Did I completely misunderstand this film? You refer to the final flashback; what was this? My interpretation was that the phone call from Vera, and subsequent scene with her and the children, was a Vertigo-type twist, where she did not die at all and another body was substituted (not impossible, given Mark’s shady character), and at the very end we are left wondering how Alex will react to this discovery.

What, if anything, did I misunderstand?

Alan Pavelin

Would anyone have an address (postal/email/etc) for Eisenstein’s Museum?

Thanks.

Anyone who, after reading the title of this film, has not realised that this is a parody, had better not go and see this film. Unfortunately, the Russian translation corrects all the mistakes in the original: Культурные изучения Америки для того чтобы делать благо славному народу Казахстана.

Anyone who has never heard of the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen had better not bother with the genre of comedy at all.

Sacha Baron Cohen is a London-born Englishman who studied history at Cambridge. On a British TV show (Da Ali G Show, 2003) he impersonated three characters: Ali G, a Londoner of Jamaican extraction; the gay Austrian fashion expert Bruno; and the Kazakh reporter Borat Sagdiev. Borat Sagdiev had developed from the figures of a Moldovan and later Albanian TV reporter whom Sacha Baron Cohen created. Sacha Baron Cohen appears in public only in character and never as his real self: since the release of Borat he only appears as Borat on talk shows, such as those of Jay Leno in the US and Jonathan Ross in the UK. Since the Cannes Film Festival at the latest, he has promoted Borat Sagdiev, sporting his outrageous slingshot thong for his beach appearances at the Croisette, posing for the cameras.

Borat is one of the biggest box-office hits in the US and had tremendous success after its premiere in the UK at London’s International Film Festival in October.

The various scandals surrounding the film – the first being the offence Kazakhstan took in being presented as a backward country in Borat – have, in a sense, only assisted Borat in promoting his film further and acting out his pranks as a Kazakh reporter. Thus, he gave a statement in front of the Kazakh Embassy in Washington – timed to precede by a day the visit of Nursultan Nazarbaev to the United States. Well – at least after 90 second any viewer realises that this is not Kazakhstan: the letters of the country are garbled, as is the language Borat speaks, which is more a mix of Polish and Hebrew words (his djenkuje hardly can hardly be mistaken for rakhmat). The inhabitants of his native village look like Gypsies while the houses in the settlement and the topography look much more like the Central European mountain ranges, where the film was indeed shot – as we know at the latest since the Romanians from the village Glod are preparing to file a lawsuit against Sacha Baron Cohen for having filmed tem under the false pretence of the crew making a film about the social misery in the remote Romanian village. Kazakhstan has no offence to take, and indeed, Cohen he has now been invited to visit the country.

What is clear, however, are two things: while Cohen has been known to film behind the scenes and walk into advice agencies and television shows to provoke with his offensive behaviour and to expose the masquerade that is the mass media today, he has never made a film that is financially successful enough to make the “victims” of his campaigns want a share of the pie. Secondly, he has never targeted America.

Thus, in addition to the inhabitants of Glod, John Doe I and John Doe II, who appear as students of the Chi-Psi fraternity, also claim to have been filmed under false pretences and filed a suit in California against Twentieth-Century Fox. And the television presenter who let Sagdiev on the program in which he subsequently disrupts the weather forecast claim to have lost her job for not checking Borat’s credentials prior to the show. And, to top it all, the film is stopped from release in Russia because it “содержит материалы, которые некоторому количеству зрителей могут показаться уничижительными в отношении некоторых национальностей или религий”. (“Борат был кастрирован в России”, MEDIA-NEWS.ru, 9 November)

The Federal Agency took issue with the Jewish theme in the film, where the “chase of the Jews” is presented as a ritual in Borat’s native village: two demonised figures with huge papier-mache masks are chased in a rodeo-style race through the town. Moreover, once in America Borat and his producer Azamat are warmly welcomed in by a Jewish family, but flee their house due to their fear of Jews as a result of the above ritual. But let us look for one second at his name to realise that this is a fear of his self and an exposure of the American’s attitude towards other religions and nations that is targeted here. Sacha NOAM Baron COHEN is of an orthodox Jewish family; his cousin Simon is a neuroscientist at Cambridge University, and young Sacha was a member of the Zionist –Socialist movement and spent a year in Israel.

Russia’s ban reveals the ignorance of the censors, rushing to decisions without understanding the plot. Unless, of course, they are terribly intelligent and figured out that this film is real targeted at America, exposing America’s view of the so-called “second world” as backward and superficial.

Borat behaves in exactly the way as an average American would expect people beyond Europe and Australia to act. The film is, if anything, a parody on America’s superficiality: The Kazakh reporter Borat and his producer Azamat travel to America to make a film about the country. Cohen creates a character who is entirely unaccustomed with culture, who lacks education and manners, and who behaves like a barbarian in a civilised country – thus exposing the prejudice of Americans vis-a-vis foreigners, described in official terms – most suitably – as “aliens”..

