Blog, Gleb Sidorkin, Magazine - Monday, March 30, 2009 9:59 - 0 Comments

Alexei German, Jr.’s “Paper Soldier”: Realist Martyrology

by Gleb Sidorkin

Alexei German, Jr. has learned the lessons of his father well, but Alexei German is not the only great late-Soviet filmmaker whose work is evoked in Paper Soldier. It is the story of a Soviet doctor in the 1960’s, whose passion for his work in the space program, self-doubt, and weak heart lead to his death at the exact moment when Yurii Gagarin becomes the first man to exit the earth’s atmosphere, strapped precariously to a rocket. The death scene, which takes place in a wintry Kazakhstan cosmodrome, is pure Tarkovsky, evoking the candle-holding death scene in Nostalghia, and the bicycle-riding mailman in The Sacrifice, among other tropes. Like in most of Tarkovsky’s films, the hero’s martyrdom brings about a miracle and a return to a long-lost home.

The visual and dramatic style of Paper Soldier, however, follows directly in the footsteps of the director’s father. Alexei German, Sr. is one of the preeminent filmmakers of the Late Soviet period, but is little known in the West. His most important film, My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985), toured briefly in the U.S. and Europe, but was never released. In fact, not one of the four meticulously researched, historically grounded films that German has directed has made it to English-subtitled circulation, despite the fact that the Russian Film Critics Ассоciation named Lapshin аs one of the ten best Russian films ever made. So when I say that German, Jr. is taking up his father’s methods, this is by no means a criticism. There are so few of these films, and they are so valuable to our understanding of history and the emotional lives of past generations, that any effort to add to this repertoire should be applauded– especially one as visually and dramatically accomplished as Paper Soldier.

German, Sr., a former theater director and the son of a prominent Socialist-Realist fiction writer, became a master of the period piece, and developed a style in which period became an end in itself. In Lapshin, which was based on some of his father’s short stories, German sketched 1930’s Soviet life in buzzing, pulsing detail. The criminal plot and love story are interwoven with more mundane episodes, and the driving force of each scene is German’s single-minded quest for historical truth, rather than narrative. Creating such total authenticity in the context of Soviet historiography is quite difficult, since the ideological bent of the official archives forced German to scour the personal archives and memories of people that actually lived through those heady yet dangerous years between Stalin’s rise to power and his descent into madness.

If Lapshin is a loving portrait of the idealistic but doomed members of the fist Soviet generation, then Paper Soldier takes up the narrative at a similar point in the lives of the next generation: those that lived through the death of Stalin and inherited the fraying banner of the Revolution in the 1960’s. Danya is the tortured son of a famous surgeon who, like many prominent doctors, was imprisoned and killed by Stalin. He is idealistic, but his zeal to give himself to a greater cause, to make that last leap forward into utopia, is no longer that of the “true believers” of the first generation. The dream of a world revolution is gone, a communist economy has been built, and nothing seems to be changing. The unofficial music of Bulat Okudzhava, whose ballad about the doomed paper soldier provides the title of the film, has replaced the revolutionary marches that Lapshin and his friends sang at their dinner table. The other members of the embattled Soviet intelligentsia that gather at Danya’s dacha showcase the beginnings of totalitarian decay. Some, like his wife, are jaded and materialistic. Others plan their escape into the West, while the rest just go along with their daily lives. They all argue over what it means to be an “intellectual”. Only Danya, who is burdened by the legacy of a great and heroic father, obsessively struggles to carve a notch for himself and his generation into the glorious revolutionary dream.

The 1960’s stand-in for the project of communist utopia in Paper Soldier is the space program, namely the quest for the first manned space flight. When the film opens, some dogs have already been launched into space, and one cosmonaut has already burned up in a failed attempt. What is immediately striking is the theatrical nature of the space program: a few people engaging in incredibly complex but ultimately silly acts for the sake of …what, exactly? In retrospect, manned space flight seems like part of the inevitable progress of technology, but in the 1960’s it was basically a few people sitting in shacks in a field in Kazakhstan, hoping that the next boy they strap into a rocket won’t come back in pieces. The odds are good that he will, and the real benefit from this silly escapade will be zero. And yet, the dream lives on, and the balance between human life and Utopian striving is once again revealed as the central tension within the Communist project. Only this time, history repeats itself as self-reflexive, tortured, intellectual farce.

The release of this film bodes well for the progress of Russian cinema. Though it is a bit too overwrought to compete with the subtlety of German Sr., and lacks the visual genius that makes us forgive Tarkovsky for all his self-dramatizing excess, it is a finely crafted work. German, Jr.’s effort gives me hope that the Lenfilm studio can once again bring together the finest Russian actors, directors, and cameramen to create works of true artistic depth and historical accountability. It’s even more difficult to make this happen under the soft censorship of the mass market than it was under the scrutiny of the Soviet censors. But now that there are two generations of Germans making films in Russia, there is a hope– if only a futile, Utopian one– that the tradition of Soviet cinema can be reborn out of the ashes of the 1990’s economic collapse and the commercial quagmire of the 2000’s.

Paper Soldier screened as part of New Directors/New Films. The second screening is on Thursday, March 31st, at Lincoln Center.

Alexei German, Sr. is currently working on his fifth film, based on the Strugatski Brothers novel “Hard to be a God.”