Page 179 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

160 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
fascinated, then crosses the road and returns twice. Combine harvesters thunder
by. She comes forward, in a lateral tracking shot, and in front of a shower of
golden grain, announces: ‘I am looking for Daddy.’
After such an opening, what follows could be something of an anticlimax. But we
are not disappointed. The little girl sets off on a lorry heading for the Virgin Lands
(this is 1955, at the beginning of the mass exodus to open up Kazakhstan). In the
steppe, a man and his dog emerge from a cloud of dust. They join the other
passengers (it is Vasili Shukshin) and, as they all travel east, each tells his story. 17
The little girl’s flashback is done in the style of her telling, using animation and
speeded-up action, with the voice of Alyonka alternately synching for that of the
adults in her story, and annotating their replies with ‘Daddy said’ and the like.
The second story is told by the Shukshin character, and it almost seems as if
Barnet is adopting the style of the future film-maker (already a published writer and
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well-known actor by then). The tractor driver Stepan crosses the path of a girl on
the escalator of the Moscow metro. He follows her and finds her crying. A few
seconds later (in the film), they are kissing passionately…then living together. He
blows up tyres in their bedroom, while she lies in bed. She reads Chekhov’s The
Lady with a little Dog, then appears with her little dog on the building site where he
works. Hoping to sort things out, he buys two railway tickets for the Virgin Lands,
where he redoubles his efforts: he improvises a mouse-trap and buys her a
handsome picture. But she is unable to stand the boredom and runs off into the
steppe. He finds her and throws the dog out. ‘Culture, that’s what.matters!’ is
Stepan’s inconclusive verdict, before the dog finally helps him find his straying wife.
All the stories remain open like this: some find what they are looking for, while
others don’t. The film ends in a railway station, where Alyonka is eating ice-creams
with a little Kazakh boy.
When Alyonka failed at the box office, which seems to have discouraged
Barnet, Mosfilm ‘assigned’ him to Whistle-Stop, based on a scenario by one Radi
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Pogodin. Close friends advised him not to accept the first job that came along.
That he should have insisted on doing the film is a puzzle to Kushnirov, who notes
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that the film ‘aroused no interest’. One might conclude that those who could have
appreciated it (including the biographer!) never had a chance to see it, thus keeping
intact their image of Barnet as a great man who had none the less given up ‘real’
film-making.
Those who did see Whistle-Stop in London in 1980 took a very different view. I
needed no less than seven shorthand notebook pages for a simple inventory, made
during the screening, of the physical action and images that fill the screen for some
sixty-five minutes of running time. From the amateur piano-playing which contrasts
with the Mosfilm statue before the animated credits which falsely celebrate the joy
of holidays, we are once again in a typically Barnetian structure, where every pan–
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and even some rather unhappy zooms–yields a surprise. The cartoon gives way
to live action: a man arrives in a village. He first meets a young girl who takes his
luggage. A child on a motor cycle watches him. Pan to an old woman, and the kid
matter-of-factly sums up the situation: ‘Another painter has arrived.’ Caught up in