>To be a genius artist like him in the Soviet Union meant privileges unheard for art film directors in Europe (let alone US), eg see the wheat field thing above. It also meant you’re at the mercy of the “masses”.
It also meant being at the mercy and whims of the Communist party. Like Polish genius director Andrzej Żuławski, who filmed almost his entire magnum opus "On the Silver Globe," only to have the Communist government cancel the project and order the destruction of what was filmed.
The greatest science fiction movie never made. I get goosebumps every single time I watch these trailers:
Żuławski is amazing! He manages to strike the right balance between abstraction and action; between soulful Slavic opaqueness and, well, viewers wanting to understand what's happening on the screen without having to read the characters' minds through an inverted Christology or some such implied cultural context.
Żuławski's movies contain enough mystery to thrill the imagination, yet it is crystal clear that they are telling a particular story, with an intended authorial meaning, the further implications of which we are free to ponder - not simply painting a vast, inhospitable landscape for us to project our own meaning onto, like Tarkovsky does, or many West European filmmakers like Bunuel or the aforementioned Bergman.
Now I want to get me a projector and organize a pirate Żuławski marathon in a warehouse, culminating with a screening of On the Silver Globe, once someone's brought a decent pusher to the party and the shit has started to kick in... Eh, if only my city's avant-garde art scene and I hadn't recognized each other for the pretentious good-for-nothing wankers that we are. More effectual personalities can be found among the wannabe gangsters, for fuck's sake - but those lives are little movies in their own right, and avant-garde cinema's got nothing on them.
Unfortunately, without an overt repressive apparatus for people to struggle against, it seems their finest qualities end up going down the drain a little bit. Creative people end up inventing novel schemes for making money out of ever more primitive illusions, instead of dedicating their brain cells to creating those increasingly elaborate visions that kept our forefathers struggling onward with dignity against inhuman conditions. Which leads us to the big question: if the Communist authoritarian project was a necessary condition to get all these fascinating, singular (anti-/post-)Communist works of art... was it worth the millions of lives sacrificed or devastated?
It also meant being at the mercy and whims of the Communist party. Like Polish genius director Andrzej Żuławski, who filmed almost his entire magnum opus "On the Silver Globe," only to have the Communist government cancel the project and order the destruction of what was filmed.
The greatest science fiction movie never made. I get goosebumps every single time I watch these trailers:
https://youtu.be/zBFRiSlcBAg
https://youtu.be/HFf5BGNpnJ0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Silver_Globe_(film)