None of the worlds belonging to distinct characters can be
universal and dominate the worlds of other characters.
—Kira Muratova, 20011
Kira Muratova, one of the great directors of the former Soviet region, resisted offering herself up as a representative of “women’s cinema”. 2 During her post-Perestroika trips west, writers and students would ask her about the place of women in cinema, but her responses remained elusive.3 It is possible that her resistance was not to the basic western ideals of feminism – many of which were compatible with Soviet women’s realities during Muratova’s lifetime – but to the idea of labelling her work. After all, a number of her films emphasise female characters and their social interactions in ways that subvert both conventionality and propriety. It is no surprise that the 1988 Festival de Films de Femmes de Créteil – a women’s film festival – was one of the first to introduce Muratova’s films to western audiences.
Many of Muratova’s films – 15 features, 6 shorts and 3 co-directed works spanning from 1958 to 2012 – prioritise women’s voices and experiences. Her first feature, the melodrama Korotkie vstrechi (Brief Encounters, 1967), focuses on two women in love with the same man and opens with close-ups of bureaucrat Valentina (played by Muratova) as she potters around her claustrophobic kitchen, struggling to write a speech for a routine local communist party meeting. In her last film, Vechnoe vozvrashchenie (Eternal Homecoming, 2012), several women who live independently are visited by old acquaintances – men who complain about their failing heterosexual marriages. Instead of paying serious attention to these complaints, the women tease the men about their infidelities and narcissism. These two films bracket a career shaped by extensive censorship and financial struggles, a body of work that shows resilient women thriving outside of western culture and nuclear families and emphasises the sustained connections these women build with each other.
It’s valid to ask how Muratova’s cinema resonates with contemporary audiences, especially because the era in which she was most active – the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union – shares with the current moment a sense of overwhelming instability. She not only captured the transformation of Soviet and post-Soviet worlds, but also created characters whose lives – like Muratova’s – don’t fit into neat categories. Muratova was born in what is now the Moldovan city of Soroca (formerly part of Romania) to a Romanian-Jewish mother and Russian father. She spent the majority of her career, including 17 years during which the Soviet regime banned her from directing, in Odessa, one of Ukraine’s coastal cities. In 1997, Muratova described herself in nomadic terms: “I am not an Odessite. I came here by chance and I stay here”.4 Indeed, primarily supported by Ukrainian funds, Muratova stayed in Odessa even as Russia’s military interventions intensified in Ukraine’s eastern region. Meanwhile, she remained a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, believing that it would gradually collapse.5 Though her films are in the Russian language, Ukrainian locations, music, and actors abound. Muratova’s resistance to ground herself in one culture and the rapid transformation of the former Soviet bloc provided a setting for her cinema as a world in which social and economic order is in a constant state of disarray. This social disintegration is accompanied by minor episodes of queerness that draw attention to social power hierarchies in order to break them apart. These minor episodes offer another way into Muratova’s work, and those who find a way into it will notice rich, explicit references to sexual and gender dissent, such as same-sex eroticism and desire. The 2006 Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture mentions Muratova in an entry on filmmaking in Russia and briefly discusses one of the more obvious nods to homosexuality in her work, such as the 1997 film Tri istorii (Three Stories).6 Part of the film is set in a dark boiler room containing what appears to be a banya, or a hot steam bath, run by a round, flamboyant queen, Venichka (Zhan Daniel). To greet his visitors – men interested in men – he wears a floral wreath, sings arias, and occasionally appears almost naked. We even watch two men briefly kiss each other on the lips shortly before one of them heads to Venichka’s bath. In these scenes homosexuality is never a subject of mockery or shame. A few years earlier, Muratova released Uvlecheniya (Passions), a 1994 film that depicts the day-to-day events of a contemporary racecourse and includes numerous scenes celebrating the beauty of the jockeys’ athletic bodies. Small groups of lean young men wander across stables, tracks, and fields. Here, youthful athleticism is largely used to suggest the pleasures of homosocial environments in which heterosexual romance does not take place. Such interludes of sexual and gender transgression appear as an organic part of the post-Soviet world under transformation – one of the main subjects of Muratova’s films.
