41_1-8

8
No.41 AUGUST 9, 2018
TIMEO U T
WWW.DAY.KIEV.UA
By Dmytro DESIATERYK, The Day, Odesa – Kyiv
“Where disinformation is named, it does not exist.
Where it exists, it is not named.”
This statement of French culturologist and
philosopher Guy Debord could be used as epigraph to
Serhii Loznytsia’s new film Donbas.
Only one of this picture’s 13 novellas is not set in
the occupied territories. The rest portray the bloody
humdrum routine of “Novorossiya” (“New Russia”) in
a fictional eastern Ukrainian town (the film was shot
in Kryvyi Rih). Yet the film is not so much about the
“Russian World” itself as about its main weapon –
propaganda, whose mechanisms Loznytsia analyzes
with characteristic mercilessness.
● MANIPULATIONS
This begins with the first scene. A
burly talkative woman (Tamara Yatsenko)
argues the makeup artist in
the film crew van. In the next scene,
she and actors, disguised as
chance passers-by on the
street, will have to pose as
“eyewitnesses” of enemy shelling
against the background of the previously
blown-up trolleybus and car.
There is a now popular term – posttruth
– to describe what “Novorossiya” propagandists
do. Although it appeared as far back
as 1992, it became particularly topical in 2016 during
Donald Trump’s election campaign and the UK
Brexit referendum. At that very time, Oxford Dictionary
named post-truth as word of the year, defining
it as follows: “Relating to or denoting circumstances
in which objective facts are less influential in
shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal
belief.”
Post-truth is being spread by the mass media and
Internet social networking sites, and it is filled with
the last century’s major mythologemes. Trump has
“Make America Great Again,” in the case of Russia and
the Donbas it is the cult of victory (“victory hystreria”),
the great USSR, Orthodoxy, struggle against “fascism”
(when ethnic origin alone is enough for one to be branded
as fascist), and political paranoia (enemies are all
around). Reality is twisted in slogans. Time and
space lose integrity in this warped reference frame, human
lives serve as consumables, and a leader or a boss
substitutes the hero. For this reason none of the stories
can finish and, accordingly, Donbas is structured
fragmentarily.
In each new scene, manipulation becomes more
brazen and masterly. At the maternity home, blabbermouth
Mykhalych (Borys Kamorzin) makes a show
for white-smocked women extras, demonstrating the
foodstuffs and medicines hidden in the office room of
a thievish director – the latter is sitting quietly in the
room next door and will then return the showman’s favor
in the shape of rather a thick envelope. A group of
Mongoloid-faced military keep telling a German journalist
that they are “locals,” but they cannot recall their
village’s name. A Ukrainian prisoner with a nameplate
reading “punishment” is being tied to the post near a
bus stop for a mob trial. A taxi minibus is cut to pieces
by Russian Grad rockets, after which an ambushed hit
squad guns down the separatists’ accompanying vehicle
on a nighttime highway. The prologue troupe is really
killed for the sake of another spot report, as the concluding
credits appear in a static long shot – lies bite
themselves on the tail.
● LITERATURE
Post-truth is literary owing to continuous propagandistic
agitation: footage produces a greater effect
if there is a necessary comment. The three scenes
about “Novorossiya’s” ruling castes show literariness
one way or another.
Visitors, who have brought miracle-working
icons of Churilas Plenkovich and relics of Theodosis
of Kherson, approach the boss, a serious-looking
man with conspicuous tough-guy manners and a virago
secretary. These saints are the film director’s invention
that resembles the Gogolian motif of outlandish
names, which produces almost full namesakes of
Nikolai Gogol’s comedy Marriage in one of the following
scenes of separatists’ wedding ceremony: Ivan
Pavlovich Yaichnitsa (“fried eggs”) and Anzhela
Tikhonovna Kuperdiagina form “the Yaichnitsa couple,”
while Novorossiya MP Oksana Potsyk welcomes
the newlyweds.
The satire with religious travelers, quite in the
spirit of The Government Inspector, gives way to the
flogging of a “Cossack” marauder by his comrades, as
church bells are ringing. It is a clear allusion to Leo Tolstoy’s
short story After the Ball, where a soldier is punished
with the running of a gauntlet on Forgiveness
Anatomy
of post-truth
in Serhii Loznytsia’s
Donbas
The chronicle
of a world
turned inside out
Sunday. But, in contrast to the original
source, there is no reflecting narrator
here because is nobody to sympathize
with. A gloomy irony: butchers scourge
themselves.
All the “new Russian” things are both literary
and ritual: adoration of relics, passage between two
rows of men, and wedding. Bringing life into line with
a prearranged plot and protocol is an integral part of
dictatorship – individuality is not essential, there are
no irreplaceable people, and you can fall victim on the
boss’s whim. This is why those who contrast with the
authorities’ arbitrary rule are not fighters or at least
jesters but sufferers.
They are town residents who hide from shelling
in a damp, dark, and musty basement, and passengers
of the bus separatists stopped at the checkpoint, the
simple-hearted businessman Senia who came to collect
his stolen car from the militants, an old woman who,
instead of laying into the captured Ukrainian “punisher,”
meekly inquires when the bus is coming because
she must go to see her daughter.
Almost everybody has their fair share of humiliations.
An aggressive blonde, the secretary in the scene
with the relics, bursts into the basement to take her
mother to a comfortable house the bandits gave her.
She showers the underground dwellers with brutal obscenities.
Some men are taken from the bus, frisked,
and forced to undress under supervision of the wicked
female commander who spurts out a stream of consciousness
about a “fatherland in danger.” The militants
rob Senia of his car for good and exact a 150,000-
dollar tribute from him.
In every case, people neither keep silent nor resist.
