更新时间:2013-01-25
Efkfra • 契诃夫的思想:摘录《契科夫的主题》相关资料
Kira Muratova: "Having seen ［Chekhov’s Motifs］ how can you say that there’s very little goodness in it? And what’s in all those films that you watch from morning to night and from dawn to dusk? Where they shoot and kill people unceremoniously one after the other, where a kind word simply doesn’t exist and you never meet a kind person."
Chekhov’s Motifs could also be seen as Muratova’s idiosyncratic response to the call for a kinder, gentler cinema. It is, she insists, ‘a reassertion of simple moral values. It’s a film about the family. About love. You understand, it’s very important for me that in this family they all love each other despite the fact that they are very different, and are pulled in different directions, and they quarrel.’ Asked in 1998 about plans for her next project, Muratova replied, ‘I have no plans. There are things that I like. For instance, Liudmila Petrushevskaia. But you don’t feel like changing anything in them, and, probably, it’s not worth touching them.’ Instead of Petrushevskaia’s bleak stories about family life, Muratova turned to Chekhov.
Chekhov’s Motifs is based on two of his early, lesser-known works – the short story ‘Difficult People’ ［‘Tiazhelye liudi’, 1886］ and the one-act drama Tatiana Repina (1889). In 1987 Muratova denied any influence of Chekhov, and in 1997 she still complained, ‘I don’t like Chekhov because of his melancholy, his cheerlessness.’ But her attitude had changed by 2000: ‘For a long time I couldn’t stand Chekhov. At first, in my youth, I adored him. I rejected him after I fell deeply in love with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. His humour and his manner annoyed me…Now, rereading his humoresques I understand that they are works of genius.’ ‘Difficult People’ is one of those early humoresques, written for money when Chekhov was an impoverished medical student. It is set on a rural homestead, where the eldest son, preparing to return to his studies in the city, asks his skinflint father for money for the journey. His mother chimes in with a request to buy him some decent new trousers and boots, and the son hints he could do with some cash to support himself till he finds a job. The father explodes in anger, and the son stalks out of the house.
Tatiana Repina is Chekhov’s least-known dramatic work. It was written in a single sitting, as a whimsical present to his friend and publisher Suvorin, whose four-act comedy of the same name had recently opened in both Russian capitals. Suvorin’s play drew on an 1881 incident in which an actress poisoned herself on the stage of the Kharkov theatre; it was followed by several copycat suicides. Suvorin’s Repina poisons herself after being jilted by her lover Sabinin, an impoverished landowner, society playboy and ladies’ man, who is after the dowry of the rich and beautiful young widow Olenina. Chekhov’s play depicts Sabinin and Olenina’s wedding, during which the groom, traumatised by the appearance of a mysterious, moaning woman in the church, can barely get through the ceremony. Chekhov satirically counterpointed the whispering and gossip of the wealthy guests with the otherworldly Slavonic liturgy chanted by the priests and choir. By the end, even the bride and groom are barely paying attention, and can scarcely wait for the ceremony to be over. Sending the play to Suvorin, Chekhov commented, ‘It’s cheaper than cheap. After you read it, you can throw it in the fireplace. Or even before.’ Muratova described Tatiana Repina as ‘Not at all theatrical. I don’t even know who would be able to cope with the task of staging it.’37 Isolated from the theatrical world of Moscow, she did not know until told by an interviewer that Valeri Fokin had recently done so.38 She understood the difficulty of staging a ceremony in which the guests, bride and groom stand in one position for nearly an hour facing the altar. The camera, she knew, provided possibilities for mobile points of view that the stage didn’t allow.
