Goldovskaya and Russia since Perestroika

Goldovskaya’s documentaries ‘draw attention to Russian politics – which give notice the ‘ compassionate factor’.

London’s Pushkin House recently hosted a retrospective of Russian director Marina Goldovskaya’s documentaries below the de constrict ‘Russia since Perestroika’.

And Masha Karp recently wrote almost Goldovskaya’s distinctive art and the issues raise in her exposures for openDemocracy.

‘Over a quarter of a ascorbic acid has now passed since Mikhail Gorbachev announced to the country that it must reform to survive.

‘What very happened back then and what has happened since is not particularly clear to universal Russians.

‘Indeed, the fewer people who remember their avow experience of the Soviet era, and the more aggressively schools and the media push their false and simplistic recitation of the past, the more derogatory the word perestroika becomes.’

Watching Marina Goldovskaya’s retrospective, however, Karp said, is like re-living the hopes increase by perestroika, its huge potential and, later, its tragic failure to castrate things in Russia.

A human life, watched closely in every terrene detail, and set in a precise social and diachronic context of use, is always at the centre of Marina Goldovskaya’s take ins.

This, Karp continued, ‘combined with elegant camera work, is her distinct style, her trademark.

And as her social and historical context is always Russia, her documentaries serve as a chronicle of transform and upheaval in the country.’

As soon as it became possible under Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’, Marina Goldovskaya started talking about Stalin’s ‘great flagellum’.

Her film ‘Solovki Power’ (1988) was the first Soviet documentary about the gulag.

The people filmed by Goldovskaya twenty five days ago, survivors of the Solovki camp for political prisoners – Academician Dmitry Likhachev, writer Oleg Volkov, memoirist Olga Adamova-Sliozberg and others– ar, Karp writes, all light now, but their stories, which form this portrait of the terrible abuse of human rights that lasted from 1921 till 1939, are horrendous and vivid.

This documentary, which won numerous awards, was notwithstanding the beginning – since then the theme of the murderous regime has been endow in nearly all Goldovskaya’s films.

In 1989 she make “I am 90, My Steps Are Light”, a film about Anastasia Tsvetaeva, sister of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who spent 15 years in Stalin’s camps.

Goldovskaya’s films do not offer any(prenominal) direct political analysis, Karp points out, yet by focusing on people caught in a developing drama and change by it, she draws attention to a deficiency in Russian politics, which consistently ignores the ‘human factor’.

If there is one film where Goldovskaya’s different themes come together, Karp said, it is her latest documentary, ‘A gall Taste of Freedom’ (2011) about her friend, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered at the entrance to her own block of flats in Moscow in October 2006.

The personal and political almost merge here; the hatful of an individual and the fate of the country are intertwined more than anywhere else, surely because Politkovskaya herself, as one of her friends says at her funeral, has become the sense of right and wrong of Russian society.

Goldovskaya unflinchingly follows the most horrific events of Putin’s rule – the  scrap Chechen War, the Dubrovka Theatre hostage crisis, the massacre in a Beslan school, – where Politkovskaya was involved as a journalist and sometimes as a participant.

Interviews filmed after Politkovskaya’s murder are interspersed with family scenes shot 15 years earlier, when Anna  was primarily the mother  of cardinal small children and  the beautiful wife of a famous husband.

The cleaning lady that Goldovskaya meets again a decade later is someone who has made her choices in life.

The children have grown and she has become a journalist dedicated to her profession.

She has divorced her husband and she helps people who are not getting help from anyone else – parents of children abducted in Chechnya, hostages during the theatre siege.

It was one fair sex’s war with a powerful state and eventually the state got her.  Politkovskaya’s murder was yet another sign that instead of its hoped-for transformation for the better, Russia had resumed its totalitarian ways, albeit on a different level: Politkovskaya’s articles in ‘Novaya Gazeta’ were not illegalize as they would have been under Brezhnev, she was not arrested and killed in the GULAG as she would have been under Stalin.

Under Putin, Karp writes, she was simply murdered near her own building entrance, silenced for ever.

As they picture the present, Marina Goldovskaya’s documentaries embrace the Russian and Soviet past.

That is what brings her back, again and again, to the confrontation between the individual and the state.

 

Materials taken from Womens Views on News