So while the Americans think they are laughing at Borat, they are laughing at their own prejudices and misconceptions. Indeed, ask an American where Kazakhstan is on the map and they would probably point at Romania; ask what group of languages the Kazakh language belongs to and the answer could well be Slavic languages and not Turkic. Maybe that explains the tremendous success of Borat Sagdiev with his exploitation of American students and Romanian Gypsies.

Birgit Beumers

My aim here is to sketch some preliminary connections between two recent films that have won my uncomfortable admiration:  Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles, 2006) and Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005).  Although Borat is generally understood as a comedy (subgenre: “mockumentary”) and Hostel as a horror film (subgenre: “torture show”), the laughs of Borat border on pain as often as the shocks of Hostel elicit incredulous giggles.  Both films have been discussed as excessive, cringe-inducing, taboo-breaking, tasteless, irresponsible – and irresistible, especially for youthful viewers eager for the all-too-rare opportunity to watch a film that garners full-blown theatrical distribution while genuinely pushing the envelope of mainstream audience sensibilities.  Both are relatively low-budget American films that became box-office sensations (Hostel’s sequel is due in June 2007, and I’m confident that a stream of Borat clones or borrowers will be with us soon).  Both choose to show us an America many Americans would rather not recognize, and both perform this feat by turning to the idea of Eastern Europe as the device that permits American fantasies of the “Other” to become revealing portraits of ourselves. 
Borat begins and ends in Borat Sagdiyev’s (Sacha Baron Cohen) home nation of Kazakhstan, but the majority of the film unfolds in America as Borat and his partner Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian) travel the country in search of “cultural learnings” to bring home for broadcast on Kazakh television.  Hostel takes the opposite tack: two college-age Americans, Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) (temporarily accompanied by a clownish Icelander, Oli [Eythor Gudjonsson]), carouse through Europe, looking for opportunities to get stoned and most of all, to “score” with the “hottest chicks” they can find.  In Amsterdam, they meet Alexei (Lubomir Bukovy), who promises them that to find what they seek, they must “go East” – to Bratislava, Slovakia.  There, he promises, the beautiful girls simply melt at the sound of an American accent.  So off they go, and after an initially disappointing series of first impressions (Slovakia seems like a gray, poor, depopulated, post-industrial wasteland), they come across heaven, just as Alexei promised: a lush hostel much closer to a palace than to the ramshackle venues they are accustomed to, including rooms that must be shared with model-perfect women who seem to crave nothing more than sex with the new guests.  But heaven soon deteriorates as Paxton’s friends disappear one by one.  He finds what’s left of them in a remote, ruined hulk of a building occupied by the “Elite Hunting Club,” an underground business that charges steep sums for the privilege of killing someone through whatever torture method you wish (American victims are the most pricey, but other nationalities are also available).  Paxton finally succumbs to the trap the Elite Hunting Club has set for him and his friends all along, endures awful torture, but eventually escapes and wreaks revenge on the murderer of Josh and Oli.
“Kazakhstan” in Borat serves largely the same function as “Slovakia” in Hostel:  not so much actual geopolitical entities as desires for spaces that authorize particular kinds of American fantasy.  Eastern Europe is both blank enough and specific enough in the American imagination for Borat to solicit our belief that a naïve Kazakh could wash his face in a toilet bowl, or for Hostel to suggest that a desperate Slovak could kill tourists for a living.  But it is precisely our need for these kinds of fantasies, our willingness to indulge them (however briefly), that both films wield as a whiplash effect:  instead of revealing Eastern Europe to us, it is America that is revealed to us.  Borat’s “Kazakhstan” and Hostel’s “Slovakia” are short-hand for “anything is possible.” And when anything is possible, it’s what is made of those possibilities that unmasks the fantasizing subject, not the fantasized object.  In fact, the fuzzier the fantasized object, the better:  Borat speaks in a polyglot gobbledygook, while the femmes fatales of Hostel claim Russian, Italian, and Czech heritage.
The vertiginous giddiness of “anything is possible” drives the humor/horror of both films, and injects the anti-Semitic displays of Borat and the homophobic and misogynist displays of Hostel with a queasy, simultaneous obliviousness and awareness.  The glee with which these films inhabit the very ignorance they ultimately wish to critique make them equal parts exhilaration and exasperation.  It’s a tricky thing to determine when exactly you (never mind the viewer next to you) are laughing with/at the “Running of the Jews” sequence in Borat, or celebrating/bemoaning vicious acts of violence in Hostel.  This is because the films understand, sometimes more clearly and sometimes less clearly, that the effectiveness of the critical laugh depends upon the resonance of the uncritical one, that the condemnation of violence depends upon the lingering taste left after experiencing the vicarious pleasures of violence.  This is a risky game to play, where critical awareness of hate is earned through becoming complicit with it.  There’s always the chance, of course, that the awareness will never arrive.  But isn’t it also a risk to not play the game at all, to pretend as if the dangers don’t exist, or to play the game so safely that the dangers become inaccessible to us?
I’ll conclude with snapshots of two overtly political moments in Borat and Hostel in order to suggest the stakes for fantasy in the provocations of these films.  In Hostel, Paxton greets the morning after he and Josh “score” with the Eastern European women by turning to his friend and saying, “Mission accomplished.” Naturally, the echoes of President George W. Bush’s words aboard an aircraft carrier during the choreographed spectacle meant to evoke Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986) as well as signal the (woefully premature) end of the Iraq War ring loudly.  What Paxton and Josh do not realize is that if anyone has accomplished a mission, it is their Eastern European lovers – it is they who have succeeded in projecting themselves as perfect embodiments of American fantasy, showing the Americans what they want to see.  What viewers see, then, in the fantasy of an American “mission accomplished,” is a profound narcissism that mistakes the Other for our desires of what we want the Other to be.  It’s a misconception that reminds us that no matter how far “East” these Americans have traveled, they have never really left home.  And of course, it’s a misconception with lethal consequences.
The Iraq War also surfaces in Borat.  A memorable visit to an American rodeo climaxes with Borat first winning the audience’s approval while voicing his support for the war on terror and the Iraq War, then facing their jeers when he decides to honor the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner” but substitute the words of the (fabricated) Kazakh national anthem.  Borat, in cowboy hat and American flag shirt, has apparently taken his sense of shared values between the US and Kazakhstan too far.  Presumably, the rodeo audience boos him for his inability to respect the American national anthem, but viewers who laugh at Borat’s cluelessness and/or the rodeo audience’s swift change of heart may well find themselves wondering just how inconsistent it really is to cheer one fantasy of national supremacy (the Iraq War) and hiss at another (the Kazakh national anthem).  Mission accomplished.