The film is about both love and beauty, laced with Muratova’s idiosyncratic humour, which keeps sentimentality at bay. Using a new cameraman, Valeri Makhnev, Muratova returned to black and white, recalling the aesthetic of Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell while adding to the Chekhovian atmosphere. Muratova commented, ‘the black and white image makes everything alive and not alive more significant, more refined and more realistic at the same time.’ As always, she delighted in finding beauty in the commonplace, in the farmstead as well as the church wedding. She used the crisp detail of the black and white image to create a visual fugue of barnyard life: geese drinking, gliding across the bottom of the frame; pigs crowding together in a pen; chickens perching on the edge of a feeding bowl; a turkey cock, simultaneously magnificent and ludicrous. The music accompanying this delightful sequence is Silvestrov’s hauntingly romantic melody from Getting to Know the Big, Wide World:
The luminous thread of music stretches out
Again forgotten days come to life.
Spring carries us far, far away,
When suddenly in the silence it sounds through the window.
And again we live in a magical world
And the distance is flooded with light,
And again my childhood returns to me
For ever, for ever, for ever.
This is not the only link between Chekhov’s Motifs and Muratova’s most sentimental film – she brought back Nina Ruslanova and Sergei Popov, who had played Liuba and Misha. That was also the only other time she filmed a wedding – albeit a Komsomol mass wedding. In the hour-long Orthodox wedding sequence of Chekhov’s Motifs, the beauty is both visual (the church interior) and aural (the chanting of the liturgy).
Muratova said she was attracted not so much to Chekhov as to the locations: ‘I’m always interested in the milieu in which the action will take place. I always want it to be new and fresh. I’m sick of cafés, cars, streets. The farm has gone out of fashion, so it’s interesting…I don’t remember anyone filming half of a movie in a church.’ Chekhov’s Motifs opens in a rainy barnyard, where three carpenters are taking a lunch break. A boy of about seven, holding a baby goat, studies them solemnly, and they tease him, claiming they are building a pet food store rather than a shed. His five-year-old brother, in round-eyed glasses (all members of this family, except the baby, wear glasses), comes to stare. An extreme close-up focuses on the glasses of the father (Popov), kneeling by the pig pen and staring at a large pig, which stares back. The animals and children in the film provide Muratova with the kind of gentle visual humour not seen in her work since The Sentimental Policeman. In one hilarious sequence, the baby, sitting in a high chair at the table, nods off while his father is ranting about how the family is reducing him to penury. As he gesticulates, the father knocks off his eyeglasses, which fly into a bowl of soup. Varia, the fey, cheeky twelve-year-old daughter, impishly fishes them out and sucks into her mouth a long noodle that has wrapped itself around them.
The central episode of the film’s first section is the family dinner, staged for the camera like the Last Supper, with the family sitting on three sides of a long table. The domestic details of the interior are meaningful sociologically and emotionally. ‘The house is furnished prettily and attractively. Lots of decorative towels embroidered with moralizing slogans and other touches of traditional village cosiness.’ The attractive china, lace-edged linens, the daughter’s hand-knit sweater, the mother’s carefully braided hairdo, all testify that this is a relatively prosperous family and the children are well cared for. At one point, father and son confront each other, framed symmetrically on either side of an elaborately framed icon. In the midst of the argument, Varia turns on the television and the mother watches the screen, spellbound by the beauty of Natalia Makarova performing the Saint-Saëns ‘Dying Swan’ solo made famous by ballerina Anna Pavlova. The performance echoes the elegant movements of the geese we saw earlier in the barnyard, just as the father’s elaborate preening before dinner recalled the posturing of the turkey cock.
The life of the Russian clergy provides a tenuous link between the two Chekhov works. The father in ‘Difficult People’ is a priest’s son who inherited land given to his father by the local noblewoman. In Tatiana Repina, the priests conduct the wedding ceremony and then, removing their robes, move back into everyday life. Church rituals and the personal life of the Orthodox clergy, for obvious reasons, were not shown in Soviet cinema. Muratova never displayed devotion to the Russian Orthodox church – if anything, her radical humanist views are closer to those of Tolstoy, whom the Church excommunicated. ‘I’m not a believer. I’d very much like to believe, but I was raised differently. I simply place religion very high as a factor of culture, human history and morality.’ But she confessed to a mad love for church singing. One of the most significant lines of the film is put in the mouth of Kuzma, the sexton (Leonid Kushnir): ‘Every day we marry, baptize, and bury them, and all to no purpose…And they sing, and they burn incense, and they read, and God still doesn’t listen.’
