Page 113 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

fragile normalcy of life. The final montage episode infers the perpetuation of Russian intelligentsia's
compulsion to repeat its messianic and self-destructive delusions, and features 'comrades' Malevich,
Rodchenko andTatlin, the soon-to-be also wiped out masters of the 1920s avant-garde art.
It is easy to identify the principles of Eisenstein's 'montage of attractions' in the clash of charged
visuals, symbolising the confrontations of old and new, high and low art, art and life, rich and poor,
but also the binary oppositions of the Russian Idea. On the one hand, the fragile aesthetic universe
epitomised by Kholodnaya's decadent beauty and Malevich's portentous Black Square is part of the
'noumcnal world, which is creativity'. The egalitarian ethics of the rebellious masses of workers and
peasants, on the other hand, are manifestation of the 'phenomenal world, which imposes marerial
objects as limitations of human freedom'.31 Thus Kovalov illustrates Berdyaev's tenet that in Russia
(and in the Soviet Union) it is religion (or ideology) and philosophy, and not economics and politics
that determine the history of society.
It is no coincidence that Tepzov and Kovalov's films are produced by the St. Petersburg's film
studios, take place in St. Petersburg and its vicinities and are directed by local directors. Lenfilm has
traditionally enjoyed the reputation of being ideologically the more open studio, and St. Petersburg is
the home of the so-called first, or perestroika, avant-garde (1984-89). Its most notorious and radical
trend was necrorealism, founded by Evgeni Jufit, the uncontested leader of Leningrad's underground.
In 1985 he made Hospital Attendants-Werewolves, considered a manifesto of the necrorealist
naturalistic-nihilistic aesthetics. In 1991 he made his first feature film, Papa, umer ded Moroz (Daddy,
Father Christmas Is Dead) - a sadomasochistic tale of psychological perversion and physical mutation.
In spite of their suggestive titles and subject matter, these works are not horror films per se but rather
satirical social metaphors featuring 'the official "zombies" of the Brezhnev era ... the "necrophiliacs
and corpses" of post-Soviet life, a "world of walking dead". These are cult movies, seen by very few

people'.32
This trend was taken further by two other St. Petersburg films: Upyir (Vampire, Sergei Vinokurov,
1997) and Okraina (Outskirts, Pyotr Lutsik, 1998). Both are postmodern pastiches of popular
(Western) horror themes, employing bodily horror. The former was scripted by Dobrotvorsky himself
in his efforts to facilitate the emergence of'[the] indigenous horror genre [responding] to the current

fast re-orientation from the collective towards the personal encounter with existential problems'.33
The film is about a post-Soviet provincial town, most of whose citizens have turned into vampires (i.e.
New Russians) and a handsome vampire-destroyer - a latterday hero (Alexei Serebryakov) - is sent
for to cleanse it. Unfortunately, in spite of the long Slavic vampire tradition and the original music
by the famous group Tequilajazz, the film is too brainy to be scary and too straightforward to become
an elaborate metaphor of the post-Communist individuation. According to one of the sternest critics
of the film 'the individual has ... not yet succeeded in separating himself from the social mass', which
is the conditio sine qua non for the emergence of real heroes and traditional genre cinema. 34 In other
words, good and evil, the self and the other, the rational and the irrational still remain nebulous
collective entities without an articulated cinematic iconography.
In a manner reminiscent of Kovalov's, the late Pyotr Lutsik identifies as powerful sources of
horror rhe collapsing boundaries between the collective and the individual, capitalism and socialism,
the old and the new. In a paradoxical reversal of post-Communist loyalties, the source of the uncanny

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