BERNARD BESSERGLIK, Moscow | Friday
RUSSIA’S ailing film industry must return to basics if it is ever to rival the glories of the Soviet cinema, according to a leading member of Russia’s ”lost generation” of filmmakers who plans to set up a studio to enable it to do just that.
Andrei Eshpai, who made his last feature more than a decade ago, has put his principles into practice with his latest, a shoestring affair shot with a digital camera in two versions made simultaneously in different languages, Russian and English.
”Anna’s Hill”, as the English version is called, is the result of a personal investment of $12 000, innumerable hours of unpaid work by his wife, actress Yevgenia Simonova, and an inexhaustible capacity for borrowing and making do.
For all its improvised qualities, the film has drawn acclaim from the few audiences who have seen it, including viewers from the Cannes and Berlin film festivals, and won a best actress nomination for Simonova in the Nika (Russian Oscar) ceremonies to be held later this month.
Eshpai, like other filmakers of his age, saw his hopes of a productive career fade when the Soviet Union collapsed, taking film industry infrastructures, along with much else, with it.
His Dostoevsky adaptation, ”The Insulted and Humiliated”, starring Nastassja Kinski and made when he was 35, fell by the wayside when it came out in 1991 but is now widely admired. Since then he has lived mainly by teaching at the prestigious VGIK film school and working on documentaries, and has no regrets about missing out in the 1990s.
”In Russia now it is impossible to make cinema on the same scale as in Europe, let alone Hollywood. The most important thing now is to experiment, to make experimental films with low budgets but new ideas,” he said.
The benefits of this approach can be seen in films as varied as the low-budget ”Blair Witch Project”, which drew on the austerity creed of the Danish Dogme-95 group and turned it to commercial effect, and the recent ”Fellowship of the Rings” blockbuster which, he noted, ”took a lot of things from experimental directors in the area of computer graphics.”
By contrast, the cash-strapped Russian industry is turning out a thin stream of ”middle-level films which are neither experimental nor commercial.”
Eshpai’s prescription for raising Russian cinema from its present slough of despond is to create a studio of his own devoted entirely to making experimental films.
”I have been talking to the ministry of culture, including the minister Mikhail Shvydkoi, and I am confident I can do this,” he said.
”They have already given me an initial grant. I am suggesting that we can make three films a year using digital cameras for a total of $100 000, maybe $150 000. At least one, maybe two, of them should be suitable for transferring to 35mm film.”
The cheapness and flexibility of digital equipment are ideal for allowing young filmmakers to take their first movies, he said.
He even has the studio name ready: Demarche, from the Russian acronym for Debut Master Steps.
”Anna’s Hill” (the title is a nod to Woody Allen) gives an intriguing foretaste of what such a studio might achieve.
The story of a woman pondering leaving her husband for a lover, it has an intimate, semi-documentary feel with echoes of Dogme-95, Ingmar Bergman and even, with its to-camera monologues by the director’s wife, the early Jean-Luc Godard.
The English-language version came about because Eshpai realised that, since Simonova speaks good English, he could avoid the need for subtitles by shooting two versions simultaneously.
The result, he said, has been two subtly different films, the language structures creating a different atmosphere in each and even markedly differing endings.
The English version is only now being transferred to film at a cost of $20 000, and though he still needed to find a Western partner to secure a release outside Russia, he was sure the gamble was worth it. – Sapa-AFP