Happy Birthday, Kira Muratova! Born today in 1934 as Kira Heorhiyivna Muratova, this award-winning Moldovan-born Soviet and Ukrainian actress, screenwriter and film director is known for her unusual directorial style.
Throughout her career, her films underwent a great deal of censorship in the Soviet Union.
Born in Soroca, Kingdom of Romania (present-day Moldova), Murtova was the daughter to a Russian father and a Romanian mother. Her parents were both active communists and members of the Communist Party.
Her father participated in the anti-fascist guerilla movement in World War II, was arrested by Romanian forces and shot after interrogation. After the war, Muratova lived in Bucharest, Romania with her mother.
In 1959, Muratova graduated from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, Russia, specializing in directing.
Upon graduation, Muratova received a director position with the Odessa Film Studio in Odessa, a port city at the Black Sea near to her native Bessarabia.
Muratova's husband, Odessa studio director Aleksandr Muratov, were married in the early 1960s. Afterwards, co-created several films with him.
Right from the start of Muratova’s career as a director in 1962, she was an irritant to the regime.
Muratova, a key filmmaker of the late 1960s and 1970s, found belated international recognition when her banned works were released--thanks to Glasnost--in the 1980s.
It was her aesthetically striking films that often portrayed emotionally wrought female protagonists.
In the late 1970s, Muratova's features came under constant criticism of the Soviet officials due to her idiosyncratic film language that did not comply with the norms of socialist realism.
Several times, she was banned from working as a director for a number of years each time.
In her mid-50s, Muratova co-wrote and directed the film of which she is best known. This was the groundbreaking 1989 Soviet black and white/color drama film 'Astenicheskiy sindrom' ('The Asthenic Syndrome').
The film consists of two unrelated stories: One is shot in black and white and the other in color. The latter half, however, is much longer than the former.
In the first story, inconsolable female doctor Natasha (Olga Antonova) has recently buried her Stalin-lookalike husband and is now in a constant state of depression (and sometimes even direct aggression).
She later ends up facing people like her, who are also on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
The hero of the second story is the young school teacher and aspiring writer Nikolai (Sergei Popov, who also co-wrote the screenplay).
As a result of personal predicaments and problems at work, he has gotten the Asthenic Syndrome – he falls asleep at the most inappropriate times.
Due to his narcoleptic episodes, he is later admitted to the hospital for the mentally ill, where he gains the understanding that the people around him there are not any crazier than those who live in freedom.
After some time, he is released and he ends up falling asleep on the subway. Unknowingly abandoned, the empty wagon then takes the sleeping man away into a dark tunnel.
'The Asthenic Syndrome' was released the same year that the Berlin Wall fell and two years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and is probably Muratova’s best-known film outside of the Russian-speaking world.
The first part (black and white) is said to be a film within a film; nervously shot like Muratova's first features.
The second part (color) tells the story of a life of an insignificant author and literature teacher of whom suffocates in the dull routine of his mindless environment.
'The Asthenic Syndrome' has been called 'a magnificent fresco'; an 'apocalypse'. However, it proved to be a diagnosis of an era.
With the two-and-a-half-hour film, Muratova had captured the country of Russia as well as Eastern Europe in images that were typical of an era on the eve of a revolution and filled with aggression and apathy.
Like Bach's The Well-Temepered Clavier, 'The Asthenic Syndrome' is constructed as such in being full of polyphonous elements.
The following year, the film won the Silver Berlin Bear- Silver Bear - Special Jury Prize. It was also nominated for the Golden Berlin Bear. However, it did not win. This occurred at the 40th Berlin Film Festival in February 1990.
In 1990, Muratova stated, "Every time I am asked what the film is about, I reply, quite honestly, “It’s about everything.”
During the 1990s, an extremely productive period began for Muratova, during which she shot a feature film every two or three years, often working with the same actors and crew.
Two actresses Muratova had repeatedly cast were Russian actress, director and screenwriter Renata Litvinova and Ukrainian actress Natalya Buzko.
German documentary filmmaker and film scholar Isa Willinger had compared Muratova's cinematographic form to Sergei M. Eisenstein.
