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Serguei A. Oushakine
Princeton University
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All content following this page was uploaded by Serguei A. Oushakine on 13 May 2019.
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BOSTON / 2019
Silent Souls*
O v siank i
2010
75 minutes
136
Silent Souls
137
Serguei Alex. Oushakine
3
For more detail, see an interview with Aleksei Fedorchenko: Irina Semenova,
“Real´nyi volshebnyi mir,” Iskusstvo kino 10 (October 2010), accessed August
25, 2017, http://kinoart.ru/archive/2010/10/n10-article13.
4
Ibid.; Natal´ia Bondarenko, “Moi fil´my—eto skazki dlia vzroslykh.” Ogonek
34 (August 30, 2010(: 43, accessed August 25, 2017, https://www.kommersant.
ru/doc/1490171. See also the official site of Fedorchenko’s film production
company 29 February, accessed August 25, 2017, http://29f.org/o-kompanii/
managers/aleksei-fedorchenko.
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Silent Souls
5
See Alexander Prokhorov’s review of the film in KinoKultura (2006), accessed
August 25, 2017, http://www.kinokultura.com/2006/11r-firstmoon2.shtml,.
6
Sergei Kurekhin (1954–96), musician, composer, actor, and scriptwriter,
was known for his hoaxes and mystifications. His 1991 television broadcast
“Lenin—grib,” a satire on the Lenin myth (Lenin used hallucinogenic
mushrooms and ultimately turned into a mushroom) and pseudo-scientific
documentaries, went viral.
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Serguei Alex. Oushakine
7
Mariia Kuvshinova, “Rezhisser Fedorchenko sozdal v fil´me Ovsianki novuiu
mifologiiu,” RIA Novosti, September 4, 2010, accessed August 25, 2017, https://
ria.ru/culture/20100904/272274687.html.
8
Colleen Barry, “Silent Souls revives ancient Merja traditions,” The Boston Globe,
September 4, 2010, accessed August 25, 2017, http://www.boston.com/ae/
movies/articles/2010/09/04/silent_souls_revives_ancient_merja_traditions.
9
See reviews by Birgit Beumers (http://www.kinokultura.com/reviews/Rlover.
html) and Mark Lipovetsky and Tatiana Mikhailova (http://www.kinokultura.
com/2010/30r-leto.shtml), accessed August 25, 2017.
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Silent Souls
Yet, like these two films, it places the unlikely figure of the widower
at the center of a story about coping and survival.10
This re-emergence of the trope of “men without women” is
important. Unlike early Soviet variations of this theme, perceptively
discussed by Eliot Borenstein,11 the narrative disappearance of
the woman in post-Soviet cinema is compensated neither by
a rediscovery of the value of masculine camaraderie, nor by utopian
visions of the global collective. Instead, the erasure of the woman is
presented here as a menacing sign, as a symptom of the impending
collapse of the man.
Silent Souls is based on a story published in the literary
magazine Oktiabr´ in 2008, in which Aist Sergeev describes a road
trip with his boss, Miron.12 The trip is a funeral ritual: Miron’s wife
suddenly died, and—as is common among the Merya people—her
body should be cremated so that the ashes can be scattered in the
river. Structured as a collection of non-dated diary entries, this
allegedly autobiographic story is a thinly disguised mystification.
The reader (and the film viewer) learns at the very end that the
monologue is narrated by Aist from under water: after cremating
the body of Miron’s wife, the car with two men falls (accidentally?)
from a bridge into the river. The story, in other words, turns into the
message of a ghost, a post-mortem auto-obituary.13
10
Sociologically, the emergence of this genre is puzzling: the figure of widower
is anomalous, given the available data about life expectancy in Russia, where
in 2011, life expectancy at birth was 64.0 years for Russian men and 75.6 years
for Russian women. Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health Wave 1. Russian
Federation National Report, December 2013, 9, accessed August 25, 2017,
http://apps.who.int/healthinfo/systems/surveydata/index.php/catalog/68/
download/2042.
11
Eliot Borenstein. Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian
Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
12
Aist Sergeev (Denis Osokin), “Ovsianki,” Oktiabr´ 10 (2008), http://magazines.
russ.ru/october/2008/10/se12.html.
13
A similar narrative device was used earlier in yet another post-Soviet quasi-
documentary. In his Private Chronicles. Monologue (1999), Vitaly Mansky
created a (fictitious) postmortem biography of the last Soviet man by
montaging endless cuts of disparate home videos, which were sent to the
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Serguei Alex. Oushakine
never learn the exact importance of this parallel, but some scenes
provide clues: the cremation ends with a shot of a couple of buntings
suddenly appearing on a tree branch. And the fatal car accident on
the way back home is also caused by the buntings: released from
the cage by Aist, they “rushed to kiss the eyes” of Miron as he steers
the car.
The instability of symbols, the consistent transformation of the
mundane into the metaphoric and vice versa is hardly accidental.
And Fedorchenko emphasizes this semantic liminality further by
his choice of crucial images: every major scene begins or ends with
a shot of a bridge or a road whose starting points and destinations
director by people from all over the former Soviet Union. For a discussion
of this documentary, see my essay “Totality Decomposed: Objectalizing Late
Socialism in Post-Soviet Biochronicles,” The Russian Review 69 (October 2010):
638–69.
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Silent Souls
are rarely specified (Fig. 2). Epitomizing the key message of the
film, these endless (and origin-less) roads and bridges stand as
Fig. 2. A bridge.
143