Page 109 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

In rune with Gogol's original, The Eve of Ivan Kupalo plunges into the sinister side of the Kitezh
myth. The story takes place on the eve of Ivan Kupalo, the magical all saints' night of the summer
solstice, when the spirits of the dead are roaming and all wishes come true. A celebration of the ancient
Slavic God and ruler of Kupala, it is also a tribute to the Christian saint John the Baptist (whose name
literally translates as Ivan Kupalo). 22 Pyotr (Boris Khmelnitsky), a peasant lad in desperate need of
money to marry his great love (Larissa Kadochnikova), strikes a deal with a demon, who promises a
fortune if Pyotr would bring him the magic fire flower that blooms only on that night. Pyotr brings
the flower only to find out that the stakes have gone up. And, while the village girls are sending candles
afloat down the river to honour the underwater entrance to the land of the dead, and while his peers
are jumping over bonfires to ensure the fertility of land and cattle, he kills a child for the loot. He can
now marry his girl, but has lost the desire to do so along with his soul.
Ilyenko's experimental visuals reveal giddy spaces and flying camera angles from falling tree
tops, from the point of view of a drowning woman, a dying man, a child, innocently unaware of
the approaching peril. The nightmarish perspectives assault our senses, luring us into the forbidden
domain of the divine and the demonic. The surreal atmosphere, enhanced by the contrasting effects
of black-and-white, red and blue elevates these simple stories to the level of mythical narratives about
the enchanted illo tempore when man and nature, the mundane and the magic were inseparable.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and The Eve of Ivan Kupalo transcend the fossilising tendencies
of the official ideology and 'render the supernatural sublimity [of the folklore] more efficient for
the deeper life of the psyche'.23 Their achievements remain isolated and, apart from the static
and didactic science fictions from the 1980s, thriving on the waning Soviet technological might
- based mostly on Kir Bulychyov's novels and a couple of classical literary science fiction works
-the supernatural all but disappeared from the Soviet screen in the 1970s and 1980s. One major
exception is Andrei Tarkovsky's metaphorical forays into space — cosmic and psychic. A God-seeker
and 'religious existentialist' himself, he vehemently rejected the 'phenomenal world' to become a
demiurge of a rich spiritual and moral universe of his own making, created out of the 'nothingness'
of Brezhnev's stagnation. In Solaris (1972) he links the gothic horror motif of the creator and his
monstrous creation with that of the 'double', 24 initially associated by Freud with the 'immortal'
soul, the first 'double' of the body, which gradually lost its numinous aspect to become 'an uncanny
harbinger of death'.25 The supernatural beings terrorising the inhabitants of a spaceship ate therefore
'phenomenal objectifications'26 of the spacemen's long ignored noumenal worlds, their monstrous
creations so to speak. After struggling with the uncanny apparition of his beloved dead wife, the
protagonist (Donatas Banionis) comes to the realisation that the 'tragedy of creation' could be
transcended only through faith and love. The final image, one of the most eloquent representations
of mysterium tremendum11 on screen, shows him kneeling in awe before his 'father' at the doorstep
of a solitary 'home', lost in space.
In Stalker (1979), conversely, a couple of seasoned sceptics, a burnt-out writer and an uninspired
scientist, led by an experienced Stalker or Follower who has lost his faith, set out on an uncanny trip
into the forbidden 'Zone' to find the place where one's secret desires come true. Instead of finding
the awesome mystery of life, they come face to face with 'nothingness' - a dreary, polluted landscape
and an empty room with a ringing phone. The key to this mystical text is the Follower's daughter, a

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