In the wedding sequence, which occupies nearly an hour of the film, Muratova’s attitude to the Church and its liturgy is respectful. Her broad satire is reserved for the wealthy guests and wedding couple, for whom traditional Orthodox rituals are simply another superficial affectation of their New Russian lifestyle. Vera, the bride, is played by Buzko, whose character in Minor People was also Vera, completing the traditional trio of names begun in Muratova’s early films with heroines played by Ruslanova named Hope (Nadezhda/Nadia in Brief Encounters) and Love/Charity (Liubov/Liuba in Getting to Know the Big, Wide World). The hypothesis ‘Nobody loves anyone’, first uttered despairingly in Getting to Know the Big,Wide World by Ruslanova’s Liuba, resurfaces in Chekhov’s Motifs when Ruslanova, returning to Muratova’s cinema after an absence of twenty years, congratulates the newly-weds in a bitter-sweet tone: ‘I love it so much when somebody loves someone. Oh, Verochka! Nobody loves anyone!’ But, as Muratova kept insisting to the critics, there is love in this film, as well as humour.
Muratova always took liberties with her source texts: ‘I long ago realized that it’s easy for me to write on the basis of something I like and based on which I can fly far away…And then to come back, spit on the whole thing, and make out of this little seed some sort of flourishes.’ But, in this film, she kept most of Chekhov’s dialogue, often word for word; her flourishes were primarily visual. She simply updated the action: the farm family watches television, the son is picked up by a wedding guest in a late-model Toyota SUV. Muratova originally planned to project several quotations from Chekhov’s narrator as intertitles, but these are not in the final version. Her most significant departure from Tatiana Repina is that the mysterious moaning woman in black is not, as in Chekhov, a friend of the late Tatiana seeking revenge but Father Ivan’s rebellious daughter, bent on disrupting her father’s service.
Chekhov’s late nineteenth-century provincial landowners and theatrical bohemians translated easily into New Russians/New ukrainians. The bride and many of the guests in the wedding scene were played by members of the popular Odessa-based comic troupe Maski-Show. Buzko is almost unrecognisable in her white gown, pale skin and exaggerated eye make-up, ‘stylized as the suffering heroine of silent films’. Another reviewer has described her as ‘something between a clown and Pannochka ［the beautiful dead witch in Gogol’s folk/horror story “Vii”］’,46 still another as ‘doll-like’. Perhaps the unloved Vera is the culmination of Muratova’s series of unloved dolls.
D. Saveliev observes that Muratova ‘collects people and puts them in her celluloid album’. Just as her non-professionals each brought their own narratives with them, her favourite actors brought to each new role the subtexts of their previous appearances, creating parallels and counterpoints. Almost every actor in the film had worked with Muratova before: Daniel in Three Stories and Minor People, Buzko in Asthenic Syndrome, Three Stories and Minor People, Kushnir in The Sentimental Policeman and Three Stories. Popov was making his fifth appearance in a Muratova film, Ruslanova her fourth. Panov, the Misha of Minor People, played the farmer’s son, while his real-life mother played the mother.
