Jessica Gorter, dir. The Red Soul. Brooklyn: Icarus Films, 2018. 90 mins. Color/B&W.
Reviewed by Volha Isakava (Central Washington Universiy)
Published on H-SHERA (September, 2018)
Commissioned by Hanna Chuchvaha (University of Calgary)
Red Soul begins with a beautifully shot sequence of a remote farmstead on a sandy, grassy beach. Quickly an old woman comes into focus. She boards a small row boat, and the first few panning shots of this bucolic, secluded countryside are accompanied by her narration, a description of GULAG mass graves in her area. This powerful beginning of the film encapsulates its preoccupation with memory, history, and trauma narrated through the intense and private lens of witness accounts. Directed by a Dutch filmmaker, Jessica Gorter, and released in 2017, this documentary film looks into hot-button social issues surrounding Stalin's legacy in today's Russia, and the politics of memory and justice for the victims of the Great Terror.
Following well-established narrative and visual approaches within the social justice documentary genre, the film seeks to elucidate the individual experience of the historical and the political. It tackles difficult questions through impartial observation, unscripted interviews, and location cinematography. The film features attentive and observant camerawork, allowing its subjects to express themselves without too much narrative guidance; only a few times in the film does the filmmaker ask a pointed direct question. In a sense, the film itself is a witness: it gives voice to the long-gone victims via their immediate family members, bearing witness to their tragic private family histories. It also provides a window into contemporary controversies by interviewing an assortment of actors: from teenage participants of pro-Putin youth camp in Crimea to ageing Communist Party members protesting in today's Moscow. Alongside a heartbreaking story of two orphaned sisters, now in their old age, who vividly recall being violently separated from their parents, the film shows an intimate portrait of a father ravaged by the drug-related death of his son, giving us a glimpse into how an ordinary middle-class Muscovite might become a hard-line Stalinist. The unmediated narratives of grief, political persuasion, and traumatic memory in the film recall the Nobel Prize-winning oral histories by the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich. Her monumental pentology, Voices from the Big Utopia that concludes with Second Hand Time (2013) is a self-professed exploration of the "Red Man," bearing witness to individual stories at particularly turbulent and tragic junctions of Soviet history. (Among Alexievich's subjects are Chernobyl, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, WWII, and Stalinist repressions).
The interviews in Red Soul are powerful and, similarly to Alexievich's books, they point to a depth of human suffering that is not easy to process. However, what struck me most as a viewer were the film's visuals. Similar to the opening sequence, Red Soul's impact is in the powerful juxtaposition of landscape cinematography and first-person narration. Following its subjects to the sites of mass graves, the film often finds itself in natural settings: thick woods, grassy fields, sandy ravines. A middle-aged woman is shown picking up bone fragments in a thick pine grove. She carefully describes the bones before placing them in a plastic shopping bag. An old man and a young girl walk in a sunlit boreal forest deciphering burial grounds along old trenches now covered by soil and foliage. Perhaps the most striking image of the film happens when the camera, at an extreme low angle, fixates its gaze on pine-tree tops: the sun is shining through the branches, the wind is gently rocking them back and forth. Then, slowly, the camera pans down and lingers on an old photo affixed to the tree trunk at eye level: it reveals a face of a man, the dates of birth and death. As the camera zooms out we see many more photos, and then few scattered visitors to this forest of mourning. These visuals poignantly present to the viewer the spaces and rituals of public mourning for the victims of Stalinist repressions. It is an "indifferent nature:" silent forests, fields, and ravines that bear witness for the dead and those who grieve them. In parallel, it is the crammed spaces of archives and libraries, tucked away from the public eye, that represent the grassroots efforts of activists who sustain the collective memory.
