KinoKultura: Issue 79 (2023) |
Aleksei Balabanov has been gone for almost a decade. At the time of his passing, on 18 May 2013, Balabanov’s public image was that of a reclusive, misanthropic, somewhat controversial auteur. Depending on whom you asked, his films were considered either brilliantly hermetic or overly simplified, populist or slandering. Balabanov’s biography by Maria Kuvshinova, published soon after his passing by the venerable Seance magazine and publishing house, solidified the director’s position among the contemporary Russian cinematic pantheon next to Aleksei German Sr, Kira Muratova and Aleksandr Sokurov.
In 2022, the year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the impact of Balabanov’s legacy was being renegotiated just as his most popular film, Brother (Brat, 1997), turns 25, Cargo 200 (Gruz 200, 2007) turns 15 and CTB, the independent film studio he co-founded with the producer Sergei Selyanov, turns 30.
As instrumental as Balabanov was in shaping the post-Soviet cinematic landscape, he can’t compete with the almost legendary popularity of Danila Bagrov (Sergei Bodrov Jr), the protagonist of Brother and Brother 2 (Brat 2, 2000). Recently decommissioned from the war in Chechnya, Danila takes his deadly quixotic quest to right the wrongs first in the gang-riddled St Petersburg and then in Chicago. The truth-seeking killer, Danila, was the righteous man for the new times. As a savior or a punishing angel, Danila’s place within the Russian cultural landscape has grown almost independently from his creator over the years, eventually shaping Danila into a national symbol of Russian identity and patriotism.
In a sympathy telegram issued to Balabanov’s family, Vladimir Putin praised the filmmaker’s sense of “the spirit and the singularity of the epoch” (Putin, 2013). He also noted Balabanov’s integrity as an artist. It can be argued that, at least in the State’s view, “the spirit and the singularity of the epoch” was best manifested in Danila rather than in the murderous policeman Zhurov from Cargo 200. Indeed, as under Putin, the country maneuvered toward a more aggressive nationalist sentiment—annexing Crimea, engaging in a proxy war in Donbas and, finally, the current invasion of Ukraine—Danila’s brand of patriotism became an increasingly valuable commodity.
When Western distributors recalled their fare from Russian cinemas as a part of the sanctions, it fell to Balabanov’s films to fill the box-office gap. Less than a month after the “special military operation” began, CTB film studio kicked off an incomplete retrospective headlined by the Brother dilogy and Dead Man’s Bluff (Zhmurki, 2005). From the poster advertising the screenings, a younger Balabanov, rendered in energetic brushstroke, exuded calm confidence, and black-and-red hand-lettered titles of the films suggested the aesthetic of street art. Shortly after, CTB kicked off a commemorative campaign, Brat 25, celebrating the concurrent anniversaries. The year-long event included the retrospective mentioned above, additional screenings, a Balabanov Day in Nizhny Novgorod, where the director went to college, a week-long festival “Balabanov: Before and After,” a comics book, a music album, a couple of capsule collections of streetwear, and even a limited edition of public transport cards. The experience was anchored by an experiential exhibit in St Petersburg’s Sevkabel Port space and a premiere of a long-awaited documentary directed by Liubov’ Arkus.
Danila’s image was projected onto a building in St Petersburg. Another projection featured the retrospective’s poster, connecting the aesthetic of subversiveness with the most appropriate and commercially viable place. Balabanov, even in the ethereal form of a street (or screen) projection, was firmly positioned as a unifying symbol of authenticity and belonging. For all the controversy surrounding his films in the past, he, according to the organizers and the media, was not just a “cult,” but the only truly “people’s” director. The mantle of an authentically Russian auteur could counteract the forces that were disrupting the domestic cultural landscape. The integrity of Balabanov’s legacy could keep the cultural narrative safely contained within the Russia’s borders, unmarred by the war the country carried on Ukrainian soil.
