you can’t die without
permission
by Douglas Messerli
Aleksandr
Medvedkin (writer and director) Schastye (Happiness) / 1934
Although championed by French
filmmaker Chris Marker, who also wrote about the director, Medvedkin in his
film The Train Rolls On, the silent
Soviet comedy Happiness has often met
with shrugs of disinterest and even with disdain from American and British
critics and audiences. See, for example, the comments by film-writer Dennis
Grunes: “This is not a good film.”
In part this negative reaction has to do
with the intentional crudeness of Medvedkin’s film, with its hand-painted sets
and its intentional artifice, particularly in the very funny scenes where the
work’s central characters, Khymr and his wife Anna attempt to retrieve their
obviously “puppet-like” horse (done up in leopard-like spots) from the roof of
their home, the eupeptic and vigorous Anna carrying it down a ladder upon her
back. Compared with the far more “realistic” presentations of earlier American
films by Keaton and Chaplin, Medvedkin’s work looks simply old-fashioned, as if
the director simply couldn’t significantly refine his art, one of the last
films of the silent era.
Medvedkin’s film, moreover, is structured
far differently from the comically picaresque adventures of American cinema.
Consider, for example, the long scene where the slacker/loser Khymr, frustrated
by his failure in his attempts to live a life of plentitude they have glimpsed
in their neighbor, Foka’s back yard, decides to simply die, constructing for
himself a simple wooden coffin. The minute he begins the process, another
neighbor shows up to condemn him for his “improvised death,” followed by a
priest, a town magistrate, local leaders, a whole army of monstrously masked
soldiers, and a representative of the Tsar himself, Khymr is taken away to be
whipped within an inch of his life (“Whip him till he bleeds, but keep him
alive.”) “For thirty years he was whipped,” the titles tell us, punished for
daring to “die without permission.”
Such outrageous, fable-like humor seldom
appears in American literature—with the notable exception of Mark Twain—but is
very much at home in the Russian literary tradition, revived particularly in
the 1930s and 1940s of the Soviet rule by writers such as Yury Olyesha and
Mikhail Zoschenko.
Indeed, the entire tale of the slacker
who, after his father’s untimely death, and an accidental recovery of stolen
monies, would become King, has little precedence in American thinking. For in
the Russian story, it is the impossibility of such an achievement that is the
given, while in the US wealth and fame are nearly presumed as not only possible
but inevitable. The very fact that the loser is a loser just because of absurd
fantasies may appear to most Americans as an absolutely cynical view of life.
Mentally, we may register the fact that the little “tramp” will never gain the “happiness”
and wealth he seeks, but with each new adventure that possibility still exists.
After all, thousands of others struck it rich in the California and Alaska gold
mines, one be discovered by Hollywood, Horatio Alger worked his way up! Even
the sad-sack Keaton won the war and the girl’s hand!
The only ways out, in Medvedkin’s world:
the first way is to go it alone or join in temporary league with other loners
such as the outcasts, with Foma at their lead, who attempt to steal the granary
of the local collective, literally carrying it off, in a wonderful comic sight
gag, as if the building have developed human appendages.
The second as does the happily blossoming
Anna, to join the collective—in short, to abandon their selfish efforts in
support of the greater whole.
Those two alternatives even seem in
opposition to the American way of thinking—if we now have a way of thinking. And, as such, further isolates us from the
charms of this nearly-lost film. When the movie was first released in 1934, it
received little attention and, apparently, the skepticism of Joseph Stalin,
whose values had been the brunt of several similar folktales.
Indeed, the first time Khymr and his wife
attempt to grow their own crops, a locust-like procession of priests,
sheer-clothed nuns, city authorities and others settle upon the independent
farmers to take away not only the products of their labors but any monies they
might have reaped from their farming attempts—suggesting that, at least in this
early form of “collectivism,” those who worked hard were left poorer than the
serfs.
But Stalin’s new collectivism, it appears,
in this film is a model of society efficiency, the hard-working Anna being
awarded melons and gourds as rewards. Even the slacker, a man whom his wife
fears may never be brought into the fold of adulthood, realizes the futility of
his going alone and springs to action when he realizes that Foma is attempting
to burn down the collective stables with its horses locked within. The slacker
ceases his slacking only through joining
up with the society at large—something which the Tramp and Keaton try to do,
and fail at, time and again.
Los
Angeles, July 13, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment