Muratova’s The Long Farewell

She is Mommie Dearest in the Soviet Motherland. Yevgenia Vasilyevna Ustinova is a manipulative, domineering mother and she has no intention of changing any aspect of relationship with her son Sasha. However, when he decides to make a change, it sends her spiraling in Kira Muratova’s freshly restored, which opens today in New York.

Ustinova has very different ideas of what Ustinov should do, even including who he should marry. He might not necessarily disagree with the last part, but he seems to have finally realized their massively codependent relationship is toxic. Consequently, he has decided to move in with his father, who was long-estranged from his mother, even before he started teaching way out in Novosibirsk. Ustinov has not informed Ustinova of his decision yet, but she discovers it through her motherly snooping. That opens the floodgates for more compulsive behavior.

Like Brief Encounters, The Long Farewell was also censored by Soviet authorities soon after its release, for reasons that eluded most international critics. In this case, aesthetic issues are probably mostly to blame. At times, Farewell is almost Godard-like, particularly in Muratova’s use of repeated dialogue for an absurdist effect. This is most definitely not Socialist Realism. In fact, you would hardly know it takes place in the USSR. Nobody seems to building socialism or smashing capitalist. Rather to the contrary, much of what goes on appears rather decadent and unhealthy.

Still, it is worth noting Ustinov’s father is in Siberia, which perhaps implies he was once on the outs with the socialist regime. Conversely, Mother Ustinova works as a translator, which maybe implies some level of trust, since she must have contact with foreigners and outside sources of information. Then, there goes Sasha, choosing him over her.

Zinaida Sharko gives a spectacularly dark diva-like turn as Ustinova. This is the kind of emotionally intense performance Meryl Streep’s defenders like to pretend she gives, but she was never really capable of anything like this.

Elem Klimov’s Come and See

During the Glasnost era, Soviet director Elem Klimov personally supervised the release of scores of previously banned films. Technically, he was a Communist Party member, but he was always out of step with Party orthodoxy. His anti-war masterwork was about as far as a film can get from Socialist Realism, but its hyper-reality is arguably the best cinematic recreation of what it is like to experience war first-hand. Viewers can witness the terrible sound and fury of Klimov’s vision in all its brutal power when the freshly restored Come and See opens today at Film Forum.

Much to his mother’s alarm, her teenaged son Flyora has volunteered for the Soviet partisans. This appears to be an official Red Army-affiliated company of partisans, which probably makes matters worse. Of course, when they come to collect her boy, they also plunder the family farm. Maybe it is just as well Flyora does not impress the legendary commander Kosach, who holds him back from combat. However, he orders the boy to surrender his sturdy boots to a salty old comrade.

Unfortunately, Flyora will find himself in the thick of war when the National Socialists over-run the Soviet Socialists’ defenses. Soon, he is navigating a hellscape of artillery bombardments and war crimes. The lad latches onto several companions in order to survive, which he does, but that is often not true for those around him.

Frankly, it takes a bit of time to unlock because the naïve Flyora we meet in early scenes seems so willfully blind to everything we can see around him. However, his slow transformation is a harrowing spectacle to behold. First-time actor Alexei Kravchenko (now an established veteran) appears to genuinely age thirty years during the course of the film. From a callow child, he evolves into a creature in and of war.

Come and See is also an overwhelming achievement on a technical level. Klimov and cinematographer Alexei Rodionov employ long, complex Steadicam tracking shots that are clearly a forerunner to Mendes’ 1917. Yet, it is the disorienting maelstrom of sound effects that really instill the sensation of being in the middle of a war zone.

Aleksey German’s Khrustalyov, My Car!

Aleksey German only completed six films as a director. Ordinarily, that would be a rather limited body of work for an auteurist reputation to rest, but German did not just make movies. He built worlds. This one could be considered Stalinist World. Life there is nasty, brutish, short, disorienting, and surreal. Fortunately, it is also about to come to an end in the late German’s newly restored 1998 classic, Khrustalyov, My Car! (trailer here), which opens today at the Metrograph.