The projections of the hero of Brother and his creator can be perceived as a decidedly apolitical response to the ubiquitousness of Danila’s image in public spaces as a representation of nationalist sentiment. It all began in 2000, when the populist newspaper KP (Komsomolskaia Pravda) launched a billboard campaign that featured three national icons: “Putin—our President. Danila—our brother. Plisetskaia—our legend.” At first, the line-up of “a killer with Nazi tendencies next to the president” and a prima-ballerina of Jewish heritage seemed odd to some (Radzikhovskii 2001). With time, it became clear that KP’s marketing department was in step with its target audience. By injecting Danila with the qualities of Sergei Bodrov Jr, whose trustworthiness, authenticity and star power were established by that time beyond his defining role, the campaign further humanized Danila while minimizing his presumable “Nazi flavor.” Of the three icons, he was the most relatable, even aspirational, symbol for the national politics of the new era.
Writing for Novaia gazeta, commentator Leonid Radzikhovskii wondered then if the nationalist sentiment of the young generation aligns with the populist ideology of Vladimir Putin. If this sentiment connects with the State, he concludes, the mood will become the ideology: “Our brother, our president…”
By 2014, while Donbas was being sliced into the newly established People’s Republics (of Donetsk and Lugansk), those musings seemed mournfully quaint. This time, the ideology was reproduced in the grassroots sentiment as a hyper-realistic mural depicting Danila appeared on the side of a utility building by the Aleksandr-Nevsky-Cemetery in St Petersburg, and rumors began circulating about a potential statue dedicated to Sergei Bodrov as Danila being erected in Moscow. As a response to the desire expressed by Putin for a re-establishment in Russia of its “spiritual clamps,” the creators offered Danila. He, the creators wrote, represents “a clamp connecting, through time, people of a brave and unwavering spirit.” The spirit of Sergei Bodrov, who died in 2002, was called to take on the role of Danila anew, as the monument’s creators explained on their website. This hybrid character shall “manifest the qualities that a national hero must possess” and guide Muscovites and the rest of the country during “the 2014 events in Ukraine and the escalation in Syria” as a symbol of “a defender of his land and people.” (Brother Danila Charity Foundation)
In 2017, the Coordinating Advisory Board for Non-Governmental Security Sphere(KS NSB) held an online vote for the “national superhero” to use the newly fangled symbol in the marketing campaign for the massive expo, Interpolitex 2018. The trope of Danila/Bodrov as the grassroots “defender of his land” has been so ingrained into the popular imagination that Danila beat out other fictional characters. Ilya Muromets, the hero of the folk tales, and Uncle Stepa, the kindly police officer, lost to Brother by at least 1,500 votes, as Danila became the de facto symbol of Russia’s defense and security. As the exhibit’s prospect notes, Interpolitex’s and KS NSB’s main customers are Russian state security forces. The State’s war effort propaganda was next to adopt Danila as their symbol. In March 2022, the Russian Ministry of Defense changed its messaging around the origin of the symbol V painted on the Russian tanks rolling through Ukrainian streets. Instead of more plausibly denoting the name of the unit, the symbol represented the (bastardized) quote from Brother 2 “Sila V Pravde” (“Power in Truth”).
The appropriation of the Danila Bagrov/Sergei Bodrov hybrid and, by tenuous extension, Balabanov, by the State engaged in a genocidal war against its neighbor was complete. Bodrov’s charisma of authenticity, paired with Danila’s homicidal innocence, took shape as a popular avatar of the patriotic sentiment in perfect alignment with the State’s ideology. Twenty-two years after the KP’s billboard, the famous and misquoted line from Brother 2, signed with Sergei Bodrov’s name and illustrated with Danila’s image, went up on billboards across Central Russia. It was part of the government campaign that included Vladimir Putin’s own likeness and messages promoting the war.
Without being in explicit agreement or opposition to the State’s use of Brother and its star, Sergei Selyanov’s CTB and Seance shaped the events surrounding the 25th anniversary of Brother as a re-examination of Balabanov’s legacy. The Brother 25 (Kinokompaniia CTB, 2022) omnichannel multimedia campaign aimed (conversely) at reclaiming and commodifying Balabanov and, by extension, Danila Bagrov/Sergei Bodrov, as a brand of authenticity, integrity and a romanticized trauma of the 90s. The merchandise offered, although commemorative and of limited supply, is not explicitly connected to the event itself. Rather it is the event, like the capsule collection by INCITY, which includes an oversize sweater and combat boots like the iconic ones worn by Danila. INCITY also offered a selection of T-shirts emblazoned with scenes from Brother and socks that bore the essential: “The power is in truth.”