Yet the easily recognisable presence of gender play and dissident sexuality is just an entry point into Muratova’s queer bloc. While the ambition of many contemporary (and often the most widely circulating) western films with queer subtexts seemingly ends with representation – sexual ambiguity, same-sex romance, and same-sex families are some predictable trajectories – Muratova’s minor queer interludes often lead to a broader interrogation and dismantling of power dynamics. While her work avoids delivering big statements about change, many of these minor queer moments imagine social transformation. Such moments, mostly achieved through elements such as camerawork, editing and sound, are especially evident in the spontaneous situations, cross-generational encounters, and transnational contexts of the post-Soviet region. All three are prominent in Passions, Three Stories, and Nastroyshchik (The Tuner, 2004), three films made with one of Muratova’s most beloved and frequent collaborators, the Russian actor Renata Litvinova.7
SITUATIONS
An elegant woman walks across a field of blooming wildflowers. Her golden raincoat blends with the warm evening light. The woman lies down and falls asleep among the chicories and Queen Anne’s lace; in the background, we can hear intense gunfire. This scene is from Passions, the first of Muratova’s films to star Litvinova, who plays Lilia, a nurse at a coastal health resort in which horsemen recover from injuries. This scene is an outlier: Muratova rarely shows her characters alone. They are usually found in groups and pairs, mingling and talking over each other: a direct commitment to her statement in the film’s epigraph that too much focus on one character can result in unnecessary universalism. The exact setting of Passions is never clarified, although we observe a beach, mountains, stables, and characters aimlessly moving between these locations. No one seems to pursue a clear goal and no single interaction claims the spotlight.
The Russian title of the film could also be translated as ‘Interests’, a translation which reflects the film’s focus on the pleasure of unobtrusive observation. The camera is interested in everyone and everything without prioritising any one image or vantage point. Two characters explicitly draw attention to the film’s fascination with looking: one is circus performer Violetta (Svetlana Kolenda), who fantasises about horse-riding; the other is a photographer who, halfway into the film, bemoans, “I am out of film!” but keeps snapping various situations, with no clear indication as to what his project is.
Film scholar Mikhail Iampolski has termed Muratova’s filmmaking style a “cinema of situations”, and argues that this allows us to observe characters in various circumstances so that we can better understand them as humans.8 But I think that the multiple situations in which Muratova places her characters achieve the opposite effect: we do not understand the characters better despite returning to them again and again, a paradox most evident in Passions. The film continually generates new landscapes for Lilia to roam across (beach, stables, a racecourse) along with new opportunities for interaction (with patients, horses, the photographer). In life, individuals may seek to understand each other through careful observation, but Passions denies us a privileged point of view, even when Lilia settles and lies down in the field for a nap. The sudden sound of distant gunfire distracts the viewer, but its source is never clarified. Both the situation and Lilia remain elusive and unknowable
As an example of Muratova’s “cinema of situations”, Passions orchestrates characters, interactions and spaces in order to think critically about the power of basic elements of film language (for instance, editing, voice, and the distance between the camera and the filmed subjects). A cinema of situations is an alternative form of world-making that does not deliver coherent dialogue or characters whose development is clear or linear. Instead it invites us to think through the uncertainties that emerge when a film does not impose upon us a sense of finite knowledge. Both Passions and Muratova’s filmmaking in general rely on an endless openness.
When Muratova’s work began to be distributed in the West, her focus on the lives of women – which she never claimed as explicitly feminist – resonated with audiences interested in ‘women’s cinema’. Today the growing interest in her filmmaking might have more to do with the open-ended nature of her work, a type of thinking and making shared by filmmakers working in experimental cinema or making films noteworthy for their queer dimensions. Those interested in the latter will find that Muratova’s work offers surprising affinities with filmic strategies that are often used to declare difference, contest power and transform relationship models, whether romantic or simply platonic. Especially prior to the emergence of more mainstream articulations of queerness, filmmakers interested in queerness had to come up with a film language capable of speaking difference, in spite of lack of material support and ongoing censorship. Filmmakers as diverse as Sergei Eisenstein and Cheryl Dunye experimented with basic filmic elements (such as the tension between stillness and motion, use of sound, or contrasts between actuality and fantasy) to deliver nuanced queer moments open to multiple interpretations.
