Take No Prisoners Retrospective: From Russia with Wanderlust

There are coffins everywhere, and music that sporadically stops for screaming. A woman runs out of the cemetery, and for the next 30 minutes, rampages through the city assaulting everybody she sees. And then suddenly, she is naked in bed with a drunken man.

No, this is not film footage of 24 hours in an asylum escapee’s life. It is an indescribable moment in the first half of Asthenic Syndrome, one of the films in this month’s Lincoln Center retrospective entitled “Take No Prisoners, the Bold Vision of Kira Muratova.”

Despite the Soviet public’s initial negative reception to Asthenic Syndrome, it is now considered one of Russian filmmaker Kira Muratova’s masterpieces. Released during Gorbachev’s policy of Glasnost, it was the only film banned by the government during that period of relaxed censorship.

For Muratova, controversy is not an exception. Her films experimental style and touchy subject matter—concentrating on the ugliness of Soviet everyday life—caused the Soviet authorities to censor many of her films. Her first two features, Brief Encounters (1967) and A Long Goodbye (1987), respectively depict a rural love story and a son leaving his mother to find his father. Yet despite the innocence of the content, the government limited the printing of Brief Encounters to five copies and held A Long Goodbye, which Muratova made in 1971, from being released for 17 years.

The authorities deemed Muratova’s style too personal. She used frequent close-ups of faces and purposefully mismatched audio and video—two techniques she discovered in the avant-garde films of the French New Wave. She stuck out from other Russian filmmakers of her time with her experimental cinematography.

Watching Muratova’s films is a disturbing experience. Her camera picks up on every detail of the protagonists’ sinister actions and ugly features. She is known to use costumes to portray her actors in an unflattering light. Yet she does not condemn this as ugliness or juxtapose it with beauty to decry it.

In one of Asthenic Syndrome’s first scenes, adolescents with muddy hands torture a cat by tying a can to its tail. From a distance, the camera films the boys tearing after the frightened cat in the dirt. It then aloofly cuts to a completely different setting: a funeral.

The audience is offered no comfort. The shots may not flow in a completely coherent manner, but they have an unassailable objectivity. The camera refuses to serve as a narrator by erasing its own presence, and confronts the audience with often illogical action that elicits strong emotional reactions. Muratova’s Passions (1994), a film about the world of jockeys and their horses, constitutes the exception in her body of work. It is the most accessible of her films and the most acclaimed (it was awarded the Nika, the Russian equivalent of the Oscar), even though Muratova brands it as the most superficial works of her collection.

Aside from Passions, however, all the films at the Lincoln Center event promise to be both discomforting and rewarding experiences. This retrospective is the first to introduce the daunting Russian filmmaker to the New York public.