Meanwhile, another streetwear brand, Piterskii Shchit (The Shield of [St] Peter[sburg]), crafted a conceptual line “imbued with the energy of the era of total freedom and lawlessness.” This energy, in Piterskii Shchit’s view, was represented most authentically by the films from CTB. They took a broader look at Balabonov’s oeuvre and offered, among other things, a killer’s balaclava from Dead Man’s Bluff (2005). By creating wearable replicas fit for cosplay, the streetwear lines reclaim Balabanov’s legacy as a quaint urban-gothic nostalgia while stripping it of the dangerous context that the “symbol of Russian identity” now carries.
By commodifying Brother (and Balabanov), they shift the idea of authenticity and identity that is now connected to promoting the war, making it a costume, and thus making it less dangerous and, yet, still the most authentic domestic culture. Domestic, not only in the sense of the country’s interior, being truly and completely “our own,” but also representing domesticity, familiar, quaint, practical even. A sweatshirt bearing a meta-slogan “Directed by Aleksei Balabanov” in an elegantly small typeface itself is its message. It has no politics beyond appropriating a David Lynch meme from a few years ago.
A true stand-out in that sense is the limited-edition metro transit card. Each of the three cities to which Balabanov had a meaningful connection—St Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Yekaterinburg—issued its own collectible design. On St Petersburg’s card, created by a comic book artist, Danila’s face has the hard angles of a comic book illustration. He is dressed in his “dopy” disguise, beret and glasses, that he used when eliminating his Chechen foes. On the back of the card, however, we see him next to Hoffman, his gentle friend and guide through the inner workings of the city.
On the other hand, Nizhny Novgorod’s and Yekaterinburg’s cards feature a softer side of Danila. Nizhny Novgorod’s card uses a line that seems almost subversive in the current context: “Hey, it’s me, Danila! Remember? The one with the player.” This Danila is not to be remembered by his self-fashioned gun or his quixotic search for truth, but by his CD player. He is only trying to get his hands on the latest album by Nautilus Pompilius. Ultimately, if only subliminally, the collectible metro-cards reference one of the most notorious scenes in Brother. In it, Danila confronts a group of dark-skinned passengers from the Caucasus who have not paid their fare. When the men refuse, Danila draws a gun on them and calls them “black-assed nits.” Critics disputed the cinematic value of the scene. Sergei Bodrov himself tried to dissuade Balabanov from using racist language. Later he admitted to a sense of ownership for Danila’s actions in the scene. Whether the transport authorities and CTB intended this connection, the cards reaffirmed Danila’s role as a defender of, this time, adequately paid-for public transport. They also play at the sense of harmless familiarity and domesticity. These are the same qualities Danila employed when choosing his disguise for his first mission as a killer.
Ten years in the making, Liubov Arkus’ documentary Balabanov. Belltower. Requiem (Balabanov. Kolokol’nia. Rekviem, 2022) also works on bringing Balabanov and his oeuvre into the private sphere by creating a two-hour personal remembrance piece. Arkus was a close personal friend of Balabanov and remains very close with his widow, Nadezhda Vasil’eva. As one of the pre-eminent Russian critics and founder (and former editor-in-chief) of Seance magazine and its publishing house, she is one of the most influential voices in Russian film culture. The filmmaker’s terminal diagnosis prompted Arkus to film Balabanov in early 2011. The next year-and-a-half, Arkus and her cinematographers, including the award-winning Alisher Khamikhodjaev, have embedded with Balabanov and his tight inner circle to capture his final months.
For most of the film, the camera is very, very close to its subject, so close, in fact, that Arkus needed a disclaimer. It sets up an expectation of the unique intimacy of the experience: “This is a documentary about my friend Aleksei Balabanov. He was a private person who always guarded his private space. Many of you will be surprised by the proximity from which this film is shot. I would like to assure the viewer that all filming was done with the support from Alyosha[1] and with his immediate participation.”