Due to its abundance of formal experimentation, Passions powerfully resonates with this legacy. Muratova’s non-intrusive observations of everyday circumstances might remind viewers of the Manila-born filmmaker Ishmael Bernal. His use of cinéma vérité creates ambiguous characters open to multilayered interpretations of their desires and identities. The polyvocal situations of Passions also remind me of Andy Warhol who filmed multiple people talking at the same time to reduce a sense of hierarchy between them. In addition to these, one of her main influences was Sergei Parajanov, the pioneering Georgian-born Armenian filmmaker, sentenced by the Soviet government to six years in labor camps on charges of homosexuality.9 Muratova’s ‘cinema of situations’, is therefore an invitation to exercise the act of looking as a critical practice. This invitation makes her legacy all the more urgent to contemporary audiences.
GENERATIONS
A woman enters the archive to steal something. This is the premise of Ophelia, the second part of Three Stories, Muratova’s 1997 triptych film. Written by Litvinova, Ophelia is an example of Muratova’s fascination with cross-generational encounters between women. The main character, Ophelia (or Opha, played by Litvinova), works as an archivist at a maternity hospital. Opha’s mother gave her up for adoption as a newborn, and now she searches for her birth mother’s archival records in order to track her down. The film ends with Opha finally meeting and then drowning her mother.
On the surface, Ophelia is a revenge film that centres women’s experiences. Only two male characters make significant appearances. One of them is a German-speaking tourist who is beaten up by three women after he attempts to sexually assault one of them. The other is a doctor who works at the same hospital as Opha and tries to seduce her. At first, Opha rejects the doctor’s advances because he does not have condoms. When they finally have sex, the doctor asks Opha if she loves him, to which she provides a cynical answer: “I do not love men. I do not love women. I do not love children. I do not like people. I would grade this planet a zero.”
This focus on women and nonchalant expressions of women’s sexuality (sex happens as an ordinary event without much build-up) recurs across Muratova’s work. What intensifies the film’s dissident energy is the treatment of time: Ophelia revolts against linear temporality, which feminist scholar E. Ann Kaplan argues is “teleological” and “patriarchal”.10 This revolt finds its expression in Opha’s obsessive search for her mother as a return to her origin story. Yet after this return takes place, Opha does something radical – she drowns her biological mother and burns the stolen birth certificate which led to their encounter. As we watch the birth certificate burn, we witness her desire to be unbound by biological kinships or personal records. The rigid structures upon which traditional archives depend – alphabetised indexes, chronological databases, storage units, folders – are rejected because they cannot contain Opha.
The film’s feminist ethos is evident: the plot is matrilineal, Opha achieves her goal, and she thrives without a need for men. And yet the assault on the symbols of linear temporality (the archive, the mother-daughter relationship, the birth certificate) opens up additional interpretations of the stakes at play in Three Stories. In the final scene, Opha is on a pier walking away from the water and towards the shore, back to the planet she has confessed to finding profoundly flawed. The visual language of this ending (the focus on the pier, the expansiveness of water) also suggests an opening: Opha returns to the planet as ground zero and she is ready to craft her own origin story. Here we witness cyclical time, which is intensified by the fact that Ophelia makes a familiar reference, to Shakespeare’s Ophelia (except Muratova’s Ophelia survives). Cyclical time has no clear beginning; like the change of seasons, it suggests constant transformation without the promise of arrival at a permanent state. Cyclical time is also an eternal return, a theme referenced in the English title of Muratova’s final film, Eternal Homecoming. Cyclical time, we might add, is a queer timezone, a becoming.
