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Article Excerpt
W. J. T. Mitchell has argued that "the word-image threshold," together with the "ideology/nature" boundary that it encompasses, invariably acts as the site of culture's "fundamental conflicts and contradictions" (Mitchell 1986, 44). (1) Such an assertion is based on the assumption that verbal and visual texts can never be subsumed into one another, but rather that both are syncretic in nature, combining aspects of word and image in varying degrees of tension. Thus, as Mitchell writes:
There is the natural, mimetic image which ... "captures" what it represents, and its pictorial rival, the artificial, expressive image which cannot "look like" what it represents because that thing can only be conveyed in words. There is the word, which is a natural image of what it means (as in onomatopoeia), and the word as arbitrary signifier. (44)
We shall not therefore be looking for specific verbal-literary "influences" on the two films to which this article is devoted, Grigorii Chukrai's "Ballad of a Soldier" ('Ballada o soldate') and Pavel Chukrai's "Thief" ('Vor'), for this would be to ignore the syncretism of both narrative and film. We will instead consider ways in which the dialogue of word and image within and between them reflects certain key conflicts in the societies in which they were made. We shall focus on two distinct modes of intertextuality: that of verbal discourse within a visual medium, and that of one film within another. This essay will contribute to the scholarly study of the relationship between verbal narrative and the post-Soviet visual media.
An eschewal of the search for specific literary progenitors for the two films is dictated in any event by the fact that neither of them is adapted from a recognized literary source, nor even pitched as "high cultural" artifacts with literary affinities. (It is true, however, that the scenario for one of them was separately published and, typically of this genre in Soviet culture, is written in semi-literary, past tense mode). (2) The verbal dimensions of the films are fourfold: 1) they both exhibit structures reflecting paradigms drawn from the literary culture which so dominates Russian society, in particular the traditions of the picaresque and of radical sentimentalism; 2) they both employ instances of narrative voiceover curiously at odds with the imagic identification structures at work in them; 3) individually and as a unity they respond well to certain models of analysis formulated in a literary context, but modified for the cinematic medium; 4) the earlier of the films (to which, as we shall see, the later is a considered response) was produced under the still potent influence of socialist realism. This doctrine, which came to dominate all official Soviet art until the 1980s, accorded film a central role; Lenin famously characterized cinema as "the most important of all the arts" and Stalin was also convinced of its crucial role in propagating Soviet ideology. Socialist realism was nonetheless conceived within a strictly literary framework and based itself on literary models.
The purpose of our analysis is to explore via the word-image dimension social, ideological and psychoanalytic conflicts within the films. We will investigate the conflict between "Ballad of a Soldier" and "Thief" in terms of post-Soviet Russia's attempts to come to terms with the Soviet past, which it must simultaneously reject and embrace. This latter paradox is epitomized in the fact that the director of "Ballad" is the father of the director of "Thief"--a relationship which, as we shall find, has more than simply symbolic significance and which is itself grounded in the father-son paradigm so central to the nineteenth-century Russian literary canon. (3) These modes of conflict find cinematic expression in the image of the train journey, which again possesses a venerable literary heritage traceable to Dostoevskii, Tolstoy, to picaresque strands in the Russian literary tradition and ultimately, to Chaadaev's philosophical meditations on Russia's historical destiny. As well as providing narrative continuity f or the films, the image of the train forms the guiding theme in our analysis. We will analyze it chronotopically, i.e., in terms of its capacity to meld artistic time and space, and to provide a nexus for other thematic and ideological issues treated by the directors: familial dispossession, the special sense of collectivity embodied in the Russian concept of "communal spirit" (sobornost'), and shifts in the relationship of private and public space.
In the most literal sense, a generation separates "Ballad of a Soldier" (1959) and "Thief" (1997), (4) each of which was made at key transitional moments in Russian history. When Grigorii Chukrai's "Ballad"--winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival in l960--was released, World War II was still being incorporated into Soviet mythology, and the liberalizing thaw that followed the denunciation of Stalin at the 1956 congress of the Soviet Communist Party was only just getting under way. Pavel Chukrai's "Thief" appeared amidst post-communist Russia's struggle to break free from the Soviet legacy. Yet the parallels linking the films across this historical chasm form a web so dense that "Thief" demands to be read as a point-by-point subversion of "Ballad." In Harold Bloom's terms, the son, the junior film director, performs a "misreading" of the father's work by producing his own "strong reading" of that cinematic text to establish his own original relation to truth (Bloom 1975, 3-4). The network o f deconstructive links is held together by the chronotopic image of the train, which also mediates the experiences of war, displacement, and homelessness, providing essential narrative and thematic cohesion in the films and enabling them to articulate their respective positions in the post-Stailnist, post-communist ideological spectrum. The train can also be shown to be crucial to the interplay of the films' visual identification systems and the sentimentalism that characterizes them and that reorients, even "derails," their ideological thrust.
We will, in the concluding section of our analysis, draw the various aspects of our reading together by reference to the films' common use of the narrative voiceover, placing the phenomenon in the context of Slavoj Zizek's post-Lacanian film theory. Zizek's theory can also account for the father-son problematic underpinning the making of the second film, and of the unifying train chronotope. Ultimately our argument will be that each film, through the interplay of voice (word) and image in which it engages, ends up undermining the ideological project it is called upon to implement. First, though, we should establish the superficial parallels and contrasts in the plots of the two film narratives, which render the making of the second film a conscious exercise in filmic intertextuality.
II
"Ballad" opens with a single mother gazing down a road along which her fatherless son left. He will never return from World War II, which did so much to bolster the Soviet imperial myth. "Thief" begins with a pregnant woman walking along a path in a field where she is to give new life to a boy, also fatherless, who will eventually fight for the still imperial post-Soviet Russia. One looks in the direction of a heroic life now past, the other towards a degraded future still unfolding when the film ends. The young Chukrai "de-aestheticizes" his father's approach to war by extracting it from the epic past and projecting it into a "messy" contingent future, thereby responding implicitly to Jean-Luc Godard's objection to his father's film on the grounds that it turns war into "a somewhat positive experience (Brashinsky 1994, 84).
Both opening scenes are accompanied by a voiceover resumed only at the close. In "Ballad," the voice is that of a third-person narrator who introduces the film as the story of the actions preceding the son's martyrdom. In "Thief," an unidentified first-person narrator introduces the boy's life about to be presented as his own. It is only at the end of the film that we see the character to whom the voiceover belongs--the now middle-aged soldier whom the boy eventually becomes. (In the version available in North America, the important final section of "Thief" is missing. Thirty six years have passed since the episode which concludes the abbreviated version of the film and Sasha is now a hardened forty-eight-year-old, high-ranking army officer. At a railway station in a post-Soviet war-zone, by all probability in the Caucasus, the middle-aged Sasha recognizes Tolyan in a dying man. Ultimately, though, he leaves in uncertainty about the now dead man's identity because only one of the tattoos--Stalin's head--is on his body, over his heart: the jaguar's head that was tattooed to Tolyan's...
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