SUNDAY 22 APRIL 1:00 PM

£12.50

MICHAEL NYMAN PERFORMING LIVE TO KINOPRAVDA 21 [15]

Dziga Vertov / 35m / 1925

The Austrian Film Museum in association with Wallflower Press and
Curzon Cinemas present a world premiere of Michael Nyman’s new score to Dziga
Vertov’s film KINOPRAVDA 21, to be performed at this special screening
by the composer himself.

A screening of Vertov’s landmark (originally silent) MAN WITH A MOVIE
CAMERA, with a pre-recorded Nyman score will precede this special solo
performance. The event coincides with the launch in the UK of a new
publication on the director, published by the Austrian Film Museum and
distributed through Wallflower Press, which provides extensive access
to previously unseen archive material from Dziga Vertov’s archive. Dziga
Vertov- The Vertov Collection will be on sale at this event for the
special
price of £12.

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA [15]

Dziga Vertov / 65m / 1929

Vertov’s best-known film is also his most mysterious. Behind the main
idea of a film about a film being made - which is also the film we’re
watching - lie a series of coded references to topical events (should the Bolshoi
be demolished?) and to the lure of fiction films. A manifesto certainly,
but still magical.

The plot is simple. Six-year-old Vanya lives in a Russian orphanage. He is about to be adopted by a couple from Italy – to become an Italian or Italianetz in Russian. So far, everything is real: international adoption is a fact of everyday life in Russia – since 1992, nearly 60,000 Russian orphans have been adopted in the US alone, about half of all children adopted abroad from Russia.  From this point on, however, the fairy tale begins: Vanya decides to find his biological mother and stay in his motherland. Vanya goes through unbelievable adventures – all against the background of almost documentary quality realities of contemporary Russian life – and finally reaches his goal. In the back of your mind you understand all this is unreal: a 6-year-old orphanage-raised child is not capable of such plans and deeds. But the wonder of art forces you to believe in what you see on the screen. Indeed, this is cinematography at its best: an authentic and sharp screenplay by Andrei Romanov, the sophisticated work of cameraman Alexander Burov, and the fine direction of Andrei Kravchuk. And, most of all, the acting: Nick Spiridonov in the role of Vanya reaches a new height of child performance in cinema.

Like any genuine piece of art, this movie carries a message (or many messages).  So, what is the message of Italianetz? As matreshkas of different sizes and colors carry different images, the movie brings various meanings to diverse audiences.

In the US, this film will be watched with trepidation and excitement by a special group of moviegoers – those who contemplate or have completed adoption from overseas orphanages, particularly from Russia. For them the story of little Vanya will be a trigger for their own anxieties, expectations, and memories. Some will identify with what they see in the movie, some will be scared and upset by the heart-breaking harsh reality of Russian orphanages, but all will be mesmerized by the likeable image of the main hero. But how many will be able to look at the movie through the eyes of those to whom this show is primarily addressed: the Russian viewers? 

