Burnt by the Sun: A Study of Water Imagery and Power Dynamics in Mikhalkov's Film, Study notes of Russian

Download Burnt by the Sun: A Study of Water Imagery and Power Dynamics in Mikhalkov's Film and more Study notes Russian in PDF only on Docsity! 1 Fire and Water Imagery in Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun The Russian cinema director Nikita Mikhalkov reached back six decades for the theme of his award-winning film Utomlennye solntsem (1993), which is generally known in English as Burnt by the Sun, although the Russian title actually means something closer to “Exhausted” by the Sun. The film portrays a fictional episode from the Stalinist purges of the mid-1930s, in which a hero of the Bolshevik revolution, Sergey Petrovich Kotov (played by Mikhalkov himself) is arrested in accordance with anonymous orders conveyed by telephone to a character known as “Mitya” (played by Oleg Menshikov), who oversees Kotov’s arrest. Tension in Mikhalkov’s film not only is generated by the imminent arrest of Kotov, but also stems from the past, when Kotov essentially forced Mitya to enter the Soviet secret service and be separated from his lover Marusya, who in the meantime became Kotov’s wife. In the midst of controversy following the film’s release in Russia, Mikhalkov was reluctant to comment extensively on the portrayal of political events. In January 1995, during an interview with Izvestia, he said he preferred to make his points through “artistic images”, rather than “political rhetoric” (7). Yet neither Mikhalkov nor critics have said a great deal about the imagery structure of Utomlennye solntsem. Various reviewers have made reference to the sun, particularly in the form of a destructive sphere that appears in the film (Clark 1224, Menashe 44, James 6, Saada 64), but have noted little else, despite the fact that the image has what we might call “privileged position” by virtue of 2 being linked with the film’s title. Upon close examination, however, one finds that the role played by what I will call more broadly the “fire”, or “cosmic”, cluster is actually of no greater significance than that of its opposite, the heretofore essentially overlooked category of aquatic, or water, imagery. Mikhalkov presents the visual underpinnings for Utomlennye solntsem in the very first shot of the film by first showing a red star atop a Kremlin tower, then having the camera pan down to street level, revealing, in passing, a squad of soldiers marching, then showing at close range the entrance to a street underpass being cleaned by a worker with a hose, as more soldiers descend the steps. The camera then slowly pans across the screen at close-up range, showing the spray splattering against decorative motifs of grain bound by a sickle on the guardrail around the entrance. Suddenly a black car emerges beyond the guardrail, as if shot out of the spray, and is followed by the camera to the entrance of a building where it stops and discharges a passenger. The focal point of the shot is the close-up of water spraying against the guardrail. This portion remains on screen for approximately five seconds, and provides an application of the point made by the Russian Formalist critic Yury Tynianov in his article “On the Origins of Cinema” (1927) that the cinematic close-up, once it moved beyond its initial, or primary, function as a point-of-view indicator, came frequently to denote the action of a verb (89). Here the Russian verb chistit’, “to clean,” comes naturally to mind. Why were these specific, or “discrete”, to use the term of the semiotician Yury Lotman, details selected? 5 important phenomena in the history of cinema” (59). The unifying principle in all these statements is Lotman’s emphasis on the artistic text as a dynamic whole. Water imagery, with a different twist, is at the center of an early scene depicting rising tension in Marusya and the household generally. Shortly after a flamboyant arrival at the dacha, Mitya tells Marusya he is “dying” (he says, umirayu) for a drink of water and goes into the bathroom to freshen up. In response to a question from a member of the household, Mitya says that he is married and has three children. His response triggers a four-minute sequence of 33 shots that consists primarily of close-ups and focuses on Marusya. In the first close-up we see Marusya’s hand by the dripping faucet of a samovar, with scars visible on the wrist and lower arm. Further close-ups show, respectively, Marusya’s hand placing the glass under the tap, water running over the rim of the glass, Marusya’s hand taking the glass, and then Marusya drinking the water herself, as Mitya tells an anecdote about her childhood. Marusya then goes with the empty glass to the dining area and Mitya comes out of the bathroom and goes there himself. When asked whether he wants coffee or tea, he answers that he just “wanted water”. As conversation peters out, we hear Marusya’s fingernails drumming on the glass, then see several close-ups of this action. When Marusya’s aunt, sitting next to her at the table, finally asks, “What’s that?” Marusya responds, as if to a neutral question, “A glass.” Relief comes only when Marusya is out of the sight of Mitya, who seems rather amused by Marusya’s behavior, perhaps enjoying the effect of the lie he has just told about being married and having a family. 