The film starts on the day of Stalin’s death, before flashing back to Gen. Yuri Klensky, the chief commissar of the Soviet military medical service, who has been hoping Stalin’s virulently anti-Semitic “Doctors’ Plot” purge would skip over him. Alas, Klensky’s optimistic illusions are shattered when he encounters his double in the cellar. Shortly thereafter, a foreign provocateur arrives with a supposed message from a family member living abroad. Klensky is coarse and corrupt, but he can recognize a power play, especially when he is the target.

In response, Klensky launches into a mad-dash escape attempt, careening out into the dark night of Stalinist Russia. However, the forces of darkness have the jump on him. Soon, his sprawling, bickering family will be evicted into the streets, as the Black Marias circle like sharks. However, all bets are off when Klensky comes face-to-face with the NKVD puppet-master, Lavrentiy Beria. There will even be a cameo for Stalin, but the expiring dictator hardly looks like himself.

Shot in starkly illuminated black-and-white, Khrustalyov, My Car! (an apocryphal quote attributed to Beria on learning of Stalin’s impending demise) offers a vision of what it might have looked like if Honoré Daumier had drawn caricatures of Stalinist Russia. The mise-en-scene is dingy, but baroque, much like his epic Hard to Be a God.

In just about every way, Khrustalyov represents some blisteringly uncompromising filmmaking from German, who doesn’t give a toss how uncomfortable viewers get when he openly compares Stalinism to violent forced sodomy. (There is no missing the significance of that scene.) German starts dark and goes progressively darker, until he reaches a Miltonian state of darkness visible.

As Lensky, Yuriy Tsurilo is about as animalistic as German could get, short a casting an actual raging bull. He is not exactly subtle (or pleasant company), but he commands the screen, even while enduring a torrent of humiliation. Frankly, it is rather remarkable how much his presence dominates the film, given the overwhelming nature of the maelstrom German orchestrates around him.

Clearly, Khrustalyov is not the sort of film you plop down in front of the couch to watch on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The viewing experience is more like walking through a fun house or a Stalinist house of mirrors. Wherever you look, there is something new to see, but it is usually deeply unsettling. It is like a waking nightmare, yet Vladimir Ilin’s black-and-white cinematography is strangely beautiful. Frankly, this is a towering work of cinema that stands beyond mere thumbs or tomato ratings. It also provides the withering final word on the collectivist experiment. Anyone serious about film as art and historical testament should it and hold on for dear life. Recommended for iconoclastic cineastes, Khrustalyov, My Car! opens today (12/14) in New York, at the Metrograph.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev

In 1960, the Soviet Union launched a campaign lionizing Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev to encourage Russian pride during the post-Stalinist thaw. That narrowly opened the window for a cinematic bio-pic. Andrei Tarkovsky would have been the Party’s absolute last choice to make such a film, but somehow Mosfilm put it into production anyway. They were not happy with the results, demanding cuts and withholding Tarkosky’s epic from domestic distribution. However, the rest of world immediately hailed the film as a masterwork. It is a powerful but demanding film that anyone with a serious interest in cinema as a legit form of art must wrestle with eventually. There is no time like the present, because the digitally restored Andrei Rublev opens today in New York.

Do not expect a conventional biographical treatment. There are no scenes of the precocious Rublev in short pants. We never even see him paint a single bush-stroke. Instead, Tarkovsky and co-screenwriter Andrei Konchalovsky (the great Russian director, who also helmed Tango & Cash) skip over years and even decades, focusing on seven incidents in his life, whose full significance and inter-connectedness will be revealed in the final scenes.

When we first meet Rublev, he is one of a trio of itinerant icon-painting monks. Despite his relative youth, Rublev’s reputation proceeds him, much to the consternation of his Iago-like colleague Kiril. When the master Theophanes the Greek requests Rublev to be his chief assistant and de facto anointed successor, Kiril’s rage prompts him to break with the Orthodox Church. Although fame and accolades are Rublev’s for the taking, he becomes increasingly disillusioned by the corruption of the Church and nobility, as well as the harsh and unjust conditions endured by the peasantry.

