Bells From the Deep

A group of pilgrims lie down on the thin ice of the lake Svetloyar and begin to look for the city of Kitesh. According to the legend, God saved the city from the Mongolian prince Batyi's soldiers by letting it sink to the bottom of the lake. If you listen carefully you can hear the bells of the Kitesh cathedral toll deep down. Bells from the Deep is one of six films about Russia, directed by different filmmakers. The other ones are: Una WertmUller, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Bogdanovich, Nobuhiko Ohbayashi and Ken Russell.

COMMENTARY
Werner Herzog knows everything about the ego's fight against the elements and God. The possessed face of Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo, twisted by the strain of dragging a steam boat across a mountain or building an opera house in the Amazon jungle, is only ever surpassed by Herzog's own face in the documentary about the making of the very same film. Here he denies the eventual greatness of the project, instead he describes it as a failure, something criminal, to work one's will against nature or the opposition of the surroundings despite the resistance.
Bells from the Deep is the total opposite of Fitzcarraldo. In the fading landscape surrounding the lake of Svetloyar in Siberia, where the tender stems of the birch trees and the yellowing grass seem to become more and more immaterial and merge with the shining, white sky, there is no room for the ego. There is a belief that the holy city
of Kitesh is to be found at the bottom of the lake, since the time when God saved it from the ravaging Mongolians. Now young and old are making pilgrimages there. Not to - as Kinski's hero would have done - try and blast the ice and dig the city out of the mud at the bottom of the lake, but in order to get as close as possible, slide face down on the ice and hope for a miracle, hope to hear the bells toll from the deep.
Herzog allows the people he is portraying to take their time. Slowly we see them turn away from the camera, find their own voices and start to relate. About what they have seen and heard at the lake, about the new saviour who has arrived (he is also interviewed: mild, poor and amiable in an 'ankle-length costume and a beard), about all the miracles that are taking place. Then he waits for another while. Then the serious woman begins to talk about a possessed pig and all of a sudden she is much happier; someone else asks the filmmaker if he wants her to shuffle some more, or if he is satisfied.
But no contradictions will shake them in their faith. Despite the cool landscape til ere is a spellbinding quality about this world, essentially different from our own. The longing to become a part of something else seems to have made a deep impression on Russians from St. Petersburg to Mongolia. This homesick longing for God. How come this feeling has survived? ':'
Kerstin Gezelius

Producent
Ira Barmak: Manus
Werner Herzog: Foto
Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein: Talat språk
English