6 The sequence forms what Lotman calls a “cinema-phrase”, a segment “bounded at each end by structural pauses” and comprising a complete unit in its own right (70-71). Here the beginning of an emotionally draining tension, which develops into a kind of tacit erotic interplay between Marusya and Mitya, is set off. While most of what Lotman says in Semiotics of Cinema could apply to literature—even on some occasions when he says cinema is unique in a certain way—Lotman does make a number of strikingly original observations, such as the point that “Only the cinema—uniquely among all the arts employing visual images—can construct the person as a phrase located in time” (23-24). Indeed, at the beginning of this sequence Marusya goes into a slow-motion-like trance and, at the end, she hastily contrives an exit from the dining area. During the early part of the sequence, tension is created, as New Yorker critic Anthony Lane has noted, between the slow-motion effects of the shots of Marusya and the normal speed at which the others continue to function (94); later her staccato drumming betrays her racing emotions, while once again the others operate at a normal pace. At both ends, Marusya is isolated in time. We have here what Lotman calls the violation of a system of anticipations, which he says “singles out semantic bundles” in the text (here, it seems, a bundle of nerves), and ‘deformed’ and ‘meaningful’ become synonymous (31-32). After Marusya shows a mental lapse by failing to turn off the water and then by drinking the water, the glass itself loses its neutral function as a vessel by becoming a tom-tom whose presence infectiously conveys Marusya’s by-now 7 nearly hysterical mood. By the end of the sequence her aunt has turned the crockery in front of her into a percussion instrument, too. As Lotman points out in his chapter on montage, content (object) and form (mode) can be temporarily reversed in artistic texts (57-58). The static nature of the glass (object) is momentarily overcome, as the glass assumes the role of mode, and functions as a “dynamic grammatical element” that conveys Marusya’s mental state. Conventional dialogue is interrupted for a time by an acoustical code that Mitya alone is able to comprehend—and, at this point, only incompletely. In the case of the variable functioning of the glass, the following observation by Lotman applies: “Repetition of one and the same object on the screen creates a certain rhythm, and the sign of the object begins to separate from its visual source” (45). The glass appears in 13 of the 33 shots, and never is featured in back-to-back shots. Lotman says further that when things are repeatedly shown, “they acquire a ‘facial expression’ [that] can become more meaningful than the things themselves” (45). The term “‘facial expression’” is particularly interesting here, since the glass seems momentarily to become a character that speaks for Marusya. The sequence is complicated by two mysteries. The first is the appearance of the scars on Marusya’s arm in the first shot. For Lotman, detail on such a close-up, which reveals only a part of an object (Marusya’s arm) is an example of metaphor (44); the question here is, what do the scars stand for? They suggest, as later proves to be the case, a suicide attempt that had to do with Mitya. But the question remains: what do they have to do with water? The 10 occurs only in two scenes, including that of Mitya’s suicide, the other scene is by default one in which it appears in several shots, first approaching Kotov’s dacha, then passing through it, and finally moving away from it, eventually veering unpredictably into a tree and destroying it. Significantly, in the first shot here, the fireball swoops low, momentarily becoming tangential to the river, providing what Lotman refers to as the key intersection of two different sign systems—here the two lethal image clusters. As concerns Mikhalkov’s explanation of the fireball’s representing Stalin, it is most interesting that Stalin’s appearance on an enormous banner during the final moments of the film is preceded by a leaden-gray balloon to which the banner is affixed—perhaps a parody on Mikhalkov’s own part of the sun link; also, the scene of Mitya’s suicide begins with an extreme close-up of a gray sphere—a detail of the plumbing in the bathroom, but in context a clear indicator that not only his personal encounters, but also the entire order of things has got to Mitya, whose suicide is foreshadowed by two shots in the first scene of the film—a close-up of his razor, and his playing Russian roulette with his pistol; also, when the image of Stalin begins to rise, Mitya salutes it with a grimace and his teeth tightly clenching a cigarette. The critic Louis Menashe objects to the fireball, calling its value “dubious” (44); however, I believe that by making this supernatural image interact with the natural water imagery, Mikhalkov successfully reflects an arbitrary and “unreal” world in a deceptively real and natural setting. The arbitrariness of this world is perhaps most apparent when we compare the official Soviet press’s explanation 11 of the fireballs as “foreign diversions” with the sight of the one at the end silently disappearing as it moves toward the towers of the Kremlin. Here, I think, we have a true sense of an ending: not only does Mikhalkov coordinate these two key image clusters, but also, in bringing the dramatic plot to a startling conclusion, ironically absorbs the persistent poetic overlay of the song into the world of grim prosaic reality. 12 Works Cited Clark, Katerina. “The Interpretation of Dreams.” American Historical Review 100.5 (October 1995): 1223-1224. Glaessner, V. “Blind Faith: Nikita Mikhalkov on His Film ‘Burnt by the Sun.’” Sight and Sound 6.1 (1996): 61. James, Caryn. “Charm on the Surface, And Stalinist realities.” New York Times, April 21, 1995: C6. Lane, Anthony. New Yorker 483 (May 8, 1995): 91-94. Lotman, Ju. M. Semiotics of Cinema. trans. Mark Suino. Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 1976. Michigan Slavic Contributions 5. Menashe, Louis. “Burnt by the Sun.” Cineaste 21.4 (1995): 43-44. Mikhalkov, Nikita. Burnt by the Sun. Columbia Tristar Home Video, 1995. Saada, Nikolas. “Partition mecanique.” Cahiers du cinema 483 (1995): 64-65. Tynianov, Ju. “On the Origins of Cinema [1927].” Trans. Ziniada Breshchinsky and Herbert Eagle. In Russian Formalist Film Theory, ed. Herbert Eagle. Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 1981: 161-166. Michigan Slavic Materials 19.