Repressed by the Soviets, Films of Kira Muratova Gain New Audiences

A brief dip into the corpus of films produced during the time of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is likely to occasion awe — not only for the brilliant and sometimes audacious cadre of filmmakers, but that their films were made at all. The “greatest medium of mass agitation,” as the dictator Joseph Stalin had it, was subject to strict governmental guidelines. The Soviets were all for agitation, but only if it suited their purposes. Film at Lincoln Center will be presenting 4K restorations of “Brief Encounters” (1967) and “The Long Farewell” (1971), both of which are the handiwork of a Ukrainian filmmaker, Kira Muratova, who died in 2018 at 83. Muratova was a triple threat: screenwriter, director, and actress. Actually, make that a quadruple threat — at least for the Soviets — as Muratova had no end of problems with the powers that were.“Brief Encounters” wasn’t released until 20 years after its completion, and it took 16 years before “The Long Farewell” saw the light of day due to the loosening of regulatory powers under perestroika. Prior to then, Muratova’s work was put under wraps. The Soviets derided the films as “bourgeois” and “deliberately complicated.” These officially relegated shortcomings resulted in the director being assigned a “forced career break.” At the age of 37, Muratova was unsure of whether she would ever make another film. Muratova lived to see the dissolution of the USSR and subsequently made 14 pictures between 1987 and 2012. She had, from all accounts, a spiky temperament independent of political or cultural fortune. Nor was her work universally beloved once it became readily available. In a remembrance published shortly after Muratova’s death, the filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa recalled a conversation that took place after a screening of “Second Class Citizens” (2001). The usher at the theater railed at him, “Why do people even bother making this stuff? Who needs this? Who on earth would want to watch this?”After co-directing “By the Steep Ravine” (1961) and “Our Honest Bread” (1964) with her soon-to-be ex-husband, Oleksandr Muratov, Muratov — yes, the former Miss Korotkova kept the name — broke out on her own. “Brief Encounters” and “The Long Farewell” were the first two films on which Muratova was in complete control. She co-wrote the script of the former along with Leonid Zhukhovitsky and worked with a screenplay by Natalya Ryazantseva on the second film.Zinaida Sharko in ‘The Long Farewell.’ Via Janus FilmsHow “bourgeois” and “deliberately complicated” do the pictures appear here in 2023? Truth be told, the Soviet censors had a point. “The Long Farewell” is a disjointed endeavor whose structure recalls the fragmented tendencies of Cubism. “Brief Encounters” advocates, in significant part, on behalf of creature comforts. The Soviets couldn’t have been happy with Muratova’s sardonic depiction of Communist statecraft. In that film, Muratova stars as a city planner in an unappealing corner of an unnamed city. Nothing much gets done even as her character makes promise after promise.The stories in both films are insistently, even reassuringly, conventional. One is a case study in star-crossed lovers; the other, an essay in generational conflict. In “Brief Encounters,” Valentina (Muratova) hires a young woman from the sticks (Nina Ruslanova) as a housekeeper. Unbeknownst to both women, they are in love with the same man, Maxim (the Russian folk-singer Vladimir Vysotsky), a geologist who spends a lot of time in the mountains and who also happens to be Valentina’s husband. All the while, Maxim strums an ever present guitar, serving as a kind of one-man Greek chorus.Tension is generated by our knowledge of the commonality to which our heroines are clueless, as well as Muratova’s tendency to abruptly transpose time, space, tone, and sound. This tack is amplified in “The Long Farewell,” with the result being a frazzled dislocation of emotional and narrative energies. Then again, given our two leads — a middle-aged woman eager for love and recognition (Zinaida Sharko) and her moody, seen-it-all teenage son (Zinaida Sharko) — Muratova’s fondness for the “deliberately complicated” makes a kind of sense. As such, “The Long Farewell” is a wearying film that improves in retrospect, while “Brief Encounters” is a more immediately satisfying cinematic experience. Whether Muratova fully justified why “people even bother making up this stuff” with the rest of her films is, for American audiences, less certain. Perhaps Film at Lincoln Center will do us the favor of shining a more extensive light on Muratova’s accomplishments.

Repressed by the Soviets, Films of Kira Muratova Gain New Audiences

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