Before Arkus-the-Friend begins her work of preserving “Alyosha” for posterity, Arkus-the-Film-Critic takes on the task of positioning Balabanov’s legacy for the current and future audience. She begins in the 1990s, on the St Petersburg streets, with a scene from Brother showing Danila Bagrov moving with the pedestrian crowd along Nevsky Prospect. As Danila moves with the crowd, veiled in a fall haze, he looks like a core part of the human collective, its black-jacketed heart. Arkus quietly narrates: “Aleksei Balabanov is the only genuinely people’s director of modern Russia.” In Danila, Balabanov has given the country, lonely and lost in the lawless 90s, its savior and defender, a Russian Robin Hood. In the following 15-minute video essay, Arkus works at reframing Brother as a reflection of a very personal struggle, the director’s painful and ultimately damaging empathy with his Motherland. She paints a portrait of Balabanov as a filmmaker on the threshold of auteur cinema and pop culture, beloved but misunderstood, a creator and a dweller of [a liminal] space between life and death.
His life, already marked with fragility, was upended by a personal tragedy when Sergei Bodrov and 27 of his film crew, many of them members of Balabanov’s crew, died under a glacier and mudslide in Karmadon. It was the grief that first sent the director into the depth of addiction to alcohol. The acute empathy for his much-maligned country has pushed him over the edge. In Arkus’ metaphoric telling, the chaotic power of nature that robbed Balabanov of the friend with whom he was deeply intertwined, also represents the mysterious and unknowable abyss that is the Motherland.
One of the first reviews of the film, written by Zinaida Pronchenko, was titled Balabanov’s Defence (Zashchita Balabanova; Pronchenko 2022). In the evident agreement and for ease of access, Arkus posted the full text on her Facebook page: “From the present day, it seems that Balabanov’s private dream—the one about the truth and the power—turned out to be a collective nightmare because it was misinterpreted. It doesn’t matter by whom, either the god-bearing nation or a clique of Pharisees. [...] Arkus functions as a public defender of Balabanov, because in 2022 especially he needs to be defended against those viewers who haven’t or wouldn’t understand or remember anything other than [the line] ‘you will answer for Sebastopol, yet!’.”
In her vague poetic style, Pronchenko argues that Balabanov. Belltower. Requiem offers the only appropriate reading of Balabanov: the one that Evgenii Margolit hoped for, too, perhaps, 25 years ago, in 1998. In his review of Brother, he had lamented that Danila is deaf to the truths of humanity and kindness, which Hoffman tries to impart, and hopes that perhaps the audience will hear the message (Margolit 1998). Nevertheless, Balabanov’s achievement as the “people’s director” is in reaching the part of the audience that “didn’t get it.” They are the ones who found their Brother in Danila and their power in the truth that the character seemed to represent. In order to truly reclaim Balabanov, the keepers of his legacy, Selyanov and Arkus included, have to separate him from the mass audience. Instead of dwelling within the zone of a threshold, with its ambiguity and a rich potential to be open to two things at once, where Balabanov’s world truly lives, they draw a border.[2]
As the camera enters Balabanov’s interior world, whether he’s cuddled on the couch with Arkus while watching Happy Days (Schastlivye dni, 1989), or surrounded by his film crew who cluster around him on the freezing set of Me Too (Ia tozhe khochu, 2012), the tight close-ups instead of creating the sense of intimacy cultivate in the viewer a strong sense of isolation.
On the set of Me Too, while Arkus captures the sort of “making-of” footage, the crew was shooting the final scenes of Balabanov’s last film. The weather was frigid as the director was preparing to film himself dying at the entrance to the Belltower. In the film, a ragtag band from the margins of society, a bandit, an aging rock musician, an alcoholic with a dying father and a sex worker drive out to a church with a belltower that is rumored to transport chosen ones “to happiness.” Some are chosen, and others, like the Bandit, get left behind and die. The Bandit meets a film director (Balabanov) who shows him around the church and then dies suddenly and collapses in the snow.
While the crew is shivering in their parkas, the ailing director keeps warm in a car. The documentarian’s camera is very close to his face, and the frame becomes claustrophobic. Arkus overlaps the scenes from Me Too with a stock effect of frosted glass, only to add to the feeling of a barrier. The vignette effect creates a barrier between the viewer, the subject and the scenes from his works used in the film. The use of the overlay is one of several questionable editing choices that Arkus makes throughout the film. Other times she adds subtle effects to the footage of Balabanov’s films or, without attribution, intermixes the original footage from Me Too with her documentary footage.
