Yoshie Furuhashi
Fri, 15 Dec 2000 11:44:00 -0800
>Dennis Perrin/Nancy Bauer wrote:
>
>>Socialists used to think this way, before they went to
>>college, got tenure.
>
>I went to college, to grad school even, but never came close even to
>tenure track, much less tenure. These distinctions between effete
>intellectuals and the horny-handed real folk are pretty tedious.
>I've often found that the people who make them most vigorously are
>trying to establish their own credibility more than anything else.
>
>Doug
_Only socialists who have been to college_ romanticize manual labor
in a _workerist_ fashion, "singing to tractors," so to speak. Most
manual laborers -- be they under capitalism or socialism -- don't.
Vasily Shukshin -- no "socialist realist" & himself intimately
acquainted with the reality of manual labor -- understood this fact
very well.
***** Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 10:34:58 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [PEN-L:4599] "There Was a Lad"
"There Was a Lad" is a deceptively modest film. Filmed in a radiant
black-and-white on location in the rural Russia of 1964, it tracks
the day-to-day existence of a young truck driver Pavel Kolokolnikov
(Leonid Kuravlev), whose only dream is to rise above his mundane
existence. But it is not money that he hungers for, rather entry into
the world of "culture", especially as expressed in the women of his
dreams.
This world is symbolized by the town librarian whom he throws himself
at as soon as he meets her. He shows up at the library and announces
in a loud voice that he wants to take out Karl Marx's Capital,
because "there are a few pages at the end that he hasn't gotten to."
He speaks these words with a broad grin on his face--as if admitting
to her and anybody else within earshot--that it is just a joke. He
also tends to speak a few decibels too loud, as do most of the
bumpkins he spends his working days with. Meanwhile, the librarian
and all the other educated professionals in the film speak at a
normal tone. Despite living under "communism", all of the characters
marked by this subtle class distinction--and others not so
subtle--are acutely aware of the differences between them.
Even though she is engaged to a engineer, he keeps making advances
toward her even while sitting with the two of them in a local fashion
show. It is difficult for her or the engineer to get angry at Pavel,
because he is such a simple and affable soul.
Pavel seems more comfortable with those on his own level. In a scene
that expresses the sympathy of director Vasily Shukshin's for such
characters, Pavel shows up at the bungalow of his single middle-aged
aunt with a bachelor friend, also middle-aged. She had instructed him
a while back to find her a man and he was there to deliver the goods.
While the three sit around a dining table drinking vodka and eating
fresh vegetables, Pavel occasionally makes comments like "Auntie, how
are you doing lately? Have you been feeling too lonely?" Meanwhile,
his male companion sits in his chair with beads of sweat forming on
his forehead. Although he knew he was there to get hooked up, the
palpable reality of the situation has him beside himself. Making
excuses, Pavel takes each off by themselves in to put pressure on
them to "close the deal". After he contentedly leaves the two to go
off in his truck, we see them a bit more relaxed as they make small
talk over another glass of vodka.
The happiness they share eludes Pavel, who seeks to rise above his
station--at least when it comes to love. When he looks up an old girl
friend on his truck route, who has a job as a construction worker, he
finds fault in her life style. Picking up some chintzy looking
ceramic animals from a shelf in her living room, he berates her:
"This is not what refined people have in their homes. Do you expect
these figurines to bring you luck?" Meanwhile, this accusation is one
that he only heard a few hours earlier from an educated woman who has
hitched a ride with him in his truck. She had told Pavel that refined
people have art prints on their walls and do not keep good-luck
trinkets. After dropping her off in her village, he overhears her
talking with her husband about the risks of taking a ride with a
"common truck driver." The hostility he feels towards his betters is
misdirected against the poor construction worker who seeks nothing
more than his affection.
Ultimately Pavel is a prisoner of his dreams. Whether behind the
wheel of his truck or in a hospital bed recovering from injuries
incurred in a heroic act, he fantasizes about a more perfect world
where he is garbed in white in a petal-strewn forest receiving the
affections of the town librarian. Or he dreams that he is a General
bedecked in ribbons delivering inspirational speeches to all the
women he has ever known, who are recovering in a hospital ward. Their
problem? It is their "heart", which is just another way of saying
that he is projecting his own romantic frustrations onto the opposite
sex. Such scenes are rendered in a surprising Fellini-esque fashion.
Although Vasily Shukshin was a preeminent Soviet writer and
film-maker of the "rural" school (derevenschik), there is nothing
romantic about his treatment of such folk. They are prisoners of
their dreams. In an introduction to a collection of Shushkin's short
stories, Yevgeny Yevtushenko compared him to "the carpenter's son
from Galilee; one of his palms was firmly nailed to the country, the
other to the town."
Shukshin knew this world first-hand. After all, he was just like the
character Pavel Kolokolnikov. When he showed up at Moscow's film
school--known as a haven for intellectuals-- he was just out of the
navy and still in military fatigues. According to Martin Cruz Smith
(LA Times, Oct. 27, 1996), when asked about his education he shot
back with a Siberian accent that he hadn't had the time to read "War
and Peace" because it was too thick. He had another obstacle to
overcome: his father was executed in one of Stalin's prison camps.
Shushkin died of a heart attack in 1974, at the age of 45. Born in
the Eurasian territory of Altai, a mountainous region just north of
Mongolia, he knew all about working-class life from an early age. At
17 he worked as an unskilled worker at a construction site in Kaluga.
Later he had an opportunity to move to Vladimir and to work at a
tractor plant as a motor-repair fitter. These experiences shaped his
consciousness and are reflected in every frame of "There Was a Lad"
and all his fiction.
"There Was a Lad" was shown as part of a series titled "Soviet Cinema
of the 1960s: Revolution in the Revolution" now at Walter Reade
Theater in NYC's Lincoln Center. (http://www.filmlinc.com/)
Encouraged by Krushchev's thaw in cultural policies and influenced by
the New Wave in Europe, these film-makers were not united by a common
style but only in a willingness to deal with Soviet society in a
frank manner and to be honest to their own esthetic dictates. Instead
of recycling "socialist realism", with its all-too-perfect heroes and
heroines, 1960s Soviet cinema dealt with real people in a real world.
This, of course, is something all too rare in cinema including our
own "free" society.
With the rise of Brezhnev, this period came to an end. Some of the
film-makers were no longer able to be free to their artistic vision,
while others came to the United States. With the end of Communism,
there is no longer a Soviet film industry. The junk that Hollywood
produces is dumped on Russian society, along with MacDonalds and
Coca-Cola. It is a great tragedy that the economic, social and
artistic initiatives of the Krushchev era were suppressed. If not for
this, the world would look a lot different today. If I get the
opportunity to see other films in this series, I will report back.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/ *****
_There Was a Lad_ sounds like a wonderful film, which gives a subtly
feminist criticism of male anxiety about "cultured women" as well as
of metaphorical representation of "culture" as "feminine" (since I
haven't had a chance to see the movie, I'm going by Lou's
description), in addition to an examination of alienation rooted in
the separation of mental & manual labor which actually existing
socialism was never able to overcome.
Yoshie