In Russia, international adoption is a matter of bitter controversy. Amongst Russian politicians and population at large there is rather wide opposition to “letting children go.” This opposition stems mostly from wounded pride and offended nationalistic feelings rather than any logic or humanitarian values. The essence of this attitude is forcefully expressed by a security guard at the orphanage for infants where Vanya arrives to discover the whereabouts of his mother. The old man says, with intense passion: “We sell children for dollars. The country is falling apart.” Responding to these sentiments and in fact, reinforcing them through the power of art, the movie sends this message to the Russian audience: “The beautiful, smart, and compassionate Russian children are being taken away by foreigners with the help of greedy re-sellers, and society tolerates this state of affairs.”

The evil force standing between Vanya and his dream of finding his mother is a ‘madam,’ – as the adoption facilitator (a middleman between prospective adoptive parents and a child) is known among the children in that orphanage. This middle-aged, energetic, and at times ruthless woman (convincingly depicted by famed Russian actress Maria Kuznetsova) with a name suspicious to the Russian ear, Zhanna Arkadievna (very likely Jewish), is the only totally negative character in the movie. For her an adoption is a financial deal, and she seems concerned only about money. What is amazing to anyone familiar with the legal process of international adoption, “madam” (the word carries an acid connotation in the context of Russian culture) does not violate any Russian laws: everything she does is legal and approved procedure (except, perhaps, for the bribes she openly offers to police officers, but that is such a ‘normal’ thing in modern-day Russia that it is not perceived as a deviation from everyday routine). And still, she exemplifies the dark forces that take a Russian child from his mother(land).

It is interesting (and the movie is honest about this) that everyone in Vanya’s surroundings understands adoption abroad means an escape from the gloomy and desperate life to which orphans doomed in Russia. The chronically drunk director of an orphanage tells Vanya that misery now and jail in the future await him if he stays in his motherland; the leader of a youth gang “instructs” Vanya with a belt, whipping him mercilessly because he thinks that foreigners’ failure to adopt Vanya may close this route for other children; all orphanage inmates, from the youngest to the oldest, envy Vanya and without hesitation would take his spot (and his close friend actually does). Ironically, the only real driving force for positive change in the fate of orphans is “madam” – she is the one who arranges initial meetings with prospective adoptive parents and manages the process of adoption. But the adoption facilitator is the only character who is painted in definitely dark colors. While Vanya is just a phantom (a symbol of the treasure taken away from Russia), the other characters in the movie are very believable and are neither positive nor negative. The film’s makers do not pass moral judgment on any character (but “madam”), treating episodes of child prostitution, lawbreaking behavior, and physical abuse as a matter of life. Again, the only character who gets no understanding or objectivity from the filmmakers is Zhanna Arkadievena – what a pity! This is a perfect example of misplaced anger: instead of pointing at society and people neglecting their most vulnerable and valuable asset – children – the creators of the film point at an adoption broker who is making money – yes, indeed – but at the same time helping children and providing them with what society denies them: security, love, and hope. Although not a sympathetic person by all means, objectively Zhanna Arkadievena is orphanage residents’ only hope!

The biggest bewilderment promoted by the movie – almost in proportion to Soviet era propaganda – is Vanya’s likable image. The movie tells us that life in an orphanage has not affected Vanya – he is smart, compassionate, brave, and goal-directed, unusually mature for his age. Any nation in the world would be proud to have him as its citizen. According to Russian nationalistic politicians, that is what Russia gives away to the foreigners! This is what Italy (USA, Germany, you name it) buys for its liras (dollars, marks), robbing Russia of its real treasure, symbolized by Vanya.

Let’s get real: a child who is reared in an orphanage simply cannot be like Vanya. Life in an orphanage, is damaging to any child: those families who have adopted from abroad have learned this the hard way. They have brought home children with developmental delays, lack of age-appropriate skills of daily living, often physically handicapped and sick, and almost always with emotional scars that take years to heal. American adoptive families apply enormous resources: time, money, patience, and efforts in remediating and rehabilitating these children. Most international adoptees are flourishing in their new families through the extraordinary scaffold provided by their adoptive families. 

The movie, with the powerful force of real artistry, plays into the hands of those ideology-driven nationalists for whom the “state-idea” is more important than the life of a particular child. The message that the movie sends to its viewers in Russia hurts thousands of orphans and those who work for their release into a better life. International adoption is not a remedy for the problem of unwanted children in Russia, but it is a solution for individual children – to deny them such a chance in the name of a nationalistic idea is plain cruelty.

Boris Gindis, Ph.D.

Dr. Boris Gindis is a child psychologist specializing in psychological issues of internationally adopted children.