Perhaps recognizing the difficulty of penetrating her subject, Arkus often uses the surface of Balabanov’s glasses as minute screens on which life is projected from a distance. The flickering flame of prayer candles fills up the dilapidated church in Sheksna. The street musician is singing some White Guard romance. Life reflected, but unaffected.
It is hard to connect Balabanov to his cinematic and cultural influence: Arkus-The-Friend is preoccupied with capturing “Alyosha” in the carefully guarded and protective confines of his home or around his family and close friends. In this space, he is removed from any possible association with that portion of his audience, whose affection put Danila’s face on the billboard next to Putin’s. When he finally interacts with the audience, he faces attendees of an event at a literary salon. The young inquisitors are yelling out their questions and then looking dissatisfied with their responses’ brevity or cryptic simplicity. They ask the filmmaker about the future of the Motherland, his imminent death, and the “curse” of his films. After all, many of his actors have died. The more morbid the conversation becomes, the more engaged the audience seems and the more satisfied they are with the guest’s “performance.” They have got what they expected and what Balabanov is known for: observing death at work.
The final chapter of the film is dedicated to the grief that overtakes the life of the orphaned family. It concludes with a mystical anecdote, the same one with which Kuvshinova concludes the biography. Reports suggest that the belltower featured in the filming of Me Too collapsed on the 40th day after Balabanov’s death. According to Christian Orthodox beliefs, the soul that has been held in limbo finally ascends to heaven on that day. Although a chosen site for the mystical occurrences of the film, in reality, the chapel and the belltower were not unique architectural sites. It was a part of standard church construction that took place all over the Russian Empire in the late 18th and early 19th century. The local authorities did not protect it; it was damaged by artificial flooding of the area. Even after Me Too brought the building some fame, no one on the local level was interested in preserving or restoring it. The tourists preferred the beach by the artificial lake, anyway (Vinogradov, 2013). Arkus concludes the film by panning over the waters of this lake as “Requiem” plays. The beach so beloved by the tourists and the country that Balabanov so acutely empathized with remains safely outside the frame, never crossing the threshold.
The creators of Brother 25, including Arkus and her film, use Balabanov, the “most genuine,” authentically Russian auteur, to salvage what was left of the domestic cultural landscape in a way that stayed confined within the country’s borders and yet not tainted by the war it carries on the Ukrainian soil. In Ukraine, Russian soldiers—many of them, like the hero of The Stoker, representatives of the indigenous peoples—are spreading death and destruction that defies international laws and is simply unimaginable. Meanwhile, many of Balabanov’s (and Arkus’) peers among the creative elites are becoming nomadic, in a sense, not only living outside of the country’s borders but also outside the familiar hierarchies, rules and definitions established in the last 20 years. Grappling to preserve if not the reality but a recollection of what is unquestionably representative and true, the stewards of Balabanov’s legacy create a hermetic space within which his story is told.
There Won’t be a Different Us (Nas drugikh ne budet, directed by Petr Shepotinnik, 2021) offers a more expansive view as it explores the charismatic persona of Sergei Bodrov Jr. through the lens of his pivotal role and his relationship with his mentor, Balabanov. The film relies primarily on interviews of the same inner circle of several people: Sergei Selyanov, Nadezhda Vasil’eva, Sergei Astakhov, and Viacheslav Butusov. Shepotinnik overlaps the current day’s interviews with archival footage, mostly his own, of interviews with Bodrov and Balabanov. The effect is opposite to that of Balabanov. Belltower. Requiem, which Anton Dolin, tongue-in-cheek, compared to a séance: “A resurrection with the requisite questioning of the guest from beyond” (Dolin, 2022). Shepotinnik, while resurrecting the archival footage, creates a dialog between the living and the dead.
