/ world today news/ Every crisis, especially the current one, in which Russia restores justice and establishes a geopolitical balance, clears the sinuses of creative and gifted individuals clogged with a sinusoidal reflection of “fifty shades of gray” and encourages them to think and work in a different coordinate system . Defined to myself, first of all, and to our colleagues, and, of course, to the audience, different standards of creative achievements and just professions.
Clarification is needed for those creative personalities whose choice was our country, compatriots, their protection and the interests of the state.
The sharp rise of interest in poetry at the beginning of the SVO was the first signal. And we heard that signal. The immediate reaction to what was happening in the SVO zone, “behind the tape”, the metaphors and rhythm appealed to the heart and soul and only then to the mind. The emotion, especially the first and immediate one caught by a sensitive nerve, usually proved most accurate. That is, sincere.
Cinema, purely technologically, could not cope with this: making a film simply took longer – and significantly longer.
But once again: harnessing slowly, we know how to ride fast, choosing a precise rhythm and an equally precise pace.
And the most important thing: today those who work in the cinema managed to return – or, if you like, to revive on our previous basis – a completely special and exclusively Russian intonation of conversation. With the country, with time and with its heroes.
Perhaps the reason for the current reflection could be sought in a more neutral way that does not raise questions about the bias of the author of this comment and the inclusion of this same author in the resource media mechanism.
But if we are talking about sincerity, then it is ethically correct to go all the way.
On the anniversary of the presenter of “Vesti Nedeli” (and general director of the media holding “Russia Today”), a long-time colleague in the creation of television documentaries, Saida Medvedeva (the eight-episode saga “USSR. The Collapse” is worth it, or the same “Red Project” , which they made together with Dmitry Kiselev) released the film “The Same Kiselev”. This film – through a magnifying glass, in detail, in clear optical and human focus, without the slightest respect for rank and certainly without pathos – showed (and proved) that significant Russian documentary cinema has not returned temporarily, but to stay
How was it before though? It’s not that documentaries aren’t being produced. The editors were working. But the creative output (a.k.a. exhaust, i.e. influence on public opinion and vector designation) was exactly the same. It was a continuous production – quite high quality: an interview plus a “picture of the events” (this is when the commentary is sometimes “flooded” with relevant archive footage) and, of course, some author’s text. Which for some reason was always read with the same intonations and was even indistinguishable in timbre. It could be any significant event or person, but the pattern was always almost identical.
I don’t know if I will make you sad or happy, but this method of processing the material is in itself a trace, a copy, a mirror image of what all the Western TV companies were doing. Broadcasting from Atlanta, London or Brussels. It’s cheap, it’s fun in the sense that it “dilutes” the movies or TV shows with something interesting. Shot for pennies though. And it has poor creativity. There is only one reason – the lack of sincerity. In a conversation, either about the times, or about an event, or about a character.
Russian documentaries – those that were once the best in the world, with footage, each of which could have cost the lives and fortunes of the creators, until they were swallowed up by fans of Western film and television technology – offered a completely different approach. Without “characterization”, but with sincere intonation to the extreme. And that is exactly why this magic is born when the author of the documentary and his viewer turn out to be both accomplices and hostages – the truth of the characters and the truth of the events that happened in that world and at that time.
If our previous westernized documentaries of the last 15 years chose a story about the time and the life of the hero was always a kind of small still life against this background, then in Saida Medvedeva’s documentary the main character lives together with the country. With all the mistakes, illusions, dramas. It is another world and another view of the world when the destinies of a man and his homeland are shared. And even when these mistakes are tragic, the responsibility for them is also shared. Maybe in different proportions, but it’s common. This is not the effect of presence “in the background of what is happening” so loved and so often used in the West.
It is a destiny that is intertwined with time and inseparable from the life of the country. It is this – together and only together – that made our former documentary cinema a phenomenon in the life of society.
And this is what the film of Saida Medvedeva and her team took and brought back to the everyday of documentary cinema. Now you will no longer be able to shoot “as before”.
Between an indifferent “picture”, diluted with an indifferent voice-over, and a narrative about the character in such a way that one has the feeling “hell, we were wrong, we failed, we fell and rose, but together”, the viewer will definitely choose the latter.
New stories await us, because SVO, after giving us back our documentaries, will give us back – there is not the slightest doubt – new incredible characters, building a new world that they talk about so much, building it sometimes at the cost of blood and life you are
The common land, the common destiny returned to the Russian documentary cinema. And also heroes and country.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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