Page 110 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

handicapped child with supernatural powers, his most cherished creation and a spiritual 'double', but
the question about the divine or demonic nature of this 'double' still remains unanswered.
When in the mid-1980s Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika admitted officially to
the obvious failure of the myth of the unassailable Good, Soviet filmmakers eagerly embarked on
violating the taboos its representation entailed. Oleg Teptsov's 1989 film Gospodin Oformitel (Mr.
Decorator) rehabilitates urban mystical motifs. Designed every bit as a Western horror film, it
elegantly employs the cultural symbols of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg - symbolist paintings,
art nouveau architecture, cemeteries and special light effects. The main character, a famous set-
designer and a Faust-like figure (Viktor Avilov), causes the death of one of his models - a poor girl
(Anna Demyanenko), suffering from tuberculosis - by egoistically 'stealing her soul' for one of his
famous mannequins, made in her likeness. The Decorator falls in love with the mannequin and its-
mysterious disappearance triggers his breakdown. Years later he is jolted out of an alcoholic stupor by
a mysterious offer to decorate the haunted villa of a rich merchant (Mikhail Kozakov) whose childlike
wife Maria looks exactly like the mannequin (and the deceased model). The ensuing strange events
lead to the Decorator's tragic death.
It is not difficult to identify in this brief outline a number of mystical and surreal symbols,
populating turn-of-the-century art - 'high' as well as 'low'. The Frankenstein motif of the creator
whose creation goes awry is certainly central, followed by that of the double (a tribute to Bauer), of
death and afterlife. Mr. Decorators butler is a Mephistophelean figure who dominates him, while
the sinister-looking Merchant is definitely an offspring of Pushkin's murderous Gambler from The
Queen of Spades. Unfortunately, such a rich constellation of mystical symbolism remains ineffective
outside the messianic context of the melodramatic culture once sustaining it. Therefore any uncanny
experience the film evokes only stems from the return of repressed extra-diegetic memories of the
(red) terror the pre-Revolutionary culture was wiped with. Thus the film gets stuck in-between
cosmopolitan mysticism and post-perestroika social and historical criticism, with the latter eventually
prevailing, diluting the numinousity of the narrative. Mr. Decorator ultimately reads as a modernist
auteur film with formal subjective allowance for the idiosyncrasies of the hero's artistic vision and
internal psychic reality.

BETWEEN MYTH AND REALITY: POLITICAL CHANGE AND BODY HORROR

Elem Klimov's Idi I smotri (Come and See or Go and See, 1985), reflects the intense spirit of perestroika
times. It is about a sixteen-year-old boy, Florya (Alexey Kravchenko), who joins the Resistance to
fight the German invaders, becomes a reluctant witness and victim of abject atrocities; he survives
miraculously but his psyche remains damaged for life. Arguably the first film ever made on Russian
soil to introduce uncensored torture scenes, it also brought to light the strictly prohibited topic of the
collaboration of anti-Soviet Ukrainians and Belo-Russians with the Nazis.
Following Freud's discussion of the uncanny, which attributes terror to the collapsing of the
psychic boundaries of self and other, life and death, reality and unreality, the disturbing representation
of Nazi terror in occupied Belo-Russian villages can be explicated with reference to the collapse of
boundaries between the national myth and reality. The excess of graphic mutilations, culminating in

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