Cottbus 2005

Traveling Through Broken Myths
By Marilena Iliesiu

Human existence feeds on myths and Communism was, probably, the most fictional adventure that history imposed. East Europeans were daily projected into heroic, idyllic and foolish myths of Communist propaganda all held together by the central myth of the 'ruling-father'. 1989 didn't only mean the blowing up of a political system, but of the deceiving cobweb of myths in which Communism had caught its victims.

"First People On The Moon"
"Ryna"

Since then, East European directors, like all artists in the area, still gather pieces of the ruined Communist ideology, in their attempt to build a new mythological foundation of a new world, reborn from its own ashes but still lacking spiritual values.

The Communist world was built on the idea of the 'pater familias', the pattern of which was the smiling Stalin, who distributed dreams as easily as handshakes to a crowd fallen into a sort of ideological trance. This is the point in which the system is ironically attacked by the director Alexei Fedorchenko in his film First People on the Moon (Pjerwyje Na Lunje). The golden dream of Stahanovian Communism aims to colonize the cosmos, to push the boundaries of the Red Empire beyond the moon. The superhero — a Communist Superman, a mountain of muscles, a sea of wit — must be an ideological traveler of the stars.

Also from a closed world, dominated by an authoritative father, the heroine of Ryna, by the Romanian director Ruxandra Zenide, escapes. She is caught in the net of lies which her father builds, trying to keep his daughter a captive in the small world of a village in the Danube delta. The bursting out from the paternal cocoon is a painful one, almost following an ancestral sacrifice.

The Czech films presented at Cottbus show a new phase of the hero's relationship with authority, a seeming detachment from the gravitation of the parental force. In Petr Zelenka's Wrong Side Up (Pribehy Obycejneho Silenstvi), the hero travels a symbolic road, starting with the childish gesture of imitating the shooting of Fidel Castro during his visit to Czechoslovakia in 1973 and ending with the unavoidable journey towards death, via Havana. But independence is deceptive, as the mentally immobilized father seems to suck energy from his son, who is lost deeper into the regained paternal authority.

"Wrong Side Up"		"Something Like Happiness"

In Something Like Happiness (Stesti) (directed by Bohdan Slama), the parental force is diluted either by alcohol, either by the force of mothers, a much more terrestrial authority which keeps count of both the food and feelings of their children. The father-son relationship in Gravehopping (Odgrobadogroba) is the same: The father is reborn through a late love, whereas the son falls into the trap of his own funeral speeches, which strongly bind him to the idea of death.

The myth of triumphing purity fails in a postmodernist rhetoric: Johanna, the heroine of the Hungarian hybrid between film and opera, directed by Kornel Mondruczo, delivers health as a bonus for a package of both medical and sexual services. She redefines the idea of Christian kindness by literarily sharing herself. In Peter Bergendy's Stop Mom Theresa! (Allitsatok Meg Terezanyut!), the Hungarian director overturns the perspective of seeing innocence: even after a range of sexual and sentimental experiments, powerfully connected with the heroine's urban experience, she has the power to appreciate the purity of love discovered in the middle of nature. The film is a rather confusing on choice and freedom and it becomes a sort of a one-night-fling manual.

"The Third"

But maybe none of the old myths imposed by Communism was blown up more often than the myth of the family. Communism borrowed the pattern of the Christian family, tearing it from any religious context and renaming it "the basic cell of society". The family on the edge of collapse from The Third (Trzeci), by the Polish Jan Hryniak, is in real need of the playful divine intervention of a 'third' person, an outsider. But what sort of a family needs an outsider to discover the garbage hidden under the red carpet of a successful existence. Also an outsider, a nanny, is the one who analyses the family in Needing a Nanny (Trebujetsa Njanja), by the Russian Larissa Sadilowa. The family's yard becomes a sort of glass cage in which the camera follows the heroes panicked by the discovery of  their own secrets buried under their bourgeois life.

Maybe Cottbus will, one day, become a sort of film museum of Eastern Europe, in which we will find the story of broken myths. But by then time will already have imposed a new perspective and we could talk about new myths of a new world. But this is the story of another festival.

Marilena Iliesiu
© FIPRESCI 2005

top