Muratova filmed Chekhov’s Motifs in two three-week shoots – in late November to early December 2001 on a farmstead not far from Odessa, and again in February in the church at Usatovo. The film was not ready for the Berliniale, but Muratova entered it in the Moscow Film Festival, which had fallen on hard times along with the Russian film industry. In the previous year not a single Russian-language film was entered in the competition. In 2002 there were several, of which Chekhov’s Motifs and Rogozhkin’s Cookoo ［Kukushka］ were seen as leading contenders. The sentimental Cookoo, with its anti-war, anti-nationalist message, was the audience favourite. To the surprise and dismay of critics and audience alike, the jury awarded the grand prize to Vittorio Taviani’s television mini-series of Tolstoy’s Resurrection. But the Moscow film critics, still Muratova’s most loyal supporters, voted Chekhov’s Motifs their Golden Elephant for best film. It was shown at the 2002 Karlovy Vary Festival, at the New York Festival of New Russian Cinema in October and at art museum venues in the United States, where viewers appreciated its gentle humour, if not its length. Muratova filmed the wedding ceremony nearly in its entirety in real time, forcing the viewer to experience the same impatience as the groom and the guests. Reviewing the film in Iskusstvo kino, Abdullaeva argues that ‘Muratova has made time the central hero of this film’. She intentionally defies audience expectations, while expectation itself, particularly the expectation of an ending to the wedding ceremony, is one of the structural themes of the film.
Reviews were generally enthusiastic. ‘A brave creative experiment, dramatic and grotesque simultaneously…one of the best films in Muratova’s biography.’ ‘Kira Muratova again demonstrated the virtuosity of her talent, but the jury noted the coldness and calculation of the director in the depiction of human weakness.’ Abdullaeva noted that Chekhov had tried out ‘new forms’ in the old dramatic canon by weaving together banal language, exalted dramatic elements and the comic. Muratova, she argues, intensified these Chekhovian motifs to the point of the grotesque, and it is actually Chekhov’s experiments, rather than his texts, that interest her. ‘Accustomed to Kira Muratova’s radicalism, we have stopped being astonished by her films. But Chekhov’s Motifs flabbergasts us…The theatrical innovators of the last century turned, for the renewal of stage ideas, to the ritual forms of ancient theatre. Kira Muratova puts the early Chekhov on the screen and turns cinema into a ritual event.’
The film is about memory as well as time. By bringing back the black and white style of her first two films, Silvestrov’s hauntingly nostalgic romance and beloved actors from the various periods of her work, Muratova has constructed a retrospective swansong. Now a grandmother just turned seventy, Muratova looks back over her career with pleasure and satisfaction, and invites us to do the same. But, ever the rebel, she challenges us to keep seeing the world in a new way.
摘自 J. Taubman, Kira Muratova: The Filmmaker's Companion 4 (IB Tauris, 2005). pp.98-104.
Chekhov’s Motifs could also be seen as Muratova’s idiosyncratic response to the call for a kinder, gentler cinema. It is, she insists, ‘a reassertion of simple moral values. It’s a film about the family. About love. You understand, it’s very important for me that in this family they all love each other despite the fact that they are very different, and are pulled in different directions, and they quarrel.’ Asked in 1998 about plans for her next project, Muratova replied, ‘I have no plans. There are things that I like. For instance, Liudmila Petrushevskaia. But you don’t feel like changing anything in them, and, probably, it’s not worth touching them.’ Instead of Petrushevskaia’s bleak stories about family life, Muratova turned to Chekhov.
Chekhov’s Motifs is based on two of his early, lesser-known works – the short story ‘Difficult People’ ［‘Tiazhelye liudi’, 1886］ and the one-act drama Tatiana Repina (1889). In 1987 Muratova denied any influence of Chekhov, and in 1997 she still complained, ‘I don’t like Chekhov because of his melancholy, his cheerlessness.’ But her attitude had changed by 2000: ‘For a long time I couldn’t stand Chekhov. At first, in my youth, I adored him. I rejected him after I fell deeply in love with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. His humour and his manner annoyed me…Now, rereading his humoresques I understand that they are works of genius.’ ‘Difficult People’ is one of those early humoresques, written for money when Chekhov was an impoverished medical student. It is set on a rural homestead, where the eldest son, preparing to return to his studies in the city, asks his skinflint father for money for the journey. His mother chimes in with a request to buy him some decent new trousers and boots, and the son hints he could do with some cash to support himself till he finds a job. The father explodes in anger, and the son stalks out of the house.
