A shiny white SUV pulled up to a curb. Two Dutch women jumped out, struggling with the thick padding of their parkas. They expertly grabbed a large camera and an extended mike, whirling around to survey their battle terrain. They found the shabby Soviet-era courtyard abuzz: men and women, red-nosed and loud, huddled in groups to celebrate the Russian version of Mother’s/Women’s Day. March 8th marked the crew’s first day of filming. The women planned to run some test shots, but their subjects started falling, laughing, crawling, rising and falling again. It was perfect.
Drunks, stray dogs, snow and inherently Russian babushkas colour a dead poet’s world, painted in Aliona van der Horst’s latest documentary Boris Ryzhy. Another “sensational” snapshot of one of the most criminal Russian neighbourhoods; another tragic suicide of a contemporary bard, singing from the limbo that separates intellectual and underground circles—the award-winning Amsterdam filmmaker did not want that story. She composed a “film poem.” Yekaterinburg life with a pastel-blue tint runs on screen in slow motion, perhaps, the way the poet saw it once. The director describes it as “a quiet movie,” where “you should make up your own mind.” Skipping years and facts, the picture features no true subject. Boris Ryzhy lived with a clinical depression and a drinking problem, which van der Horst grouped as “labels,” decisively omitting these from her elegy. “That’s not the subject of this movie,” she explains.
After six weeks on location, two months of editing, weeks of sound design and 200,000 euros worth of grants, Boris Ryzhy crossed the ocean to play at Hot Docs last Wednesday, at the exact time and date of the poet’s death back in 2001 (an unplanned coincidence). “It has disturbing beauty,” said one viewer at the Q&A after the screening, “looks like Edmonton,” offered another. “Thank you for such an accurate depiction of my hometown,” mumbled the third. Van der Horst, a smiling soft-spoken woman with wild curls, directed four Russia-themed movies, including the award-winning series The Hermitage Dwellers. When she was two and Brezhnev-period stagnation hugged the nation, van der Horst family left Moscow for Holland. The filmmaker retained fluent Russian, playing at grandma’s every summer and experiencing Perestroika at the Moscow State University for six months.
With the Soviet empire crumbling, the Russians leaped into “the grinder,” launching businesses, joining mafia groups and recruiting bodyguards. Van der Horst remembered the taste of 1990s ever since she interpreted for the New Russians, a side-product of the era. Boris Ryzhy, another a child of the ’70s, grew up with—and wrote about—future murderers and bodyguards. The director finally could revisit the battlefield together with the dead poet. “I was shocked by the number of deaths [in his neighbourhood],” says van der Horst. “It was as if Russians went to war that they called Perestroika, but Western public tends to forget that.”
Returning to her old community, the poet’s sister points out ex-cons’ apartment (“I’m so frightened…they are murderers,” she whispers into the camera, tracing an invisible cross across her body). Later, as they search for forty-somethings the siblings had befriended as children, the sister repeatedly warns the filmmaker: “I’m not sure if they are still alive.” On another continent, at the Hot Docs’ Q&A, van der Horst shakes her head with a sigh: “Russia is a country of extremes … They are survivors.”
In the late ’90s, the poet wrote:
“All those things among memory dumps.
Though dead now, he once used to say:
‘Ugliness has a kind of beauty
That your soul could not embrace.’”
Mirroring the tenderness towards the ugly parts of the poet’s industrial Yekaterinburg, the filmmaker sought to capture what he could once see, hear and feel so affectionately. Headshots of somber Russian youths run on screen, unmoving, unsmiling, staring. Suddenly, they reveal awkward, lopsided, boyish grins. Seemingly absurd images—military trumpeters performing on an icy rooftop (the single staged shot in the doc), a woman carrying goldfishes in a plastic bag, a teen rocking on a swing—flow together as a single sequence, loosely narrated by Boris Ryzhy’s poetry (though some verses are poorly translated into English). Then, in the style of an acclaimed Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, Boris Ryzhy features prolonged scenes of unsmiling Russians, staring as snowflakes blur the screen. “The faces are like renaissance paintings,” says the director, “A glance can hurt and he [Boris Ryzhy] could, probably, see it.”
Van der Horst hates overwhelming her audience with sounds and effects. Her 2006 documentary, Voices of Bam, created invisible subjects, victims of the Iranian earthquake speaking through the living (while directing the film, van der Horst got ejected from Iran, but that’s a story for another time). Boris Ryzhy performs another non-narrated meditation, with its raw, candid footage of school brawls and snow battles, shot by the poet’s fourteen-year-old son through a cell phone camera.
Van der Horst filmed family interviews by herself, plowing away mistrusts of the apprehensive Ryzhy widow and her resentful teenager, seeking the poets’ contrasting world, breathing in the disfigured beauty of violent attachments and defensive ignorance. When her one-hour-long documentary premiered in Amsterdam last November, everyone cried, she recounts.
“I wanted to create a tragicomedy, so you can laugh and cry at the same time,” says the filmmaker, adding timidity after a pause: “Did it work?”
You can make up your own mind.
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