The story of Bodrov’s rise to the status of a national celebrity and his journey of establishing himself as a director is punctured by a detailed account of his tragic death, along with the 27 crew members, recounted by a surviving member of the group. A calamity of historic proportions, the Kolka–Karmadon glacier slide killed over 120 people, most residents of this North Ossetian region of the Caucasus. When asked about the possible mystical causes of the tragedy, as it relates to Bodrov, Sergei Astakhov, Balabanov’s erstwhile DoP, reminds his interlocutors that while they are talking about the star and his film crew, “there are hundreds of people buried there. People who used to live there, the entire valley. Life… it’s much simpler.” Irrevocably and undeniably, the mudslide engulfed and sealed together the film crew, the villagers, the local servicemen and the members of the special forces OMON. The footage of the enormous solidified mud, rock, and ice that cuts through the Caucasus, more so than the forgotten and collapsed belltower in Arkus’ film, is a powerful metaphor for the deadly gorge within Russian society and its culture.
In her video essay, Arkus describes the way the urban space works in Balabanov’s films—the cargo trolley with a hollowed middle, the gaps of arches in the city’s architecture, the emptiness of the streets and squares—thus: “It’s as if there was something important that was removed.” The poignant phrase is an unattributed (by design or by accident) quote from Iurii Saprykin’s essay A Tale of Emptiness. Writing on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Brother, Saprykin isn’t talking about spaces but about people. Specifically, the film’s audience. Here is the quote within the full context:
Perhaps, the main lesson of the last twenty years is that neither charisma, nor intrinsic patriotism, nor basic grade school decency, don’t make one a hero and, indeed, a champion of their country. The emptiness inside can be filled with anything, and it is easiest to be filled with war. The audiences that watched Brother in 1997, when it felt like a wall of the theater collapsed, definitely felt the gap inside the character, that omission and then felt it inside themselves. It’s as if there was something important that was removed. In many ways, this determined what happened to them in the next 20 years (Saprykin, 2017).
Anna Nieman, Cheshire, CT
Notes
1] Aloysha, a diminutive form of Aleksei, used to address a close friend.
2] Georges Teyssot's reading of Walter Benjamin ’s The Arcades Project in the article “A Topology of Thresholds” (2005) offers a framework for a theoretical analysis of Balabanov ’s work.
Works Cited
Brother Danila Charity Foundation. n.d. Vopros-otvet – Brat Danila.
Dolin, Anton. 2022. “Spiriticheskiy seans ‘Balabanov. Kolokol’nia. Rekviem.’ – fil’m Liubovi Arkus o smerti vazhneishego rossiiskogo rezhissera i ee blizkogo druga.” Meduza, 6 December.
Kinokompaniia CTB. 2022. Filmu “Brat” 25 let!
Margolit, Evgenii. 1998. “Plach po pioneru, ili Nemetskoe slovo ‘Yablokitai’.” Iskusstvo kino, 2.
Pronchenko, Zinaida. 2022. “Zashchita Balabanova.” Kommersant, 21 October.
Putin, Vladimir. 2013. “Rodnym Alekseia Balabanova.” Kremlin: President Rossii, 18 May.
Radzikhovskii, Leonid. 2011. “Poputchiki?” Novaya gazeta, 11 May.
Saprykin, Iurii. 2017.“Skazka o pustote.” Kommersant, 16 June.
Teyssot, Georges. 2005. “A Topology of Thresholds.” Home Cultures 2.1: 89-116.
Vinogradov, Sergei. 2013. “Khram obrechennyi.” Kommersant, 15 July.
Film Credits :
Balabanov. Belltower. Requiem. Russia, 2022
Color. 115 min.
Director and Scriptwriter: Liubov’ Arkus
Camera: Georgii Ermolenko, Alisher Khamidkhodjaev, Aglaya Chechot
Editing: Dmitrii Novoseltsev
Producers: Sergei Selyanov, Konstantin Ernst
Production: CTB, TV1, Masterskaya Seance
There Won’t Be a Different Us. Russia, 2021.
Color. 80 min.
Director and Scriptwriter: Peter Shepotinnik
Camera: Aleksei Fedorov, Il’ia Kopylov, Dmitrii Stetsenskii
Editing: Peter Shepotinnik, Aleksei Kochkin
Music: Viacheslav Butusov
Producers: Evgenii Nikishov, Valerii Fedorovich, Asya Kolodizhner
Production: 1-2-3 Production
Anna Nieman © 2023 |