Tatiana Repina is Chekhov’s least-known dramatic work. It was written in a single sitting, as a whimsical present to his friend and publisher Suvorin, whose four-act comedy of the same name had recently opened in both Russian capitals. Suvorin’s play drew on an 1881 incident in which an actress poisoned herself on the stage of the Kharkov theatre; it was followed by several copycat suicides. Suvorin’s Repina poisons herself after being jilted by her lover Sabinin, an impoverished landowner, society playboy and ladies’ man, who is after the dowry of the rich and beautiful young widow Olenina. Chekhov’s play depicts Sabinin and Olenina’s wedding, during which the groom, traumatised by the appearance of a mysterious, moaning woman in the church, can barely get through the ceremony. Chekhov satirically counterpointed the whispering and gossip of the wealthy guests with the otherworldly Slavonic liturgy chanted by the priests and choir. By the end, even the bride and groom are barely paying attention, and can scarcely wait for the ceremony to be over. Sending the play to Suvorin, Chekhov commented, ‘It’s cheaper than cheap. After you read it, you can throw it in the fireplace. Or even before.’ Muratova described Tatiana Repina as ‘Not at all theatrical. I don’t even know who would be able to cope with the task of staging it.’37 Isolated from the theatrical world of Moscow, she did not know until told by an interviewer that Valeri Fokin had recently done so.38 She understood the difficulty of staging a ceremony in which the guests, bride and groom stand in one position for nearly an hour facing the altar. The camera, she knew, provided possibilities for mobile points of view that the stage didn’t allow.
The film is about both love and beauty, laced with Muratova’s idiosyncratic humour, which keeps sentimentality at bay. Using a new cameraman, Valeri Makhnev, Muratova returned to black and white, recalling the aesthetic of Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell while adding to the Chekhovian atmosphere. Muratova commented, ‘the black and white image makes everything alive and not alive more significant, more refined and more realistic at the same time.’ As always, she delighted in finding beauty in the commonplace, in the farmstead as well as the church wedding. She used the crisp detail of the black and white image to create a visual fugue of barnyard life: geese drinking, gliding across the bottom of the frame; pigs crowding together in a pen; chickens perching on the edge of a feeding bowl; a turkey cock, simultaneously magnificent and ludicrous. The music accompanying this delightful sequence is Silvestrov’s hauntingly romantic melody from Getting to Know the Big, Wide World:
The luminous thread of music stretches out
Again forgotten days come to life.
Spring carries us far, far away,
When suddenly in the silence it sounds through the window.
And again we live in a magical world
And the distance is flooded with light,
And again my childhood returns to me
For ever, for ever, for ever.
This is not the only link between Chekhov’s Motifs and Muratova’s most sentimental film – she brought back Nina Ruslanova and Sergei Popov, who had played Liuba and Misha. That was also the only other time she filmed a wedding – albeit a Komsomol mass wedding. In the hour-long Orthodox wedding sequence of Chekhov’s Motifs, the beauty is both visual (the church interior) and aural (the chanting of the liturgy).
Muratova said she was attracted not so much to Chekhov as to the locations: ‘I’m always interested in the milieu in which the action will take place. I always want it to be new and fresh. I’m sick of cafés, cars, streets. The farm has gone out of fashion, so it’s interesting…I don’t remember anyone filming half of a movie in a church.’ Chekhov’s Motifs opens in a rainy barnyard, where three carpenters are taking a lunch break. A boy of about seven, holding a baby goat, studies them solemnly, and they tease him, claiming they are building a pet food store rather than a shed. His five-year-old brother, in round-eyed glasses (all members of this family, except the baby, wear glasses), comes to stare. An extreme close-up focuses on the glasses of the father (Popov), kneeling by the pig pen and staring at a large pig, which stares back. The animals and children in the film provide Muratova with the kind of gentle visual humour not seen in her work since The Sentimental Policeman. In one hilarious sequence, the baby, sitting in a high chair at the table, nods off while his father is ranting about how the family is reducing him to penury. As he gesticulates, the father knocks off his eyeglasses, which fly into a bowl of soup. Varia, the fey, cheeky twelve-year-old daughter, impishly fishes them out and sucks into her mouth a long noodle that has wrapped itself around them.