Restrained reactions are in sharp contrast with
theatrical lamentations at the pace of staged attacks,
as well as with the revelry of the “new Russian” crowd
in the scene of the wedding and the hysterical guffaw
in the scene with prisoners of war. However, the literary
motif in the film develops sequentially – to the
proverbial and logical, almost like in The Overcoat,
sympathy with little people. But, in the last analysis,
it is not they but those who rule them who will turn out
to be ghosts.
OlenaStarikova’ssilvermedal
PHOTO FACT
Photo courtesy of the Odesa International Film Festival
● OPTICS
Internet video footage provided material for the
Donbas script. Candid photography in the Internet is
a matter of information, not film making. Accordingly,
Oleh Mutu, who worked in all of Loznytsia’s feature
films, subjects his individuality of a cameraman to
dramaturgy. He is reincarnated as a bouncing TV camera
in the bomb shelter, as a phone in the hands of a
light-minded woman car driver on the road under
shelling, as a motionless observer in very long shots.
This kind of dissociation does not rule out the author’s
ethically clear position – this is the only way to testify
to what eschews testimony and to make real the factory
of unreality.
It is not a document, not a drama, but quite a wide
anatomical table – there can be perhaps no other optics
for the hell of post-truth.
No one has ever suggested this view before.
After the Donbas premiere at the Odesa Festival,
Serhii Loznytsia met Den/The Day’s correspondent.
● “I TRIED TO SHOW VARIOUS ASPECTS
OF THIS OUTRAGE”
How was the film born? Was there any concrete
nuance?
“It is difficult to say how and when ideas emerge,
but do you remember what was going on in this country
four years ago? I closely watched the events and
looked for information in the Internet. Some videos really
struck me. I suddenly wished to work with this material
because it seemed to me that it contained some
very important things that influence our existence. In
peacetime, you live in a routine, no events occur, and
you don’t know the consciousness and subconsciousness
of people next to you and in the neighboring region.
And suddenly these ‘flowers’ blossomed there,
and you get it in this form.”
What exactly was interesting there for you?
“It is the combination of things that usually do not
combine in our mind, when the tragic and the funny,
even the grotesque, simultaneously come side by
REUTERS photo
side. So, it seemed interesting to me to work with this
tragifarce.”
Speaking of grotesqueness, the ironical interpretation
of Donbas is quite a new method for you.
“Yes, it is new. Obviously, I haven’t tackled this
kind of topic or taken on this pattern before. (With a
smile) I may be developing, though.”
What caused a fragmentary structure, without
a recurring character?
“The idea. I strove to describe this space and show
various aspects and manifestations of this outrage, this
feast of disobedience, these Saturnalia, this hell. A recurring
character, a single conflict would only hinder
me. I thought up nothing new. There are similar in cinema.
Luis Bunuel’s Phantom of Liberty and Sergey
Eisenstein’s Strike are illustrative examples. As for
documentaries, I have long been making films where
there is no protagonist but there are masses. It was interesting
to try this form in fictional films. I gathered
13 novellas and managed to combine them with each
other. As it is in Bunuel’s film, a character passes to
an episode, this episode unfolds, then another hero
moves into the next episode – the only thing is that the
audience should not get lost. I’ve already had an almost
similar script of Babyn Yar. I failed to film that script,
but I’ve made Donbas. This structure suggests a
broad view – I get an opportunity to look at society as
a whole and get a general picture.”
It seems to me this form quite fits in with this very
type of events.
“Of course it does.”
What was the most difficult thing in this work?
For you can’t see the documentary footage on which
your script is based without a veil over your eyes – it
draws a too strong emotional response…
“If had a veil over my eyes in the course of work,
I would perhaps have to change profession. But I keep
a certain distance from these events. A few steps aside.
If there is no distance, you will be so much biased that
you won’t be able to say a word. For this reason, I can
watch these clips, they have an impact, of course, but
I cut off my emotional links – it is perhaps just a professional
quality.
“The point is different: as we filmed in Ukraine,
it was difficult to organize the process. I invited department
heads, a cameramen, a sound engineer, an
editor, a line producer from various countries, where
the film industry in very well developed. The director’s
first assistant is a profession that I think does not exist
in Ukraine. Local specialists had to learn administering
and other things on the job. Unfortunately,
there are so far no skills in ethics, working relations,
and decision-making. So, it was not so easy to launch
this process so that the film crew worked like clockwork.
And don’t forget that this crew consists of more
than 100 people. Yet we managed to do so.”
How long did the whole process last?
“We shot this difficult film in 31 days. We had
no funds for a longer time, and I think what we had was
enough. It took us about 3.5 months to prepare for
work. I came to Ukraine on November 2 and left on
March 31. I stayed here on location in Kryvyi Rih except
for New Year’s Day. Otherwise, it was easy. If you
know what you want, work with splendid actors,
know how to work with non-professionals, can find
beautiful places and talented people, the rest is a technical
matter. So, six months were enough for us to complete
the whole cycle.”
Read more on our website
The Ukrainian cyclist has already won a second medal at the summer sports European Championships
The European Championships continue in the
Scottish city of Glasgow. In the track cycling program,
Ukrainian cyclist Olena Starikova won a
silver medal in the 500 meters time trial (an individual
timed race), www.sportonline.ua reports.
This is Starikova’s second silver in these
European Championships.
Earlier, she won silver in the team sprint
event while paired with Liubov Basova. Thus,
the medal count of Ukraine’s team as of the
morning of August 7 included 13 medals, with
4 golds (1 in swimming, 1 in synchronized
swimming, 1 in cycling, and 1 in diving), 8 silvers
(2 in cycling, 1 in rowing, 4 in synchronized
swimming, and 1 in swimming), and
1 bronze (in rowing).
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