When life flies at a maddening pace and time is not on our side, news is what little we manage to watch, dozing off twenty minutes into a late-night movie. Even if you want to watch an interesting film, sometimes you have to work your remote control until your thumb is sore. Meanwhile, a home theater, video, or computer free us from the constraints of prime time television programming and bring the latest blockbusters into our homes. At the very least, you can watch your favorite films over and over again. Meanwhile, let’s hit the pause button and ask our guests about their impressions of the latest motion pictures.
Tetiana TSYMBAL, anchor of the “25th Frame” television program on the New Channel (Novy kanal):
“I suggest that you select what you watch on television. Prime time ratings determine what you watch. Often we are hostages to prevailing tastes and fashion. It is better to watch films from your private video collection. Yet some movies are better watched in contemporary movie theaters. For example, Master of the Seas by Russell Crowe or The Lord of the Rings by Peter Jackson, whose scale, vividness, and special effects are amazing. A quite different matter are Lars von Trier’s Dogville and Andriy Zviahintsev’s Homecoming, films that keep you watching even after you run out of popcorn. You keep returning to such films, closely watching the director’s work and the actors’ play, look for familiar situations and similar moods.
“Every year, as winter sets in, I look out my window at the first dusting of snow, lifeless trees, and people. At such moments I want to leaf through Mikhail Bulgakov’s Days of the Turbins. I like to revisit people, places, books, and films.
“I was particularly struck by Jacques Perrin’s documentary Winged Migration. A film crew of five hundred shot it several years all around the globe. This is a story about the self-sufficiency of bird civilization. The film shows the annual cycle in a bird’s life: migration to the south, colonization, relations among the leaders and the flock, return home, and the hatching of little ones. A special camera was designed to film birds in flight: their cries of fear, the sweep of the wings, birds gaining altitude, and the sky. This is freedom! When watching this film I understood that man is sometimes redundant on earth.”
Oleksiy BOHDANOVYCH, actor with the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater:
“I use intuition to select films for my video collection. It contains movies to suit my moods: melancholy, elation... I rarely watch blockbusters, as everything repeats in them. I prefer little films. I like Nikita Mikhalkov’s early works. I can watch his Unfinished Piece for a Player Piano endlessly. There are scenes that make me cry each time I watch them. Of course, I weep for myself when Kaliagin’s hero says that he is 35 and asks himself who he is and what he has achieved. This question troubles us all. Time is slipping away, but has life been a success?
“Meanwhile, there is Yelena Solovei with her eyes and soul wide open and intonations that seem false at first. But to me she is not false at all. It is we who are cynical, saying there are can be no such people. Granted, there are no such people now but there had been, with so much inner purity. And you cannot act out such purity, if you don’t have it in you.
“Recently I watched Sergei Ursuliak’s Summer People, an adaptation of Gorky’s play Dachniki [Country house dwellers]. Several people have gathered at a dacha. All of them are educated and intelligent, intellectuals with their own opinions and estates. But it turns out that they are all unhappy in their own individual way. For example, a lady of fifty is in love with a man 25 years her junior. He confesses that he ‘loves every gray hair of hers.’ But she rejects him all the same. All the heroes are married. But none of them has anyone, even a friend or lover, who understands them.
“Or Patrice ChОreau’s Intimacy. From time to time a man and a woman meet to make love, but don’t know a thing about each other. He wants to understand who is that woman who comes to his apartment each Wednesday and craves for nothing but sex. Although quite explicit, the bed scenes are not vulgar. They convey information about how much untapped energy these two have. When the man begins to follow the woman around, he finds out that she is an actress at a little London theater, married with a son, but her husband is annoyed with her passion for acting. Yet something is missing from their relationship, and the two break up. Each has a past. The man can’t leave his family with two children whom he loves madly. The woman can’t sacrifice her calling and the little stability she has with her down-to- earth husband. The relationship could have turned out well twenty years before. It’s just that they met much too late.”
Valentyna STEPOVA, soloist with the National Opera of Ukraine:
“An abandoned infant is discovered in the banquet room onboard a ship. The boy grows up among sailors and passengers onboard a steamer endlessly plying the Atlantic between England and America. He has a penchant for the piano and achieves great success. Each night passengers gather to listen to his improvisations. His music conveys passion, the inebriation of love, melancholy, and mental turmoil. Word of the gifted pianist who never stepped ashore and never studied spreads like wildfire. A prominent black jazz player comes to compete with the young man. He’s no match for him in skill, but above all in humanity.
“In America the pianist is offered to come ashore and settle there. Meanwhile, he stands in the bustling crowd and wonders how one can walk these identical streets and fall in love with a single woman among thousands of others. The world offered him seems full of conventionalities and duplicity of human nature. Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean struck me deeply.
“I prefer meaningful, intellectual, psychological, and optimistic films. My son and husband sometimes watch science fiction and thrillers, while I watch fables, as they are full of folk wisdom. For example, Beautiful Varvara the Long Braid. I also like cartoons. Amid so many negative phenomena, we must find a source of positive things.
“Comedy is my favorite genre, especially the films starring Andriy Mironov, as well as silent movies starring Charlie Chaplin. He said it all without uttering a word.”
Myroslav HRYNYSHYN, stage director:
“I was most impressed by the film Ten Minutes Older — The Trumpet. It consists of seven episodes by the world’s seven prominent directors Aki Kaurismaki, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Werner Herzog, et al. In an extremely short period of time, ten minutes, each of them tells about the conceptual events in the human life: birth, life proper, love, and death. The short film Twelve Miles to Trona about a man who, after poisoning himself on food at a reception following business talks, wanders through a desert stretching for some hundred miles ahead. It seems that time is crawling by. He is sick, but the nearest hospital is closed until the following day. He collides with another car and, about to faint, asks a woman driver to help him. Immediately, he relives his whole life as if on a filmstrip.
“The next morning the man wakes up and sees the woman beside him, but has nothing to say. Meanwhile, yesterday life was fragile and about to end any second. A prominent Georgian stage director Robert Sturua says that Georgian actors act so passionately and true to life because they know that they could die any second. Being aware of one’s own mortality breeds a lust for life.
“Werner Herzog’s novella, Ten Years Later, is also memorable. High-rise and smaller skyscrapers. The sky. A boat is flowing with the current on the Amazon. This territory used to be inhabited by the Uru-eu tribe, of which only two men have survived. They hardly remember who they fought against, what values they upheld, and what rituals they used to trap prey. Their rainmaking songs sound pathetic. But these two are living witnesses of another self-sufficient but lost world.
“One can shoot a similar film in Ukraine among the Hutsuls high in the mountains. Several years ago I visited a village seven kilometers off the nearest road deep into the mountains. Highlanders do not leave the village for years.
“Speaking of film art in depth, I am very interested in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s films. His notorious films Fando and Liz, The Mole, Holy Mountain, and Holy Blood make it possible to get to know the world of an individual people and an individual person. You might like this world or not, it might seem completely absurd, but it is for real. Now the director plans to shoot the film Cainabel, spelled as one word. Alejandro Jodorowsky points out that now is the time of a poetic revolution, which can preserve art without letting it turn into show.”
P.S. In this new column we plan to discuss your favorite films and share impressions of the latest movies with interesting people. We will learn about their tastes and will try to better understand ourselves through motion pictures that make you think, cry, laugh, and commiserate. We also hope that the Home Theater column will become a reliable guide to our film and video arena.