From the September 1996 issue of The Chicago Reader, American film critic and author Johnathan Rosenbaum wrote: “Asthenia” is defined in the American College Dictionary as “lack or loss of strength: debility,” and some critics have given Muratova’s film an alternate English title, The Weakness Syndrome.
Apparently Muratova connects the syndrome to both kinds of behavior. Both, after all, are ways of being “out of control.”
It might be said that formally speaking The Asthenic Syndrome is “out of control” as well.
It’s a film that alternately assaults you and nods off — usually without warning and often when you’re least expecting it.
Mean-spirited and assertive one moment, narcoleptic and in complete denial the next, it bears an astonishing resemblance to the disconcerting rhythm of contemporary public life."
Muratova's realism was full of contrasts, irony and rage and shows every character from different sides.
She presented a complete picture of personal syndromes and collective apathy, meanwhile stunning the viewer with shock therapy and destroying every illusion.
Muratova was but one of a small but immensely talented group of Soviet women directors who began their careers in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Like most Russian women filmmakers and writers of her generation, Muratova was uncomfortable with the terms "feminism" and women's film."
Nevertheless, part of Muratova's uniqueness as an artist lies in qualities attributable to her woman's eye and ear, and to her knowledge of women's lives.
Muratova had an extraordinary life and a career that spanned over five decades. She was still making films well into her late seventies.
However, throughout her career in the USSR, she faced tight censorship rules and regulations.
Despite this, her films are distinguished by their particularly penetrating, often merciless gaze at her female characters, and by her keen ear for the "heteroglossia" of Russia.
This included various forms of female language often heard on the street, the workplace, or in the home, but, until recently, seldom in Soviet film or literature.
Muratova's career had not been easy. Her films were released for a general Soviet audience only in 1987, and her work is still little known in North America.
Nonetheless, Muratova was an absurdist filmmaker who had emerged from the Soviet shadows into the era of perestroika.
She was a continuing irritant to the Soviet regime; a great, fearless filmmaker who unabashedly poked at open wounds.
Today, Muratova's films are still being ignored in the overall discussion of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Unfortunately, her work remains nearly impossible to track down outside of Russia.
Muratova was one of the most brilliant singular and prolific filmmakers of Soviet and post-Soviet cinema; spanning the Soviet Thaw and two decades post-perestroika but still remaining critically neglected.
This included both in scholarship and in the international festival circuit.
And yet, she would have boosted the so-much-talked about women quota, even though she would have brushed aside questions about feminism with the comment: “But we have a patriarchy!”
Maybe the inattentiveness to her work has to do with the fact that she was ‘just’ a great filmmaker, and never made a deal about being a woman filmmaker. Her films challenge contemporary life in a profound and uncomfortable way.
Muratova always held her finger on the pulse, or rather stuck it into and meandered it around in the open gashes – such deep-rooted flaws of human nature as evil and cruelty.
Her films possessed an inimitable lightness in a complex narrative fragmentation, seemingly stitched together with dialogues that exposed the absurdity of speech.
Moreover, Muratova turned the vulgar into something beautiful, used waste as a decorative ornament, and integrated the criminal into the everyday.
She has often been accused of disliking people, both due to her brisk answers in interviews and in their screen representation, exposing foibles and showing a keen interest in morbidity.
Her attitude towards death would often make her the victim of abuse, but she looked at death straight in the eye with a stoic and piercing view.
The trademarks of Muratova's style include characters behaving in inexplicable ways, storylines moving in bizarre, unpredictable directions, ellipses, and a sense of bitter humor reflecting a violent, loveless, morally empty society.
Though much darker, her films belong beside the blackly humorous oeuvres of Georgian-filmmaker Otar Iosseliani and Swedish film director Roy Andersson amidst the cinema of the preposterous.
Nonetheless, Muratova has been called both “one of the Russian-speaking world’s most influential filmmakers” and “one of the most marginalized figures in Russian cinema.”
With that being said, are her films just too unflinching? Perhaps her Soviet audience (as with her North American audience) will never know.
Muratova had been active from 1961–2018.
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