Page 107 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

nvuveau or modern (as it is known in Russian), with their universal fin-de-siecle obsession with Gothic
mysticism and death' than with the indigenous myths and 'the cosmogony of the Russian Idea'. 14
The Golden Age of mediating the Russian Idea on screen, Kovalov argues, came in the 1920s
when the young medium and its avant-garde began churning out aesthetically astounding projects
for shaping Russian society in the image of Kitezh-grad. As an example Kovalov singles out Sergei
Eisenstein's Staroe I Novoe (Old and New, 1929). Formally dedicated to the benefits of village co-
operatives, the film furnishes a superb mise-en-scene of collective desire, in which millions of subjects/
dreamers were the protagonists. In real life, 'Marfa Lapkina's village is dark and destitute', hell on
earth. The Utopian commune', however, 'enjoys bright modem buildings, well-fed herds and gushing
streams of milk'. According to the indigenous folklore and the Orthodox tradition, it 'does take a
miracle (or rivers of blood, for that matter) for a national dream to come true'. And while Eisenstein
parodies the 'trance of the peasant procession praying for a miracle against the draught [he] equally
ironically features ... Marfa's milk separator ... not as a 'new' and tational response to the 'old'
unenlightened ways, but as a magical source of affluence, an Aladdin's lamp of sorts'.15
Historical and economic changes remain ineffective before the powerful drive of the collective
unconscious to 'fixate its instinct' to the national myth of the miraculously attainable Paradise on
Earth, thus transferring its awe-inspiring numinosity from the domain of the Orthodox Christianity
to that of the New Life.
In the early 1930s, the Socialist Realist canon purged the intellectual and formal ambiguity of the
avant-garde. The privilege to formulate the eschaton scientifically went to new theoretical disciplines
like 'dialectical materialism' and 'scientific communism', which could not endorse magic separators
due to obvious reasons. The supernatural component moved to the fairytale and to popular genres like
the musical and the historical epic, where the 'perfectly legitimate stylistic mode of the ... fairytale-
like structure ... elevated the subject matter into the realm of a 'dream' ... enabling the spectator to

"rise above" reality and regard it in a more sublime manner'.16
A key figure here is Alexander Ptushko. He owes his place in Soviet film history to his talent to
harness Slavic legends and put them in service of the Communist state. From Novi Gulliver (The New
Gulliver, 1935), one of the first full-length animation films, to his last release, Ruslan I Ludmila (Ruslan
and Ludmilla, 1973), a set-designer's tour-de-force packed with special effects of his own making,
Ptushko kept selectively popularising the Norse Slavic tradition of enchantment and the fabulous,
carefully avoiding its horror and death-related mysticism. He was allowed a relative artistic autonomy
and lavish budgets for the intricate settings of his phantasmic world. Nourishing the imagination of
generations of Soviet children was unquestionably a noble task; sustaining the belief that the good life
is attainable only through a miracle was a strategic one, as it helped the official mythology maintain
its grip on the collective unconscious.
In 1967 Ptushko designed the special effects of Vyi (The Spirit of Evil), revealing another,
repressed and archaic, side of Slavic folklore. The film follows the story from Nikolai Gogol's famous
Evenings collection, with its eight narratives about peasants and boisterous lads, about devils, witches,
abounding in genuine folk flavor, including Ukrainian words and phrases. Directed by Georgi
Kropachyov and Konstantin Yershov, the film introduces some of the most popular female symbols
of repressed sexual desire known from the Ukrainian and South Slavic demonic tradition.

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