Rublev will also be traumatized by acts of barbarism that Tarkovsky stages in graphically violent long takes, on an epic scale worthy of Cecil B. DeMille. Over fifty years later, these sequences still have the power to shock, but it is worth noting a notorious scene in which a cow is set on fire was cut from all but the earliest edits (the cow was fine, by the way).

If you want to get sucked into somebody else’s life and throw your empathetic arms around them, Andrei Rublev will leave you cold like the Siberian tundra. However, the boldness of Tarkovsky’s grotesquely baroque vision is arresting, in an immersive kind of way. Even though they are ostensibly science fiction films, it is not hard to see echoes of Tarkovsky’s Daumier-and-Bruegel-like set pieces in Aleksey German’s Hard to Bea God and Andrzej Zuławski’s On the Silver Globe.

Frankly, it is Tarkovsky’s bold strokes that drive the film rather than his cast’s elocution and emoting. Still, Anatoly Solonitsyn performance as Rublev is genuinely haunting—you could even call it iconic. Yet, it might just be Nikolai Burlyayev’s manic, frantic portrayal of Boriska, a young aspiring bell-caster very likely in over his head that could very well define the film’s sense of hope and desperation.

Andrei Rublev is an unpolitical film, by just about every conceivable criterion, but it is easy to see why the Soviets thought it was bad for Party business. There is no question Tarkovsky and Konchalovsky vividly illustrate the dark side of orthodoxy—with a small “o.” Yet, the Vatican was hip enough to include on their “Great Films” list, compiled to mark the 100^th anniversary of cinema (a pretty solid honor roll that includes obvious masterpieces and some genuinely worthy outliers). Frankly, it is the sort of film you are supposed to sink into and get a little lost in, but when it bites back, it clamps down hard. Highly recommended as one of the most important films ever, Andrei Rublev opens today (8/24) in New York, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Future Imperfect: Dead Man’s Letters

It was produced in 1986, but this Soviet post-apocalyptic drama envisions a world of widespread environmental devastation and a weak central government that still tries to maintain its authority through brutal and arbitrary assertions of power. In other words, nothing has changed for Soviets, except maybe for the millions who died in the nuclear blast. Existence rather than life goes on for a professor futilely searching for his missing son in Konstantin Lopushansky’s Dead Man’s Letters, which screens during MoMA’s ambitious but oddly titled film series, Future Imperfect: The Uncanny in Science Fiction.

The Professor is sort of like a post-apocalyptic Nicholas Sparks character. He essentially narrates the film through ruminative letters ostensibly written to his son Eric, even though he realizes it is highly unlikely they will ever be read by the intended recipient. His wife sort of survived, but she is fast succumbing to radiation sickness, dementia, and who knows what else. They have found temporary refuge in a shelter below a Hermitage-like museum, which explains the high quality of surrounding bric-a-brac and detritus.

In flashbacks, we witness the impact at Soviet ground zero and watch the Professor’s desperate search for Eric in various makeshift hospitals and morgues. Grotesque yet visually arresting, these sepia-toned sequences have the look and feel Hieronymous Bosch. They are some of the most effective passages of the film. However, the high point is undeniably the eulogy the museum director gives to mankind before committing suicide in despair. Rather than condemn man, he praises our tragic outsized ambition and the capacity to love that produced so much great art. Frankly, it is quite a refreshing sentiment, compared to the contemporary eco/outbreak/zombie thrillers that argue humanity is fundamentally evil and deserves to give way to snail darters and cockroaches (looking at you, Girl with All the Gifts).