NATIONS
The 2004 film The Tuner is an example of how Muratova was not constrained by one culture or language. Set in a coastal city and filmed in Odessa, The Tuner is a film about crooks taking over the former Soviet Union. We watch how western capitalism reshapes the country in the mid-1990s: the most trusted currency is the U.S. dollar; mobile phones disrupt traditional communication; tourists speak broken English; and shady shops selling a hodgepodge of imported electronics emerge in unusual locations. One of the main characters is Andrei (Georgiy Deliev), a charming piano tuner who also happens to be a talented con artist. Litvinova is cast again, this time as Andrei’s lover, Lina, a woman who desires financial stability and impersonates different social types (a gangster, a bureaucrat, the wife of a wealthy businessman) to exploit naive individuals. What might require transformation, or tuning, the film suggests, is the entire disrupted social order, especially linguistic, ethnic and class prejudices, all of which are exacerbated by economic disparities and the personal insecurities that result from them. In one scene, we watch two wealthy elderly women guess the tuner’s ethnicity. “Is he Chechen? Maybe Armenian?” they ask each other. They finally decide he is Uzbek when they hear him perform what to them is an incomprehensible song. Later, we learn that the women were actually concerned the tuner might be Jewish and therefore – according to one of them – a crook.
Parallel to the collapse of monolingual and monoethnic order in The Tuner, is the disintegration of gender and sexual norms: Andrei is utterly submissive to Lina, running her baths and bringing her breakfast in bed, but Lina shows no romantic interest in him. Eventually, we learn that this is her third relationship in which she uses a man for strictly financial gain. In The Tuner, we encounter multiple failing heterosexual marriages and women denouncing any interest in having children. These multiple instances of revolt against gender and sexual norms may at first appear as signs of a social order collapsing in times of transnational economic and social unrest. Yet these moments can also be interpreted as signs of a world-making that brings disparate individuals together.
This world-making is evident when we follow Lina to a public men’s toilet in the basement of a building. Here, she reconnects with an old friend, a crossdressing attendant of the establishment (played by Zhan Daniel, the same actor who stars as the flamboyant queen in Three Stories). Lina’s old friend and past accomplice Tanya (Natalya Buzko) also appears, showing off her flapper dress. And so in the spacious waiting area of the toilet a vibrant and rather queer reunion unfolds, with an impromptu fashion show and jokes about the failures of heterosexual relationships. The three friends stand very close and talk over each other, but other sounds gradually fill the space and their stories become harder and harder to hear, as Muratova creates a sonic disorder that parallels the upheaval happening aboveground. In The Tuner, as Lina descends from the attic she shares with Andrei, to busy streets and subterranean locations, we watch her quickly alternating between costumes to embody different social types. She traverses an evolving geography and we observe her constant transformations, some of which verge on the surreal, such as when she appears as a census taker with a scythe in her hand. As the scenery and the character of Lina cycle and change, The Tuner suggests that transformation can begin in everyday situations and extend in numerous directions – like a spontaneous chat between three friends reunited in a transient space.
Lina Žigelytė is an educator, curator, and audiovisual artist. She was born in Vilnius, Lithuania and is now based in Rochester, New York. Her work explores the relationships between transnational media history and sexuality studies. She is a faculty member in the Media and Society program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
1. Andrey Plakhov, ‘Кира Муратова: я все время притворяюсь’, Kommersant, April 2001. Translations my own.
2. Galina Tsymbal, ‘Женское кино—жесткое и циничное действо’, Delo, 23 February 2007.
3. “The following day Muratova was invited to a seminar on feminist theory. The students had watched her film and prepared to discuss it with her. I was recruited as a translator. […] After a long and lively exchange with the predominantly female students, she concluded with a comment intended as a compliment. As I prepared to translate it, however, my heart sank, anticipating their reaction. ‘You know, I think that, if I hadn’t found my métier in art, I too might have become a feminist.’”
Jane A. Taubman, Kira Muratova, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005, pp. 8-10. p. 10.
4. Ibid., p. 109.
5. Irina Milichenko, ‘Муратова: Думаю, в Украину Крым не вернется, но может, Россия развалится’, Gordon, 21 March 2016, [accessed 2 July 2019].
6. David A. Gerstner, ed. Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
7. Litvinova is also an award-winning director of feature films and documentaries. As an actor and filmmaker, she is known in Russia for films that explore questions of gender performance, memory and celebrity culture.
8. Mikhail Iampolski, Муратова. Опыт киноантропологии, Санкт-Петербург: Сеанс, 2015, pp. 511-528.
9. Jane A. Taubman, p. 9.