Issue 83 (2024) |
Aleksei Fedorchenko: Big Snakes of Ulli-Kale (Bol'shie zmei Ulli-Kale, 2022) reviewed by Ellina Sattarova © 2024 |
While Aleksei Fedorchenko’s 2022 effort Big Snakes of Ulli-Kale is sometimes described as a mockumentary, the filmmaker himself disapproves of such categorization. It would be more appropriate, says Fedorchenko, to call it a docu-fairy tale (dokskazka), a genre inherently different from a mockumentary in its approach to facts (Shavlovskii 2022). If the latter seeks to pass off fiction as reality, Fedorchenko’s docu-fairy tales offer whimsical and fanciful representations of often implausible yet mostly real historical events and figures. Fedorchenko’s Big Snakes, an exploration of the relationship between Russia and the Caucasus in the 19th century and beyond, invokes, among others, Imam Shamil and General Aleksei Ermolov, Kunta-Haji and Leo Tolstoy, Petr Zakharov and Alexandre Dumas, as well as the 46 women who threw themselves into the Terek River after the Russian troops led by Ermolov had destroyed their village and killed all the men. As is always the case, however, with Fedorchenko’s cinematic endeavors, facts in Big Snakes are ultimately indistinguishable from fiction, and it is this indistinction, the amalgamation of fact and myth, that is of particular interest to Fedorchenko. More than anything else, his docu-fairy tale targets the narratives that are both a product and the catalyst of Russian century-long imperial violence in the Caucasus. The film sets out to dethrone, among other others, Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy, the key perpetrators of literary imperialism, an accomplice to its deadlier counterpart. So as not to replace one problematic myth with another, however, Big Snakes presents itself as a series of mise-en-abymes that insists on the certainty of one fact only: that of mediation itself.
The film’s opening scenes encourage the spectator to infer the meaning of the film’s title. An unrolled film strip, nudged by the wind, wriggles itself on the ground like a snake. A few other strips are thrown into the air so that they resemble kites (vozdushnye zmei in Russian—air snakes). Several literal snakes will appear further in Fedorchenko’s docu-fairy tale, including one that will devour Fedorchenko himself in the film’s denouement—in the film’s principal mise-en-abyme filmmaker Fedorchenko appears as the central character of his own film. It is, however, the association between film and the reputedly sneaky reptile that appears particularly important in Big Snakes. Even the layout of the film’s closing credits is designed to resemble the curve of a snake.
Fedorchenko’s film is indeed a wriggly one, at least at first glance. In the film’s prologue the filmmaker tells a news reporter that a group of village boys miraculously discovered a pre-revolutionary film titled In the Caucasus. Fedorchenko suspects the film had been buried by Aleksei Taldykin, one of the pioneers of Russian cinema, who shortly after the revolution allegedly buried most of the films he had produced to protect them from the Bolsheviks. In the Caucasus, Fedorchenko explains, is an anthology film made up of nine shorts, each directed by a different filmmaker. If we take Fedorchenko’s word for it, what we are about to see is a restoration of the discovered film with some additional footage shot by his own team. The scientists (!), he tells us, were able to salvage only 70 per cent of the original, so his crew decided to take a trip to the Caucasus and shoot what was missing, using the surviving storyboards. Fedorchenko is bluffing, of course: everything we see both before and after this point was shot by Fedorchenko himself.
The film flaunts its conceit, however. The footage of the film discovery shows that the film reels were buried in a chest, the kind you would expect to find in treasure hunt films. When the news report cuts to a video showing the restoration process, we see Fedorchenko and another specialist in lab coats (!), as though the computer screens in front of them were showing X-rays rather than film frames. By the time Joël Chapron, a Paris-based expert on Eastern European cinema, appears on screen, we already strongly suspect Fedorchenko is pulling a prank akin to the one he staged in his earlier effort First on the Moon (Pervye na lune, 2005). Chapron describes the discovered film as a sensation and speculates it would have changed the course of film history had it not been buried more than a century ago. The film, he exclaims, is radically ahead of its time—it features animation, documentary footage, a combination of studio and location filming, intra-shot montage, the first close-ups, mobile cameras...
