“War and Remembrance: The Films of Aleksei Guerman” (through March 20 at Lincoln Center in New York) offers a unique opportunity to savor in one place the rarely seen works of a Russian master. All four of the movies Guerman has directed in his censorship-blighted career will be screened. So, too, will his 1967 debut “The Seventh Companion,” which he co-directed with Grigori Aronov and disowns, and Ardak Amirkulov’s fantastical (and fantastically brutal) Genghis Khan epic “The Fall of Otrar” (1991), which German produced and co-wrote with Svetlana Karmalita, his wife and collaborator. The director Alexander Pozdnyakov will meanwhile personally present his 2009 documentary, “Guerman: From the Other Side of the Camera.”
Just six years older than the late Andrei Tarkovsky, Guerman (born in Leningrad in 1938, the son of a celebrated writer friendly with Stalin and Gorky) is a fellow visionary. His densely allusive, frequently mordant films depict flashpoints in Soviet history — and what it is to be a victim or onlooker of savage upheavals. They have all been shot in black and white (though 1984’s “My Friend Ivan Lapshin” has a few deliberately faded color scenes) and are characterized by serpentine tracking shots and successive set-pieces often described as hallucinatory,
“The Seventh Companion” depicts the fate of a widowed, peace-loving military academic in the Tsar’s army during the 1918 Red Terror. Held with other officers and bourgeois dignitaries by Bolshevik guards who take some off to be executed, he humbly works as a laundryman before being set free to wander pathetically around the streets with an ornamental clock – all that remains of his past life. He soon winds up fighting with a ragged Bolshevik platoon and, as ironies succeed ironies, is captured by the White Army during the Civil War. Despite the compromises Guerman had to make in working with Aronov and his reservations about the film, it is an affecting humanist drama about the depletion of old world decency, supposedly for the greater good, in a world turned upside down.
For its negative portrait of Soviet military conduct during World War II, Guerman’s “Trial on the Road” (1971), his first solo film (pictured above), was banned for 15 years. It’s the fact-based story of a Russian sergeant who defected to the Nazis and then returned to the Red Army ranks, his punishment for disloyalty being a series of increasingly dangerous missions. The movie contains Guerman’s most kinetic action sequence.
“Twenty Days Without War” (1976) is a melancholy reflection on how war damages both combatants and citizens. After German planes a strafe a beach, a ruminative war correspondent, Lopatin (played by the circus actor Yuri Nikulin, typical of Guerman’s contrapuntal casting), travels home to Tashkent to bring a dead soldier’s belongings to his widow. His train journey incorporates Guerman’s greatest monologue sequence – a tormented soldier confesses at length to Lopatin the details of his wife’s infidelity. In Tashkent, Lopatin is thrown out by the grieving widow, miserably encounters his estranged wife, who claims to be happy with her new man, and tenderly connects with a lonely seamstress. He also gives a speech encouraging the workforce of a munitions factory, a sequence for which Guerman gathered 5,000 extras, and watches the filming of a war movie based on his writings, before returning to the Eastern Front. This is the only one of Guerman’s films to have been released in a timely manner in Russia, though it is no less skeptical about the notion of wartime heroism – an offense in the eyes of Soviet authorities – than his other works.
Guerman’s next film, the first widely seen outside the USSR, was “My Friend Ivan Lapshin” (1982, released in 1985 thanks to perestroika), based on stories by his father. It is a nostalgic piece, narrated by a sixtyish man looking fondly back on the time when he lived with his father and a group of men in a provincial commune just before Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937-38: death thus hangs over all of them. The title character is a lugubrious police inspector dedicated to destroying a crime gang – a little allegory of the Little Father’s liquidation policy.
“Khrustalyov, My Car!” (1998), the last film the painstakingly meticulous Guerman has completed, is generally regarded as his masterpiece, though it was famously misunderstood and renounced by critics when it was shown at Cannes. Maximally abstruse unless one is steeped in Russian politics and literature, it’s nonetheless a mesmerizingly surreal and breathless account of the fall and resurrection in 1953 of a decadent Red Army general and brain surgeon who runs a Moscow hospital doctor and lives large with his eccentric and importunate clan. Arrested as part of an anti-Semitic purge, he is sent to a gulag and viciously raped on the way there, only to be plucked from certain oblivion and brought to Stalin’s dacha in a vain attempt to save his life. When we last see him, he has completely reinvented himself. Baffling or not to Western eyes, the spectacle is as weird and wonderful as its title, which comes from the words spoken by Lavrentiy Beria as he quits Koba’s death scene. ARTINFO’s J. Hoberman wrote an essay on the film that has been republished on Film Comment’s website.
Guerman, now 73, is currently working on a science-fiction film, “The Chronicle of the Arkanar Massacre,” which is discussed by Anton Dolin in another Film Comment article. Also invaluable is Ronald Holloway’s 1988 interview with Guerman at kinoeye.