The central episode of the film’s first section is the family dinner, staged for the camera like the Last Supper, with the family sitting on three sides of a long table. The domestic details of the interior are meaningful sociologically and emotionally. ‘The house is furnished prettily and attractively. Lots of decorative towels embroidered with moralizing slogans and other touches of traditional village cosiness.’ The attractive china, lace-edged linens, the daughter’s hand-knit sweater, the mother’s carefully braided hairdo, all testify that this is a relatively prosperous family and the children are well cared for. At one point, father and son confront each other, framed symmetrically on either side of an elaborately framed icon. In the midst of the argument, Varia turns on the television and the mother watches the screen, spellbound by the beauty of Natalia Makarova performing the Saint-Saëns ‘Dying Swan’ solo made famous by ballerina Anna Pavlova. The performance echoes the elegant movements of the geese we saw earlier in the barnyard, just as the father’s elaborate preening before dinner recalled the posturing of the turkey cock.
The life of the Russian clergy provides a tenuous link between the two Chekhov works. The father in ‘Difficult People’ is a priest’s son who inherited land given to his father by the local noblewoman. In Tatiana Repina, the priests conduct the wedding ceremony and then, removing their robes, move back into everyday life. Church rituals and the personal life of the Orthodox clergy, for obvious reasons, were not shown in Soviet cinema. Muratova never displayed devotion to the Russian Orthodox church – if anything, her radical humanist views are closer to those of Tolstoy, whom the Church excommunicated. ‘I’m not a believer. I’d very much like to believe, but I was raised differently. I simply place religion very high as a factor of culture, human history and morality.’ But she confessed to a mad love for church singing. One of the most significant lines of the film is put in the mouth of Kuzma, the sexton (Leonid Kushnir): ‘Every day we marry, baptize, and bury them, and all to no purpose…And they sing, and they burn incense, and they read, and God still doesn’t listen.’
In the wedding sequence, which occupies nearly an hour of the film, Muratova’s attitude to the Church and its liturgy is respectful. Her broad satire is reserved for the wealthy guests and wedding couple, for whom traditional Orthodox rituals are simply another superficial affectation of their New Russian lifestyle. Vera, the bride, is played by Buzko, whose character in Minor People was also Vera, completing the traditional trio of names begun in Muratova’s early films with heroines played by Ruslanova named Hope (Nadezhda/Nadia in Brief Encounters) and Love/Charity (Liubov/Liuba in Getting to Know the Big, Wide World). The hypothesis ‘Nobody loves anyone’, first uttered despairingly in Getting to Know the Big,Wide World by Ruslanova’s Liuba, resurfaces in Chekhov’s Motifs when Ruslanova, returning to Muratova’s cinema after an absence of twenty years, congratulates the newly-weds in a bitter-sweet tone: ‘I love it so much when somebody loves someone. Oh, Verochka! Nobody loves anyone!’ But, as Muratova kept insisting to the critics, there is love in this film, as well as humour.
Muratova always took liberties with her source texts: ‘I long ago realized that it’s easy for me to write on the basis of something I like and based on which I can fly far away…And then to come back, spit on the whole thing, and make out of this little seed some sort of flourishes.’ But, in this film, she kept most of Chekhov’s dialogue, often word for word; her flourishes were primarily visual. She simply updated the action: the farm family watches television, the son is picked up by a wedding guest in a late-model Toyota SUV. Muratova originally planned to project several quotations from Chekhov’s narrator as intertitles, but these are not in the final version. Her most significant departure from Tatiana Repina is that the mysterious moaning woman in black is not, as in Chekhov, a friend of the late Tatiana seeking revenge but Father Ivan’s rebellious daughter, bent on disrupting her father’s service.
