Page 178 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

A FICKLE MAN, OR PORTRAIT OF BORIS BARNET AS A SOVIET DIRECTOR 159
[Tsvetik-semitsvetik, 1948] and Lone White Sail [Beleet parus odinokii, 1937] as it
does Barnet, whose charms are usually more energetic.
The hero is a poet who joins the Revolution, while his best friend, also a poet,
joins the Whites. In fact, the film’s theme is the usefulness of artists in a revolution,
no matter which school they belong to. When several painters working on
propaganda pictures start to argue about the styles of Picasso, Matisse and Repin,
an old revolutionary (played by a Barnet regular, Kryuchkov) steps in and brings
everyone to agreement. Cubist or realist, he urges, the important thing is to give us
great works (at a distance of twenty-five years, the scene is a rebuttal of a similar
one in Chiaureli’s Out of Our Way [Khabarda, 1931]). The rhetoric is typical of this
period of the Twentieth Congress (also reflected in Donskoi’s remake of The Mother
[Mat’, 1956], Alov and Naumov’s Pavel Korchagin [1957], Raizman’s The
Communist [Kommunist, 1958]; and in the ‘unchained camera’ demonstrated by
Sergei Urusevsky as cinematographer on such films as Chukhrai’s The Forty-First
[1956], Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying [Letyat zhuravli, 1957] and his later I
Am Cuba [Ya Kuba, 1963]). Here, shots that last longer than usual and interrupted
camera movements evidence a somewhat feeble attempt at lyricism. Barnet is
more interested in staging relationships within the frame, and produces striking
spatial effects: a courtyard in which the arms of the discontented bourgeoisie are
requisitioned, the hovel where the poet lives, a couple of chase sequences. In the
poets’ soirée at the beginning of the film–where we first meet some of the characters
who will appear later, as they perform before a mixed audience of smug bourgeois,
vociferous members of the rabble and soldiers, and which a revolutionary patrol
further disrupts–Barnet arranges yet another of his meetings of disparate
elements from which fiction can develop in all its complexity. Later, the hero is
rescued from a firing squad by the girls we saw in the poets’ club, now
camouflaged as a happy wedding party, playing music and singing before
disarming the soldiers.
This is a picaresque view of the Revolution, enhanced by the careful use of
colour (in this case, muted shades of blue, grey, pink, ochre) which also
distinguishes The Wrestler and the Clown–Barnet’s best-known film, justifiably, of
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this period (for which reason I will not discuss it here). The challenge of taking
over a film begun by another ultimately made The Wrestler and the Clown an
almost perfect film. On the other hand, Barnet’s most carefully prepared project,
Annushka [1959], left him strangely cold. Perhaps because his films have less to
do with families than with wanderings, and reflect little nostalgia for that type of
community, melodrama–and Annushka, centring on motherhood and the desire
for a home, is that–remains alien to Barnet’s film-making.
Better to pass on, for Alyonka [Alenka, 1961] and Whistle-Stop [Polustanok,
1963], Barnet’s two last films, once again display his stronger qualities. The credits
of Alyonka appear over a long aerial shot of fields both green and gold, which
closes in on a road busy with lorries carrying corn. Cut to a close-up of a child
watching the lorries. Reverse angle: wide shot of the lorries. The child again. The
same wide shot, in which she now comes closer to the unbroken stream of traffic,