Regressing Nature Returns
I Am King on Saturday is the title of a documentary produced by AMA Company, NTV Cinema, directed by Volodymyr Dvinsky, script by Volodymyr Dvinsky and Vladlen Kuznetsov, and director of photography Ihor Sosenkov.
Its premiere in Kyiv followed those in Moscow, New York, and Chicago. The Cinematographers’ house was packed. This is highly unusual, considering that it was not a blockbuster movie but a documentary. Or maybe it is only natural, because a full-length well-made documentary is perhaps the greatest rarity nowadays. Moreover, the names of the crew speak for themselves. Volodymyr Dvinsky is a clever and precise film director, tending toward publicism in scope. And he is well known in Kyiv, having produced quite a few documentaries jointly with the noted Ukrainian scenario writer Vladlen Kuznetsov. All this explained the packed houses, although I personally believe yet another factor was at play, the topic. Some of my colleagues aptly described it as the Jewish path through time, rather through the twentieth century. On the other hand, it is a trip the authors made to their own ethnic roots. This combination of the epic and personal layers begot the documentary’s very special confidential and lyrical color.
“I’m a typical Russian Jew. First, because I was born and have lived to this day; my parents were spared death at the hands of a Black Hundred patrol by sheer miracle, the same for the Nazi camp furnace and Stalin’s prison camp. Second, I’m a typical Jew because I don’t know the language spoken by my forefathers. I would be an utter idiot not to ask myself, others, and the Lord all my adult life, Why did it happen the way it did? That’s actually how we conceived this documentary.” The film director says this offscreen at the beginning of I am King on Saturday. It starts at a slow pace, with carefully selected and compiled scenes from newsreels, stories about Jewish townships, the shtetl, in the former empire, each such place beginning with a synagogue, shule, and cemetery, where people spoke only Yiddish, where the unique Yiddish culture was upheld, and whence absolutely unique brilliant personalities came forth, contributing to other cultures; where life had a special balanced and idyllic-patriarchal tempo and pattern. True, what was idyllic about it was rather fragile. Hence we find the abysmal sorrow in the eyes of residents of those shtetels at the start of the century in pictures taken by anonymous photographers. And nor is there anything coincidental about the authors often quoting from Shalom Aleichem with his bitter humor. Jewish luck. That says it, doesn’t it? God forbid! Remember the “gifts” the Jews received from political leaders? Hitler presented them with Terezin [Thereseinstadt], a town in what is today the Czech Republic, destined to become one of the horrible events of World War II, turned into a ghetto with thousands of inmates. Stalin later presented them with a whole republic, Birobijan (next to the Chinese border — Ed.), sending Jews there if not for physical annihilation then for the destruction of their Yiddish culture and age-old traditions.
That would happen later. Now the documentary was just approaching the 1917 Russian Revolution, the narration gaining momentum, becoming almost a synopsis. And well it should, for life and circumstances changed at a head- spinning rate; history took sharp turns, sweeping off in its impetuous progress all those patriarchal shtetels, changing the destiny of a whole people. Rather, those who survived Babyn Yar, the concentration camps, campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans” (the Soviet Union, of course, outlawed anti-Semitism, but somehow all the rootless cosmopolitans in the press caricatures seemed to sport yarmulkes, earlocks, and quite distinctive nasal architecture — Ed.), and refusniks during the Brezhnev years.
And then the authors, as though circling the twentieth century, return to the shtetels. This was also no idyll. Perhaps the most touching and penetrating scenes of the documentary are about those who might be the last residents of Shargorod, a town that only 15-20 ago lived its own full-fledged active life. Several senior citizens played dominoes, waiting for lunch and recalling the good old days. There was a tailor with practically no customers left, a sage, all-understanding man, and a young woman teaching school, desperately trying to preserve fragments of the past, organizing a local history museum strongly reminiscent of a tombstone. Everything is permeated with farewell sorrow, an all-pervading sense of exodus.
The sage pointed out once that if there were more bad than good things about life it would have long stopped. As a confirmation, the authors show a man who thinks he is perfectly happy. He has a wife he loves, children, grandchildren, and plenty of songbirds. What more can one wish to be truly happy? This ingenious concept has stricken a wisdom of its own. Perhaps this is the formula of Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, and universal happiness? Very likely this is so, except for the voice offscreen saying that he died several weeks after the documentary was made.
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Still, the film does not leave one with a feeling of hopeless despair. Grief, a sense of nature in regress, the way you feel it when the day is waning, giving way to twilight. We are witness to waning people, relationships, cultural phenomena. But there is always tomorrow. Another day, another life.
Vladlen Kuznetsov was born in Kharkiv 70 years ago — which is hard to believe. He is so energetic and temperamental. He loves life, his work, and he seems to manage both and so much more. He is an exemplary family man and effective secretary of the cinematographers’ union. He is very active in public life and plans new films. He and Volodymyr Dvinsky are slated to soon begin another documentary. And we join in the choir of birthday greetings today from his relatives, friends, and colleagues.
THE DAY’S REFERENCE
Vladlen Kuznetsov was born December 4, 1931, in Kharkiv. He went to school in Kyiv, entered Kyiv State University, worked as a journalist, and wrote numerous scripts used by the Kyivnaukfilm, Ukrkinokhronika Kyiv studios and in Moscow. Among his scenarios are “A Word about Bread,” “Prison Camp Dust,” “A Shorthand Report,” “A Historian and History,” “The Twentieth Century,” and “The Intelligentsia and the State.”
