Regular readers of my movie reviews know that I tend to shy away from anything that can be described as “poetic” even though in a previous lifetime that would have been exactly my cup of tea. Too many wars and too many crushed revolutions have tended to inure me to anything except dry analytical exercises on the workings of capitalism and only those films that make the case for its abolition either implicitly or explicitly. So when I got a press notice for a Russian film titled “Silent Souls” that describes the plot as a road movie centering on a burial ritual according to the rituals of the Merja culture, an ancient Finno-Ugric tribe from Lake Nero, I almost decided to pass on it. As a long-time advocate of socialist modernization, I doubted that the film would be of much interest to me even though I tend to see just about any film coming out of the former Soviet Union as a way of keeping tabs on the erstwhile Marxist experiment.
I am happy to report now that “Silent Souls” is a brilliant work of art and that its poetic representation of Merja culture is something that transcends national boundaries and ideology just as any great art should. It opened yesterday at the Angelika Theater in NY and will open at the Laemmle in Los Angeles on September 30 and should not be missed. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/silent-souls/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