Both the style and subject matter of Letters largely overwhelms the veteran cast. Nevertheless, as the Professor, Rolan Bykov still manages to project dignity and a profound sense of loss. Physically, he resembles Wojciech Pszoniak in Andrzej Wajda’s 1990 Korczak, especially when the Professor assumes guardianship of a group of outcast children. Yet, it is Iosif Ryklin who truly defines and redeems the film as the museum director (sometimes credited as “The Humanist”). His farewell address is the sole identifiable element that qualifies Letters for MoMA’s Future Imperfect, a series that explores the ways science fiction is uniquely qualified to determine what it means to be human, but it is more than sufficient justification.

Letters’ unambiguous religious symbolism might surprise many, given its Soviet origins. However, the end titles make it clear the film was partly (if not largely) produced with the Western nuclear freeze movement in mind. Clearly, the hope was if the gullible West took a gander at the suffering wrought by nukes, they would force Reagan administration to unilaterally halt the military build-up, cluelessly giving the Soviets time to regroup and rebuild. We now know nobody was more concerned about the potential destruction a nuclear war would cause than Ronald Reagan himself, but he could see deception and manipulation for what it was.

Lopushansky assisted Tarkovsky during the production of Stalker—and it is easy to see the master’s influence. We can also see echoes of Letters in Aleksay German’s Hard to Be a God. Of course, both Stalker and German’s film were based on novels written by the Strugatsky Brothers, Arkady and Boris, the latter also being a co-screenwriter of Letters, so you could say all three films are closely related. As a result, Letters is one of the better Soviet Bloc post-apocalyptic movies, far superior to August at the Hotel Ozone (screening tomorrow). Recommended for those who appreciate strong imagery or are nostalgic for some Soviet duck-and-cover, Dead Man’s Letters screens again today (7/30) at MoMA, as part of Future Imperfect.

Tarkovsky’s Solaris

Thirty-seven years before the publication of the Ted Chiang novella that would be adapted as The Arrival, polish author Stanisław Lem had already grappled with the challenges of human communication with radically dissimilar life forms. However, some of those themes of his novel were overshadowed by a more fundamental examination of what it means to be human in Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic cinematic adaptation. Easily one of the most important science fiction films of all time, Tarkovsky’s Solaris (trailer here) returns to New York theaters this Friday, freshly restored by Mosfilm from the original negative.

Kris Kelvin sounds cold. In fact, he has been emotional unavailable to those closest to him, resulting in the tremendous guilt he bears. As Solaris opens, he is spending what could well be his final day on Earth, essentially saying farewell to his elderly parents. He will soon leave for the space station orbiting planet Solaris. Communications with the crew have been garbled, so Kelvin is to assess their condition and determine whether the mission can continue.

It is pretty clear the Earthbound authorities would prefer to pull the plug. Ever since space pilot Henri Berton gave an outlandish report of an attempted rescue mission in the planet’s atmosphere, the reputation of so-called Solaristics has suffered in scientific circles. Kelvin’s initial meetings with the two surviving crew members do little to reassure him. Much to his disappointment, his friend Dr. Gibarian committed suicide shortly before his arrival, but he left Kelvin a cryptic video warning.

The space psychologist will soon understand what his old friend meant when he comes face-to-face with his dead wife Hari. She is not a hallucination. She is a physical manifestation generated by “The Ocean,” the sentient atmospheric storm on Solaris the space station scientists roused with their X-Ray probes. Clearly, the Ocean is responding with what the crew somewhat euphemistically call “guests,” but it is unclear whether the intent is hostile or benign.

Those who saw the original American release of Solaris were probably baffled, because a good half-hour was chopped out. Granted, there are some long, meditative Tarkovskian stretches, but viewers really need to go through them to get into the film’s headspace. It is still the most commercial of Tarkovsky’s films (an almost laughable distinction), but viewers who buckle in and commit to it, should have no trouble following along.

Somewhat intended as a response to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris is one of the few films that can match its cosmic scope. Yet, Tarkovsky deliberately de-emphasized special visual effects, instead presenting a cluttered, human-scale vision of the future. Few films have managed to develop the Tarkovsky’s themes (and Lem’s) any further, but its shadow looms over every subsequent first contact movies.

