On Andrzej Żuławski's Boris Godunov

When Ringan Ledwidge built his recent video for Massive Attack on a fragment of Żuławski's Possesion, cinephiles' most frequent reaction was eager recognition even though the muted emotions of Rosamund Pike, her posing to pleasant music with an all-too-clean underpass for the the background, sanitized practically everything that made the original scene so remarkable. Undertaking film adaptation of Musorgsky's opera Andrzej Żuławski realized that music can easily supress Pushkin's lyrics, and operatic conventions with numerous domes and golden attire can undermine the drama of the plot. Tarkovsky understood this, too. In an attempt to save his own 1983 rendering of the opera from becoming tales of yesteryear and a grand trifle he introduced it with a well-known anecdote about Stalin and Yudina in the programmes. Żuławski never put political agenda first. Probably that is why in his film Soviet-like soldiers march by the fence that calls to mind the iconic photos of Nazi concentration camps, Polish nobility is somewhat cleaner but perhaps even more repulsive that Russian boyars. And all of them fevereshly rush into the abyss. Just about to join them is the film crew which is quite often seen on the screen. Żuławski doesn't shy away from theater (“Art is related to the artificial,” he says.), he seems to rather enjoy revealing conventions while erasing not only the border between cinematic and theatrical, but also between art and life. No wonder travelling shot along the crowd of actors-townsmen rhymes with a similar shot of the “audience”. The real audience isn't safe either since the camera strives to involve them into what's going on on the screen and on the set, his part becomes unclear. The faces are shot with rapidly moving camera and become blurred as well. The film is particularly rough on conservative opera lovers. At the heart of almost any opera (and various “operatic” films like The Godfather or Visconti's films) is disposition to nostalgia and idealisation of the past that are entirely alien to Żuławski. Hence the mud that actors have to wade through, the infamous Fool's bucket and that is why the messy orchestration by Musorgsky suits the film much better than the common smooth and sleek Rimsky-Korsakov's version. Discomforting like all Żuławski's films, Boris Godunov sometimes resembles Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (especially in the fantastic decorations of the sets) or Powell-Pressburger's Les Contes d'Hoffmann (the rebellious colors and conscious play with theatricality), but is in fact apart from all director's oeuvre and other musical cinema.

Original is here. The text was translated for the Warsaw FIPRESCI project. Unfortunately, just when I recieved a formal invitation I had to decline it. So here it is.

Тэкст быў перакладзены для ўдзелу ў Warsaw FIPRESCI project. Ад паездкі, на жаль, давялося адмовіцца, але пераклады я вырашыў размясціць тут.