The intentionally poorly disguised trick plays a crucial role in Fedorchenko’s film, as it allows for a heterogeneity of perspectives and voices so important in a film that seeks to dismantle dominant narratives. While all nine chapters imitate the aesthetic of silent cinema, each was shot in a different style. The supplemental footage allegedly shot by Fedorchenko’s team at least a century later than the “original” parades its difference from the predecessor—the recently shot material is in color and features synchronous sound. The single authorship of the “original” chapters is further diluted by present-day manipulations of the surviving footage. While all the shorts are initially black-and-white and silent, Fedorchenko announces via voice-over that his team used a neural network to colorize the first short to make the “incredible world” that the short presented to them “even more incredible.” Further in the film, we see a lip reader decode the words uttered by a character in one of the other shorts. The character then acquires a voice—a part of the short in question is reproduced as though it had always had synchronous sound.
The film’s challenge to the notion of authorship is tied together with the film’s primary goal of challenging the authors most strongly associated with the Caucasus text in Russian literature—Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy. The film’s flaunted heterogeneity plays a multifold role in this attack. In the chapter titled “Pushkin and Gazavat,” for example, we see Pushkin at work writing his poem “I’ve seen the vast and barren borderlands of Asia...” (“Ia videl Azii besplodnye predely…”). Exploiting cinema’s capacity for transmediality, Fedorchenko transforms a wall in Pushkin’s room into a notebook page. The poet’s handwriting appears directly on the wall as he scribbles “O frightful land of marvels!” (“Uzhasnyi krai chudes!”). A displeased local, however, crosses out the word “frightful” using a mop (!). The intertitle that follows deciphers the exchange between the official who decides to intervene and the irreverent local: “What are you doing? Pushkin himself wrote this!” / “Be it Pushkin or Kukushkin! Makes no difference.” An infuriated Pushkin then shapeshifts into a “red shaitan!”—his black-and white pants and coat turn into a bright red reminiscent of the color of the raised flag in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (a nod, no doubt, to the Soviet-era Pushkin cult). Interspliced with this short is present-day footage that features Fedorchenko’s interviews with two locals: one who refers to Pushkin using the oxymoronic combination of “the great” and the pet name “Ally” (“velikii Sashechka”) and another, who, commenting on the poet’s gambling record in the Caucasus, says he was not a cheater, he was simply a loser!
Fedorchenko’s unraveling of dominant narratives at the heart of the myth of Russian exceptionalism does not translate into the privileging of either of the other non-compliant voices it features. It is their coexistence that the film cherishes. Thus, one of Fedorchenko’s interviewees claims that Tolstoy definitely knew Kunta-Haji and was influenced by his teachings, while another insists that the two never met. If there is a single perspective that Fedorchenko might appear eager to align himself with, it is Kunta-Haji’s principle of non-violence. Another of the interviewees featured in the film explains that Kunta-Haji did not leave behind a definitive way of performing the zikr and shows several of the existing variations of the ritual. Fedorchenko at some point joins in the prayer. The “expert,” however, who walks him through the ritual is none other than actor Georgii Iobadze, familiar to viewers from his role in another of Fedorchenko’s films, Angels of Revolution (Angely revoliutsii, 2017). While performativity is on display throughout the film, the casting of Iobadze in this particular role serves as an extra reminder to the viewers not to conflate Fedorchenko, the actor in the film, with the Fedorchenko who directed it—however convincing the former may be.
Ellina Sattarova,
University of Southern California
| Comment on this article on Facebook |
Works Cited
Shavlovskii, Konstantin. 2022. “Istorii nuzhen dobryi storonnii vzgliad.” Kommersant. 25 November
Big Snakes of Ulli-Kale, Russia, 2022
Black-and-white; color, 122 minutes
Director: Aleksei Fedorchenko
Scriptwriters: Lida Kanashova, Aleksei Fedorchenko
Cinematography: Artem Anisimov
Animation director: Mariia Sediaeva
Editor: Dar'ia Ismagulova
Musical composition: Roman Tsypyshev
Cast: Aleksei Fedorchenko, Dar'ia Ismagulova, Joël Chapron
Producers: Aleksei Fedorchenko, Dmitrii Vorob'ev
Aleksei Fedorchenko: Big Snakes of Ulli-Kale (Bol'shie zmei Ulli-Kale, 2022) reviewed by Ellina Sattarova © 2024 |