Viy

The Pete Seeger post below aside, I wouldn't want to be taken as some kind of hard-line opponent of Communist cultural products. Last night, for example, some friends and I watched Viy, a Soviet horror film based on the Gogol short story of the same name, and it's pretty fascinating; taking a broad theatrical approach that you don't often see in movies, combined with some unusual uses of camera motion and perspective.

I'd never seen a movie based on a Gogol story before, but in retrospect it seems like very promising source material since he has plenty of narratives that work nicely at film length without extensive cutting. Are there others out there that people would recommend? Plus, he's funny. I suppose the unreliable narrative of The Nose would be hard to pull off, but someone should try.

Comments

"Ha, ha" funny, or funny like you imagine Thomas Pynchon to be?

Posted by Fred | July 23, 2007 10:37 AM

You're trying to hard to be smart, and you're looking silly. Nabokov is famous for unreliable narrators. The Nose is narrated in the omniscient third-person. It is a fantastical story with elements of surrealism, (as in many Ukrainian/Russian folktales) but I would hardly call the narrative "unreliable."

Posted by vanya | July 23, 2007 10:38 AM

I think you could do "Dead Souls"... make it about congressional redistricting in coal country :)

Posted by mikem | July 23, 2007 10:46 AM

I am sorry but is the implication of this blog that Gogol, who burnt most of his masterpiece "Dead Souls" because his priest told him to shun the vanity of the mundane world, a product of Communist Culture?

Someone made Taras Bulba into a movie. I am pretty sure anyway because I think I have seen it and it starred Yul Brynner.

By and large that suggests what sort of works get made into films - not think-pieces like Dead Souls (although you could set it in the pre-War South but who would go to see it?), but more adventurous stories. I'd think that the Caucasian stories of people like the early Tolstoy would make great films if they could be films in Chechnya. No doubt they would all be seen as Iraq allegories - as, no doubt, the Inspector General would be if it were made today.

Posted by HeiGou | July 23, 2007 10:46 AM

Watch "Volga Volga" sometime. That movie will make you anti-Stalinist real quick.

Posted by Felipe | July 23, 2007 10:53 AM

I was hoping commenters would talk more about movies based on Russian literature. I'm been devouring mostly-19th century Russian novels lately, so I'd love to see some movies based on the work.
Dostoevsky's The Idiot has a TV series based on it that can be purchased at russiandvd.com. Has anybody seen it? I saw there's also a The Master and Margarita movie too. Any suggestions?

Posted by Derek | July 23, 2007 10:59 AM

I am sorry but is the implication of this blog that Gogol, who burnt most of his masterpiece "Dead Souls" because his priest told him to shun the vanity of the mundane world, a product of Communist Culture?

I don't think so. I believe the implication is that the movie Viy, which is based on a Gogol story, which came out in Soviet Russia is a product of Communist Culture.

Posted by Derek | July 23, 2007 11:01 AM

Soviet filmmaking, particularly between 1924-1928, is an essential part of any civilized person's knowledge of cinema as both an art film and a popular medium. Eisenstein's early works, but also the great Dziga Vertov, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko all reached great heights of artistry before Stalin made things more difficult. Even still, brilliance still arose from time to time. And Tarkovsky worked in the system for part of his great career in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Konchalovsky (Siberia).

Posted by hopeless pedant | July 23, 2007 11:19 AM

The Soviet-era film of Crime and Punishment is excellent.

Posted by ostap | July 23, 2007 11:29 AM

I'd never seen a movie based on a Gogol story before

Not a big Danny Kaye fan, are you?

http://www.amazon.com/Inspector-General-Danny-Kaye/dp/B00004WLUS

Posted by rea | July 23, 2007 11:31 AM

Not a big Danny Kaye fan, are you?

Danny Kaye: Entertainment's Area 51.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 23, 2007 12:04 PM

The 1960 Italian horror classic Black Sunday is based on the same material, and is also highly recommended. The Russian VIY was directed by Alexander Ptushko, an interesting Soviet director who got something of a bad rap when a couple of very badly dubbed versions of his films showed up on Mystery Science Theater some years back. All his films are made in the same ostensive, presentational style observed in THE VIY. His approach owes a lot to Eisenstein's sound films. Specifically, compare it to Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible Parts I & II, where the acting and mise-en-scene aren't just theatrical, they're positively operatic.

Posted by PJ F. | July 23, 2007 12:04 PM

There is an italian version of The Overcoat.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0044474/

I know I've seen it in the portuguese TV when I was nine. I know it made me cry for the first and almost only time in a movie since then. I have not seen it since, as I don't want to discover that it is a not-so-good movie. But maybe it's not.

Posted by rui tavares | July 23, 2007 12:24 PM

Awhile back I bought a 3-pack of DVDs of East German sci-fi (DEFA Studios). One move was shot in the 60s, one in the 70s, and one in the 80s.

This weekend, I watched the 70s movie, "In the Dust of the Stars," and I highly recommend it for its hilarity, clumsiness, and for its subversive pro-capitalist message. (AND FOR THE DANCING!)

Posted by John | July 23, 2007 12:40 PM

Alexander Alexeieff made a pin-a-mation version of The Nose in 1963. Don't laugh about pin-a-mation - Alexeieff's version of Kafka's Before the Law begins Orson Welles' The Trial.

Beyond Soviet films, what about the rest of Eastern Europe? Films like:

Milos Forman's The Fireman's Ball
Wajda's Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds, Man of Marble
Polanski's Knife in the Water
Karel Kachyna's The Ear
Jiri Menzel's Closely Watched Trains, The Cremator
Jansco's The Red and the White
Kieslowski's Camera Buff
Makavejev's Man is not a Bird, The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

Posted by burritoboy | July 23, 2007 12:42 PM

Burritoboy totally made that shit up . . .

Posted by Felipe | July 23, 2007 12:58 PM

@Derek---there's a terrific TV-movie of Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog---don't know if it ever came out in the states.

As for Gogol---it's a little deceptive, because there's a number of canonical stage productions of his work, but not as many films. The sterling example is Meyerhold's famous expressionist staging of Dead Souls, which many Russian directors have imitated.

As for other Russian lit films---the Russians made lots of them, but only some are available in the US. Which is a shame, because some of them are terrific---I'm particularly fond of the 80s film of Uncle Vanya, with bizzare Schnittke score.

Posted by That Fuzzy Bastard | July 23, 2007 1:15 PM

Thank you for the recommendations! I'm eager to look into these.

Posted by Derek | July 23, 2007 2:13 PM

I remember watching The Overcoat in Russian class. I believe it was this version.

Posted by Dave S. | July 23, 2007 3:25 PM

I rented Amphibian Man, a Soviet-era adaptation of a novel by the same name.

Posted by Kriston | July 23, 2007 4:10 PM

...and suddenly all together they pounced upon the philosopher...

Posted by abb1 | July 23, 2007 5:49 PM

I saw a great one-man show of "Diary of a Madman" in Chicago in the nineties. It was very funny. never read the source text; it might be hard to film, but it was funny.

Posted by Wrongshore | July 23, 2007 7:17 PM

Unfortunately, there seems to be no in print recording---but there is:
http://www.amazon.com/Shostakovich-Nose-Gamblers-Dmitry/dp/B00000DFKN/ref=sr_1_5/105-7273683-4985215?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1185243922&sr=1-5

Posted by kishnevi | July 23, 2007 10:37 PM

I saw the 1926 silent version of "The Overcoat" accompanied by live piano music. The intertitles were all in Russian and I couldn't read them well or fast enough to tell what was going on; in one case a single word took up the whole screen.

Posted by eb | July 29, 2007 9:54 PM