Viewers should also appreciate the ensemble’s fine performances, once they acclimate to Tarkovsky’s reserved aesthetic. As Kelvin, Lithuanian Donatas Banionis looks like an existential crisis personified. You can practically see the waves of guilt radiating out from him. Natalya Bondarchuk gives one of the great science fiction performances in movie history as the new Hari, who has apparently inherited the old Hari’s neuroses and develops peculiar new ones as she becomes cognizant of her true origins. However, it is Estonian Jüri Järvet who steals scene after scene as the station’s roguish but compassionate cyberneticist.

During his career, Tarkovky was bedeviled by Soviet state censorship and interference, but he was never considered an overtly or even semi-covertly political filmmaker. However, we can possibly read the rather dramatic use of J.S. Bach’s sacred “Ich Ruf Zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 639” over the opening titles and the strategic positioning of an image of a Rublev icon as small acts of defiance. Arguably, their very inclusion stretches Tarkovsky’s canvas even further. Regardless, Tarkovsky always keeps the nature of humanity front and center throughout Solaris. Anyone who professes any interest in science fiction cinema absolutely must be conversant in this film. Very highly recommended, the restored Solaris opens this Friday (5/12) in New York, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

The Wild East: White Sun of the Desert

One wonders why the Soviets were so successful cultivating the “non-aligned” Middle Eastern nations during the Cold War. The American ambassadors should have simply showed the local potentates a few choice Soviet “Easterns”. Often featuring Red Army soldiers battling bloodthirsty Muslim hordes in the outer Central Asian Republics, Easterns were a popular staple of Soviet cinema. In fact, watching Vladimir Motyl’s White Sun of the Desert, perhaps the quintessential Eastern, became a pre-launch tradition for the nation’s cosmonauts. Holding up rather well, Sun screens tomorrow as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Wild East retrospective of vintage Soviet Easterns, which kicks off today in New York.

Fyodor Sukhov has good news for his wife. He has more-or-less won the class war while serving in the Caspian detachment. Unfortunately, it may take some time for the honorably discharged officer to make his way home through the desert. He keeps stumbling across men buried up to their necks in the sand, like Sayid. Though not exactly overjoyed at his rescue, the sullen local and the indomitable veteran become casual allies. Sukhov will need the help. Despite his protestations, he finds himself charged with protecting the former harem of a Basmachi warlord, nearly single-handedly.

Desert features a strange mash-up of tragedy and broad comedy, but it always looks great. From the Byzantine architecture, to the white sands and blue waters, the film perfectly captures the feel of its Near Eastern locale. Frankly, it indulges in an Eastern exoticism that was already politically incorrect in Hollywood, but that is part of its retro appeal.

Without question, Desert was conceived as propaganda, but Motyl never lets the proceedings get too heavy or didactic. Anatoly Kuznetsov also anchors the film quite effectively as Sukhov. Though undeniably a hero of fine Soviet rectitude, he adds a sense of world weary whimsy that gives the film its charm.

As with most Easterns, Desert's kinship with the American western is obvious. However, it also shares elements with good old-fashioned imperialistic historical dramas like Gunga Din and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer that Hollywood quit making decades before the 1969 Soviet favorite. Indeed, it is good nostalgic fun, perfectly suited to FSLC’s Wild East series, when it screens tomorrow (2/12), Wednesday (2/16), and Thursday (2/17) at the Walter Reade Theater.

The Wild East: Cold Summer of ’53

News traveled slowly to the outer Republics. One provincial Soviet town had no idea Khrushchev’s De-Stalinization campaign was underway, but it has immediate repercussions for them all in Aleksandr Proshkin’s Cold Summer of ’53, which screens as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s The Wild East, a retrospective of vintage Soviet action films set in the Central Asian Republics starting this Friday.

