Stockholm Film Festival

A Russian film in the spirit of Eisenstein's montagetechnique. A director is sitting at the editing board, editing old news-reels, He is making a Stalinist propaganda film about the Soviet Communist Party's 20th party congress with cuts from Chrustjov's trip to the US. He mixes in clippings showing Yves Montand's and Simone Signoret's visit in Moscow. An ironical portrait of ''homo sovieticus'' slowly develops, an optical poem, that by calling on film history gives yet another picture of the present events.

Comment:
Oleg Kovalov's Scorpion's Gardens can be characterized as a description of Godard's Alphaville or Lang's Metropolis before the apocalypse. Kovalov describes a mythical time, the image of a magnificent harmony of the great masses. He hasn't filmed anything himself, but presents a mosaique, the closing of accounts of sorts with dozens of films from ''the sixties'' Soviet.
''The sixties'' doesn't have the same resonance in the Soviet Union as in Europe (where you come to think of youth uprisings), The Soviet sixties was characterized by social romanticism, academic avant-gardism and a naive, compassionate pathos which came to an end when the tanks entered Prague. Until then, for example the revolting Budapest, had been almost completely repressed in the collective conscience.
Kovalov doesn't ''demask'' the past, but shows it in a general chaos of fictional and realistic images, North Korean legionaries, rock'n'roll, cabarets, dinosaurs, making up a remarkable world, very different from the one portrayed in the popular social myths.
Human wavelike movements, back and forth. A world where the good and the evil are in eternal opposition. But the balance is off, the garden is dying. When the visions become nightmarish, the color disappears from the film, Somewhere in the desert, beyond good and evil, the scorpion is biding its time, waiting to put an epoch, incapable of handling its own completion, out of its misery.
Kovalov uses an educational film about alcoholics' delirious dreams, Evil spirits have been awakened in the alcoholics, and they believe they're Mayakovsky or Sjostavitj. The doctors cure them with hypnosis and refers to the inner strength of the spirit. Maybe all of Soviet history is nothing but a struggle with inner ghosts and alcoholic haze? Those who see the movie will decide. Kovalov only presents his material, he's not trying to manipulate his viewer with the montage-technique. He doesn't pull apart the world - he collects it. It's a world containing everything but human faces - those seen on the screen are only masks. With one wonderful exception - Simone Signoret observing Yves Montand. He sings for Moscow while, steadfast, the scorpion is waiting.
MICHAIL TROFIMENKOV

Orig. titel

Sady skorpiona

Medverkande

Documentary

Producent

V. Slik

Foto

Anatolij Lapsov

Musik

Béla Bartok, Carl Orff, Dimitrij Sjostakovitj, Krzysztof Penderetski

Talat språk

Russian

 

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