'This is my declaration of love for the people I grew up with as
a child’, says a voice at the beginning of Aleksei German’s Moi drug
Ivan Lapshin (My Friend Ivan Lapshin). There is a pause as the narrator
struggles for the right words to express his feelings for the Soviet Union of
the thirties; when they come—ob”iasnenie v liubvi—it is with a
strained emphasis on ‘love’. The film, released in 1984, is set in 1935 in
the fictional provincial town of Unchansk, where a young boy and his father
share a communal flat with criminal police investigator Ivan Lapshin and half a
dozen others. It weaves together elements from the director’s father Iurii
German’s detective stories and novellas of the same period: a troupe of
actors arrive to play at the town’s theatre; Lapshin tracks down a gang of
criminals trading in human meat; a friend of Lapshin’s, Khanin, becomes
unhinged after his wife dies of typhus; the spirited actress Adashova falls in
love with Khanin, and Lapshin with Adashova. The authorities are largely
absent: it is a film about people ‘building
The film holds hope and suffering in the balance. Adashova
proudly boasts about what the 1942 production quotas for champagne will be;
Lapshin declares, ‘We shall clean up the earth and plant a garden, and we
ourselves will live to walk in it’—just as the hacked-up corpses hidden by
the meat-traders are loaded onto a truck. The film is full of such alarming
details and ill omens: dubious meat, which retains the headline offprint of the
newspaper it was wrapped in (‘WE REJOICE’) even after it’s been cooked;
febrile explosions of rage over spilled paraffin; flocks of crows cawing across
the sky. There is a mismatch between the optimism of the characters and what we
know of subsequent events. ‘I’m going on a course’, Lapshin says towards
the end of the film, and his words are left hanging in the air. These are
people whose faith in the future remains intact, but whose betrayal is
imminent. German has said that his main aim was to convey a sense of the
period, to depict as faithfully as possible the material conditions and human
preoccupations of
Loosely episodic, the film is remarkable in its resistance to linear narrative: dialogue is often drowned out by senseless chatter or the clanging of buckets; our view of important characters is frequently blocked by figures crossing the screen. In its cinematography, Ivan Lapshin consistently refuses to accept established priorities: as though every element of each shot must be allowed its meaning. The camera often enters the room behind characters’ backs, like a guest, or at elbow-level, like a curious child. There is no sense that the scenes are choreographed or pre-arranged, but rather a feeling that the camera, wide-eyed, is capturing what it can of a bewildering world.
All German’s films focus on moments in which history and myth have become entangled, if not dangerously indistinguishable. He has described his films as ‘antipotochnye’, ‘against the current’: disrupting certainties and undermining convenient truths.footnote1 The Stalin era, his principal subject, is the period of his own childhood and youth. Born in 1938 in Leningrad—the same generation as Tarkovsky and Mikhalkov—he grew up in a milieu frequented by leading cultural figures of the time: Kozintsev dropped by regularly, the playwright and fabulist Evgenii Shvartz was his ‘uncle Zhenia’, and even Akhmatova was seen on occasion at the Germans’ flat on the Moika. German graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography in 1960 as a theatre director; it was not until the mid-sixties that he made the shift to scripting films, during the extraordinary rebirth of Soviet and East European cinematography—influenced in part by Italian neo-realism but also by the French New Wave—that came with the Khrushchev thaw. In career terms, German made the move just too late. By the time he had scripted Trudno byt’ bogom (It’s Hard Being God, 1968), based on the Strugatskii brothers’ science fiction novel, and Ivan Lapshin (1969), Brezhnevite conformism had set in; neither film could be made.
German’s first feature, Proverka na dorogakh
(Trial on the Road), was finally shot in 1971; in retrospect it seems
almost incredible that it was filmed at all. Soviet, indeed, Russian identity
since World War Two had been founded on that bitterly won victory: the march to
Berlin did more than any cult of personality to legitimate
The production of his second film Dvadsat’ dnei bez voiny
(Twenty Days without War) was less problematic. Made in 1976, it was
released after only six months’ delay although again, it looks aslant at a
crucial Soviet story: the siege of
Filming on Moi drug Ivan Lapshin finally began in 1979 and finished in 1982. Although the first screening was greeted with a standing ovation, the film was immediately attacked from within German’s own studio, Lenfil’m—an article in the studio’s newspaper called it a ‘gadkaia kartina’, a ‘disgusting film’. An official of Goskino informed him that everyone knew 37 and 38 weren’t good years, but he shouldn’t destroy all people’s illusions—‘leave 1935 alone’. German was then told to re-shoot half of the film, and when he asked which half, the head of Goskino replied: ‘Either. Leave half of your crap and do half as we want you to’.footnote3 Fortunately, due to lack of finance and the director’s protestations, the re-shoot never took place. After prolonged debates within Goskino, the film was released in 1984, to critical acclaim and even a certain commercial success.