Chekhov’s late nineteenth-century provincial landowners and theatrical bohemians translated easily into New Russians/New ukrainians. The bride and many of the guests in the wedding scene were played by members of the popular Odessa-based comic troupe Maski-Show. Buzko is almost unrecognisable in her white gown, pale skin and exaggerated eye make-up, ‘stylized as the suffering heroine of silent films’. Another reviewer has described her as ‘something between a clown and Pannochka ［the beautiful dead witch in Gogol’s folk/horror story “Vii”］’,46 still another as ‘doll-like’. Perhaps the unloved Vera is the culmination of Muratova’s series of unloved dolls.
D. Saveliev observes that Muratova ‘collects people and puts them in her celluloid album’. Just as her non-professionals each brought their own narratives with them, her favourite actors brought to each new role the subtexts of their previous appearances, creating parallels and counterpoints. Almost every actor in the film had worked with Muratova before: Daniel in Three Stories and Minor People, Buzko in Asthenic Syndrome, Three Stories and Minor People, Kushnir in The Sentimental Policeman and Three Stories. Popov was making his fifth appearance in a Muratova film, Ruslanova her fourth. Panov, the Misha of Minor People, played the farmer’s son, while his real-life mother played the mother.
Muratova filmed Chekhov’s Motifs in two three-week shoots – in late November to early December 2001 on a farmstead not far from Odessa, and again in February in the church at Usatovo. The film was not ready for the Berliniale, but Muratova entered it in the Moscow Film Festival, which had fallen on hard times along with the Russian film industry. In the previous year not a single Russian-language film was entered in the competition. In 2002 there were several, of which Chekhov’s Motifs and Rogozhkin’s Cookoo ［Kukushka］ were seen as leading contenders. The sentimental Cookoo, with its anti-war, anti-nationalist message, was the audience favourite. To the surprise and dismay of critics and audience alike, the jury awarded the grand prize to Vittorio Taviani’s television mini-series of Tolstoy’s Resurrection. But the Moscow film critics, still Muratova’s most loyal supporters, voted Chekhov’s Motifs their Golden Elephant for best film. It was shown at the 2002 Karlovy Vary Festival, at the New York Festival of New Russian Cinema in October and at art museum venues in the United States, where viewers appreciated its gentle humour, if not its length. Muratova filmed the wedding ceremony nearly in its entirety in real time, forcing the viewer to experience the same impatience as the groom and the guests. Reviewing the film in Iskusstvo kino, Abdullaeva argues that ‘Muratova has made time the central hero of this film’. She intentionally defies audience expectations, while expectation itself, particularly the expectation of an ending to the wedding ceremony, is one of the structural themes of the film.
Reviews were generally enthusiastic. ‘A brave creative experiment, dramatic and grotesque simultaneously…one of the best films in Muratova’s biography.’ ‘Kira Muratova again demonstrated the virtuosity of her talent, but the jury noted the coldness and calculation of the director in the depiction of human weakness.’ Abdullaeva noted that Chekhov had tried out ‘new forms’ in the old dramatic canon by weaving together banal language, exalted dramatic elements and the comic. Muratova, she argues, intensified these Chekhovian motifs to the point of the grotesque, and it is actually Chekhov’s experiments, rather than his texts, that interest her. ‘Accustomed to Kira Muratova’s radicalism, we have stopped being astonished by her films. But Chekhov’s Motifs flabbergasts us…The theatrical innovators of the last century turned, for the renewal of stage ideas, to the ritual forms of ancient theatre. Kira Muratova puts the early Chekhov on the screen and turns cinema into a ritual event.’
The film is about memory as well as time. By bringing back the black and white style of her first two films, Silvestrov’s hauntingly nostalgic romance and beloved actors from the various periods of her work, Muratova has constructed a retrospective swansong. Now a grandmother just turned seventy, Muratova looks back over her career with pleasure and satisfaction, and invites us to do the same. But, ever the rebel, she challenges us to keep seeing the world in a new way.
摘自 J. Taubman, Kira Muratova: The Filmmaker's Companion 4 (IB Tauris, 2005). pp.98-104.