In contrast to these images, the film takes us through officially sanctioned public spaces of remembrance: examples include celebratory commemorations of WWII, or lively discussions about Stalin, the commander in chief, at a Crimean youth camp. The film's poignant visuals unambiguously point to the lack of public investment in restorative justice for the victims and their descendants, as well as the lack of public recognition for spaces of trauma and mourning. The issues the film raises could not be more timely given recent troubling developments around these sites of memory and the people who work with them. A case in point is criminal charges brought against Karelian historian and activist Yuri Dmitriev (featured in the film but not identified by name), seen by government critics at home and abroad as politically motivated.[1] Another recent controversy involves a Russian Military-Historic Society excavation of the mass graves in Karelia, seen by the critics as a move to reinterpret the history of the Sandarmokh memorial site.[2] The film effectively introduces the viewer to one of the most prominent debates in recent post-Soviet history: the politics of memory in relation to state violence.
I commend Red Soul for capturing polarizing and divergent views on public remembrance, but it needs to be pointed out that it hardly breaks any new ground, especially considering vast scholarly research and public debates stretching back to the 1980s on the politics of memory in Russia. This comes as no surprise because the film's target audience is likely international, aiming to educate the foreign viewer on controversial issues surrounding the Putin-era treatment of history and memory. It is no coincidence that the film ends with the elderly sisters insisting that the filmmaker not "slander" (ochernit') Russia in her final product, as if understanding implicitly that the film does not aim to tell their story to their own countrymen, but instead is made for external consumption. This fact does not detract from the Dutch film's value and importance. However, it does open the door for some exoticizing and essentializing rhetoric. Take the film's title. "Red Soul" alludes to a cliched narrative of the "Russian soul" in its Cold War incarnation that has entered the Western imagination through the now iconic words of Winston Churchill. The film's own promotional website describes it as laying "bare the Russian psyche of today." To use terminology such as national psyche, character, mentality or soul is both to grossly generalize and to arrogantly assume essentialist views of nations and people. Such essentialism imagines nations as monolithic entities whose movement through history is defined by a set of inalienable traits supposedly propelling them towards catastrophe or triumph. While the director's statement on the same website provides a nuanced and sophisticated take on her work, the film's title becomes a red flag for any education professional who is to consider using this film in the classroom. That being said, "Russian soul" is an easily recognizable trope that anchors the film in popular imagination, perhaps providing an easier marketing path for this independent documentary. The film bounces back and forth between pro-Putin summer camp, Communist Party demonstrations, sequences featuring grassroots activists' work, and sequences that illuminate personal narratives of the repressed without establishing any contextual connections beyond a simplistic pro-Stalin vs. anti-Stalin dichotomy. This diminishes the complexity of Russia's contested political landscape of memory and remembrance, especially when it comes to pro-Stalin public sentiment. Stalin's legacy in today's Russia is subject to much political appropriation precisely because it is not imagined as one-size-fits-all: Stalin of the Communist Party and pro-Putin youth camps are not identical products from the same social and political imagination and ideological bias. A more interesting question, which I wish the film had asked, is how the historical legacy of Stalinism is used in today's political and cultural battles to shape collective memory and the collective vision of history. Finally, there are some relatively minor translation inaccuracies in the film's subtitles. I would like to point out just one: the Russian word tiazhelo, which means hard or difficult, is rendered as "awkward" in the film. The word is used to describe the relationship between local townspeople and GULAG prisoners whose labor was deployed to build the town. "Awkward" might be a good descriptor for a less-than-exciting date or a party; the context of forced labor and state violence is something else.
I recommend this film to international audiences unfamiliar with the topic and to education professionals seeking to introduce their students to the debates on politics of memory in post-Soviet context.
Notes
[1]. For ongoing coverage of Dmitriev's criminal case, see: "Two weeks after acquittal is overturned, historian Yuri Dmitriev is again detained by Russian police," Meduza, June 27, 2018, https://meduza.io/en/news/2018/06/27/two-weeks-after-his-acquittal-is-overturned-russian-police-again-detain-the-historian-yuri-dmitriev.
[2]. "Dig Near Stalin-Era Mass Grave Looks to Some like Kremlin Dirty Work," Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, September 4, 2018, https://www.rferl.org/a/dig-near-stalin-era-mass-grave-looks-to-some-like-kremlin-dirty-work/29470518.html.
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Citation:
Volha Isakava. Review of Gorter, Jessica, dir., The Red Soul.
H-SHERA, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52109
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