Chaff and Spade sound like buddy-cops, but they have been deemed criminals—“enemies of the people,” in fact. The older Spade once traveled abroad, thus making him a “British spy,” whereas the younger Chaff had the misfortune of briefly being captured by the Germans during WWII. They are former political gulag inmates serving the balance of their sentences in exile somewhere in North East. If not warmly welcoming, the villagers accept the political criminals in their midst. Unfortunately, they will soon encounter a band of real criminals up-close-and-personal.

Bitterly disillusioned, the regional militia officer Mankov takes grim satisfaction informing the village apparatchik of Beria’s denouncement. The former interior minister’s general amnesty of the gulag’s legitimate criminal element has made his life much harder. Naturally, “political” convicts like Chaff and Spade were unaffected, but there would be cause for hopeful speculation if they knew how the winds were blowing. However, they have more immediate concerns when the marauding gang of former “thieves by law” takes the town hostage. With the town’s Communist figureheads either dead or instinctively kowtowing to their new bosses, it is up to Chaff and Spade to give them the Die Hard treatment.

Proshkin and screenwriter Edgar Dubrovsky reportedly slipped the political context into Summer while filming was underway. Even by Glasnost standard, it is still remarkably outspoken about the Stalin-era repression for a Soviet film. Still, it is rather clear they were reluctant to address “Uncle Joe” directly, laying responsibility for the great purges specifically at Beria’s feet. Indeed, just who did he work for and how much autonomy do they suppose he had? Be that as it may, Summer forthrightly condemns the Gulag justice administered under his watch, lamenting the wasted lives that resulted. Proshkin does so especially subtly and poetically in one of the closing scenes of the Summer’s exteneded denouement.

As an action film, Summer is certainly serviceable, getting an intense anti-hero turn from the Daniel Craig-looking Valery Priyomykhov as Chaff. In his final screen role, Soviet comedic actor Anatoly Papanov adds a genuine note of pathos as Spade. Frankly, the real villains are not the hostage takers (mostly generic, except for their wiry ringleader with a Napoleon complex), but the cringe-inducing village authority figures, who earn the audience’s contempt in spades. Perhaps the film’s only drawback is its rather stereotypical depiction of Soviet women, particularly the insensitive portrayal of the deaf matronly Lydia, the mother of the buxom Shura.

The comparison between Soviet Easterns and the American Westerns is particularly apt in the case of Summer. Proshkin and cinematographer Boris Brozhovsky capture a vivid sense of the region’s big skies and rugged landscape. Having in effect lost his name, Chaff certainly shares a kinship with Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter as well. Undeniably a film of its moment, Summer was an enormous hit when first released in the dissolving USSR, yet in retrospect it still holds an intriguing appeal for both action and art-house audiences. Though a bit of ringer, it is a welcome inclusion in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Wild East series, when it screens this Friday (2/11) and the following Tuesday (2/15) at the Walter Reade Theater.

Potter at MoMA: I Am an Ox . . .

During World War II, Soviet Cinema propaganda often targeted women, exhorting them to do their part for the war effort. As a result, films from the era feature women willing working, fighting, and most of all suffering for the sake of the Soviet homeland. Taking its title from a period political poster, Sally Potter surveyed the contributions of women filmmakers to Soviet cinema for British television in I Am an Ox, I Am a Horse, I Am a Man, I Am a Woman: Women in Russian Cinema (trailer here), which screens as part of the MoMA’s current Potter retrospective.

Produced in 1990 for the British television series Women Call the Shots, Ox is definitely a product of Glasnost-induced optimism. One assumes that Potter and her crew considered the privilege of shooting in the USSR significant in its own right, because the questions she asks are distinctly of the softball variety. When one Russian cinematographer mentions the stringent ideological requirements of the Soviet film authorities, Potter lets this important and telling avenue of inquiry die on the vine. Not wanting to antagonize her subjects is a reasonable concern, but she could have at least politely asked the obvious follow-up questions.

Instead, we largely hear age old questions about whether they specifically identify themselves as women filmmakers or if they consider such terms condescending. Even in that great egalitarian workers’ paradise, Ina Churikova suggests that once actresses reach a certain age, as she had, they find it increasingly difficult to find meaningful work. Evidently, Hollywood is like the old USSR in more ways than we realized.

