Page 111 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

FIGURE 21 Florya from Come and See (1983): a reluctant witness and victim of abject Nazi atrocities

burning women and children alive in a church, goes far beyond the needs of a typical World War Two
Soviet film. The depiction of gore and horror is linked to the fundamental shift in the 'unconscious
implications' of the Russian Idea, identified so far exclusively with the myth of the unassailable Good.
The radical aesthetic and thematic change of settings is of special interest here as it suggested a need
to relieve the collective unconscious of its long-repressed negative contents and restore the balance in
the representation of the Russian Idea.
Oleg Kovalov's compilation documentary, Ostrov Myortvykh (Island of the Dead, 1992), is devoted
to 'Vera Kholodnaya, the Queen of the Russian Screen'. Kholodnaya was discovered by Yevgeni
Bauer, the most original director of Silent Russian cinema. He gave her the breakthrough role in
Turgenev's Pesn torzhestvuyushchei liubvi (Song of Triumphant Love, 1915).28 Unfortunately, all that is
left from her substantial creative record are a handful of films, which Kovalov inter-cuts with excerpts
from amateur documentaries, newsreels, animation films like Wladyslaw Starewicz's pioneer The
Cameraman's Revenge (1912), and from fiction films like Yakov Protazanov's Aelita (1924) and Sergei
Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925).
Albeit structured as a philosophical essay about the tragedy of the Silver Age generation, Island
of the Dead reads as a postmodern thriller with explicit instances of bodily horror. The unfolding
atrocities, least we forget, were executed with the best intentions and in the name of the forthcoming
Paradise on Earth. Kovalov foregrounds the unique role of arts and culture in the attempts at
redesigning the collective unconscious in accord with the pressing needs of the national myth to
justify the atrocities. His film highlights the peculiar impersonal nature of Soviet and Russian horror

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