A Response from filmmaker Masha Godovannaya
Readers: this guest post from filmmaker Masha Godovannaya was written in response to my essay about two of her recent films, found here.
by Masha Godovannaya
I would like to start my response by thanking David Finkelstein for his thoughtful and critical engagements with my works and for providing me with insightful readings of the films.
In order to reflect on David’s points in the analysis of the films, I think it’s important to provide a bit of background story on how these two films came alive and what processes were behind them.
Both films – Landscapes of Nosferatu (2020) and The City Bridges are Open Again (2020) – were made within a framework of the que_ring drama project Dark Revolutions where Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński and I were invited to produce three film essays for the theater stage accompanying three performances by different artists1 – Part 1: Аn Аddress to Jeanne (it was based on Carl Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), Part 2: An Erratic Chorus of Sergei Eisenstein, and Part 3: Landscapes of Nosferatu – with the soundtrack created by the sound-artist Bassano Bonelli2. After the theater premier, I singled out Part 2 into a separate film – The City Bridges are Open Again with the specially written music score by Federico Schmucler, a Mexican composer and musician.
The three essays later were united into a film Matters of Daring (2020) where the order of the parts remains the same as in the original theater performance, and where viewers are drawn into landscapes populated by ghostly communities, shadows, and intermediate beings acting as transitions to revolutions and dreams in past, future, and present.
In October of 2021, film scholar and curator Katerina Beloglazova put together a program of my recent works for the second New Holland Island International Debut Film Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she offered to show three films separately weaving them through the program with other films. And for me, the presentation of these films in such a way has been certainly an enriching experience – even an experiment – of meaning-making through curatorial screening practice, rather than through filmmaking per se.
For Belinda and me, Landscapes of Nosferatu was a continuation of themes that were touched upon in The City Bridges are Open Again that deals, as David pointed out accurately, with “the drive to revolt”, the usage of the weaponized violence, and almost inevitable failure of these attempts to achieve long-lasting social changes. Engaging exclusively with landscape shots from Murnau’s film we tried to refer to these topics without naming them and give the agency and voice to space – the peopleless landscape. In our understanding, the peopleless landscape is what would remain after the full-scope decolonization project(s) is/are completed. We humbly remind ourselves – and the audience – that we may not witness the outcomes of this/these project(s) due to its massive change of social order and the potential for violence that it can evoke almost inevitably.
The City Bridges are Open Again was conceived with different intentions and tonality than The Landscape of Nosferatu. In the latter, it was our – Belinda's and mine – melancholic reflection on aftermaths of events that I enthusiastically imagined in the former film: utopian projects that nevertheless failed, cinematically and politically.
The film was envisioned as a contribution to Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished Mexican project that was about to bridge the Mexican and Russian revolutions of 1910 and 1917 correspondingly. In his letters to Esfir Shub, one of a few women filmmakers of the Soviet Avant-Garde and a pioneer of found-footage film3, Eisenstein referred to his Mexican project as “my second Battleship Potemkin.” He intended to take into account “mistakes” and “setbacks” of his previous works, mainly October (1928) and The General Line (aka Old and New (1929)), and create a film that would be innovative in its approach in filming and editing. He wrote to Shub that he envisioned this film to be assembled on an editing table, emphasizing the role of montage in film creation. As we know, he never saw the footage he shot in Mexico and never completed the film.
There have been a lot of studies on Eisenstein in Mexico and how this trip influenced him intellectually, socially, politically, personally, and indisputably sexually. His diaries, personal writings, and most importantly drawings of that period are vivid witnesses of what was happening with/to him, events he was part of, and experiences he was going through. One could only imagine what kind of “second Battleship Potemkin” Eisenstein could concoct, considering the path he undertook in Mexico and the scope of his creative mastery. The existing versions of his potential film are just pale shadows of his intentions.
And I undertook a risk to “complete” a version of his Mexican film from a position of a queer-feminist post-soviet subject and experimental filmmaker rooted in the Soviet and North-American Avant-Gardes. I thought of the film as my queer cinematic relational gesture to a proto-queer kin-folk who was interested in the revolutionary potential of cinema. And for me, this interest is still connected to a continuous inquiry into queerness in/for/as film.