Throughout Ox, Potter presents many intriguing movie clips that seem ripe for feminist deconstruction. In one film’s climax, a matronly commissar abandons her newborn so she can continue the fight to protect the revolution. One could easily ask if Soviet films similarly urge men to abdicate their claims to fatherhood for the sake of the Bolshevik cause. Indeed, based on the scenes seen in Ox, one could argue Soviet cinema seems to revel in the suffering of women. After all, the slogan which supplied the film’s title establishes a pretty clear hierarchy, with the ox on top and women at the end.

Yet Potter eschews any provocative analysis or interpretations. Scrupulously avoiding macro-controversies, she largely interviews her subjects about the specifics of their own careers. Of course, for those viewers unfamiliar with filmmakers like Kira Muratova, such an approach will most likely be disappointing.

Ox might have been a notable undertaking at the time, but it already feels like a dated artifact that willfully ignores the huge elephants of state censorship and repression still lumbering through the room. Only of historical interest to those studying Potter’s oeuvre, Ox screens at MoMA tomorrow (7/21).

NYJFF: The Return of Nathan Becker

August 12, 1952 would be the last night on Earth for thirteen Soviet Jewish writers and intellectuals. Loyal Communists who had promoted the Russian war effort as members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, they were fatally purged by Stalin in what came to be known as the “Night of Murdered Poets.” Among them was one Peretz Markish, a Yiddish poet, playwright, and novelist, who also penned the screenplay for the only Soviet Yiddish film of the sound era, The Return of Nathan Becker, which screens tomorrow at the NY Jewish Film Festival.

Markish was not the only member of the Return production who would not live through the Stalin years. However, co-star Solomon Mikhoels was considered too prominent a public figure as the artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater for the usual show trial and summary execution. Instead, he was assassinated on Stalin’s orders in 1948 through a staged automobile accident. It is Mikhoels that the NYJFF pays tribute to tomorrow with screenings of the 1925 silent film, Jewish Luck, and Return from 1932. The leading Soviet Jewish actor of his day, Mikhoels was the cultural point-man for convincing his co-religionists their faith and heritage were indeed compatible with Marxism. Return was very consciously a part of that program.

The film is in fact, propaganda. Wisely, the National Center for Jewish Film, which restored Return, added an introductory preface explaining Mikhoels and Markish would eventually be killed by the same regime the film proceeds to exalt. As it opens, the burly title character is returning to his homeland after years of toiling for Yankee robber barons. The Great Depression has laid America low, but the Soviet Union is portrayed as the new land of plenty. His idiosyncratic father, played by Mikhoels, has abandoned the shtetl, becoming an ardent Communist. So should you all is the clear message of the film.

The noble worker has difficulty acclimating to his new home. He is so used to the competitive pressures of capitalism, he chafes at what he perceives as half-hearted efforts from his co-workers. While the work leaders try to explain the “Soviet” way to Becker, he will have none of it, challenging them to a bricklaying duel to prove his point. Becker knows only one way to work—100% flat-out. He starts fast, but is eventually worn down by the ergonomically advanced Communist methods. Believing himself disgraced, Becker prepares to return to America. However, his father and the work leaders reassure him he is still welcome in the workers’ paradise. In fact, they can learn from him as well, refining Soviet bricklaying techniques with his own innovations.

In a way, it is hardly surprising that the producers of propaganda telling laborers to work smarter, not harder, would eventually run afoul of the state. As propaganda filmmaking, Return has some interesting visuals, like the broken Becker dwarfed by the looming brick towers of his ill-fated challenge, but it is nowhere near the league of Sergei Eisenstein’s films. It is a highly significant work, but one that must be considered in the proper historical context—specifically the fates of Mikhoels and Markish. A fascinating viewing experience, Return screens tomorrow (1/25) at the Walter Reade Theater.