My film version reexamines and presents again a political – revolutionary – potential of montage as developed and theorized by Eisenstein himself. Engaging attentively with materials from his films Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927) as well as from two cinematic improvisations based on his Mexican material (¡Que viva México! by Grigoriy Alexandrov (1979) and Sergei Eisenstein. Mexican Fantasy by Oleg Kovalolv (1998)), the film develops along Eisenstein’s principle “thesis + antithesis = synthesis” creating a visual story of a utopian revolution-about-to-happen. It freely employs his cinematic language and proclamations of original intertitles, imagining through the montage in one cinematic scape two alternative modernities – Mexican and Soviet, unrecognized and marginalized by the West. In that sense, I agree with David that there is more presence of ghostly Eisenstein than mine in the film.
However, stepping out from Eisenstein’s original intentions, the film also serves as a reminder of decolonial historical projects which took place in the past and were forgotten and silenced (as, for example, the Haitian Revolution of 1791 – 1804); or failed in the long run or were betrayed by social structures they themselves erected (as the Mexican and Russian revolutions), or of those attempts that were crushed, and of countless ones that didn’t happen. A “straightforward” example of this reminder is heard at the beginning of Landscapes of Nosferatu when Belinda and I interchangeably speak: “Behind us, the chorus of the shadows. Attempting to convince us, sharing silenced stories of previous riots, insurrections, revolutions … Haitian … Mexican …Russian…revolts and aftermaths … voices merging into a cacophony.” Thus, both films remain in relation and talk to each other, filling out each other’s intended gaps and allusions.
I would disagree with David that the film “advocates for violent resistance”. For me, the film also problematizes its effectiveness and to some extent, reveals its failure. Indeed, the film rapidly builds up the tension towards a revolutionary situation where arms are taken and used in order to fight against structural and institutionalized oppression. However, after some “celebratory” sequences, the film shifts in its intended revolutionary pathos to a different tonality through a sequence of shots where a hand-grenade thrown by a sailor at first destroys a palace and in the second throw animates fireworks. The tone is shifted completely when the famous shot of a woman from the Odessa Steps scene is intercut with the title “За что боролись?” (“What we were fighting for?”) This question remains unanswered. What comes after is a call to join the forces but to whom it’s addressed and who should respond remain unclear and unanswered. And they – those ghostly beings of this cinematic revolt – are still waiting for the answer – from us? – and [our] actions.
Thus, I would insist that by employing Eisenstein’s powerful imagery the film doesn’t only follow his initial intentions but also contains my own reflections on our rebellious past and its aftermaths. It invites others to share the excitement and enthusiasm of those political programs, that in the words of queer theorist and writer Elizabeth Freeman, are “not only as yet incompletely realized but also impossible to realize in their original mode – that nevertheless provide pleasure as well as pain”.4
However, after Feb. 24th, 2022, when the Russian Army invaded sovereign Ukraine, both films gained other readings and meanings, premonitions that came in hindsight. They again warn, conjure, and give agency to the processes that we have no control over…
The peopleless landscapes are now staring at us in very close – non-cinematic – realities and distances. And we are, as rebellious ghosts of the past, “waiting for an answer” (“Ждут ответа”) of what awaits us at the edge. We are waiting for an answer but “there is no answer yet” (“Ответа ещё нет”).
Masha Godovannaya
July 19, 2022
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https://brut-wien.at/en/Programme/Calendar/Programm-2019/November-2019/the-que_ring-drama-project-Dark-Revolutions
The theater project premiered on Nov. 14, 2019, at studio brut, Vienna, Austria. I would like to express my gratitude to Gin Müller and Radostina Patulova for inviting me to this project, to my dear friend and collaborator Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński for her valuable feedback, and to Naomi Rincon Gallardo for her constant strong presence and endless inspiration.
Her film “The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty" (1927) is considered the first found-footage film that recontextualized poetically as well as ideologically the usage of archival materials granting them new readings and meanings. Through her careful way of dealing with the Tsar archive, she was also a pioneer in film archiving practice. Sadly, her own found-footage films were not treated with the same care by other filmmakers and some of her films are irreversibly lost. I’m endlessly grateful to filmmaker and film scholar Keith Sanborn for inviting me to his translation project of Esfir Shub’s autobiography “My Life - Cinema” (1972) which includes letters to/from Shub to other important Soviet artists, film directors, and writers. Unfortunately, Keith's translation of Shub's book has remained unpublished up to the date of my writing.
FREEMAN, ELIZABETH. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, 2010, p. xiv.