CoMo No. 33: Estonia (March, 2025)

[Jürka]

originally, the GK Retrospective was not supposed to be a completionist crush BUT because i highly cherished New Satan (viz ↑) and Lapeteus (viz ↑↑), here we come with the completion of GK’s non-extensive (multi-genre) oeuvre — this time dealing with a “proletarian Bond” spy fiction.

GK Retrospective, Pt. 5/5

Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Grigori Kromanov, 1975) #CoMoEstonia

based on the 1974 detective novel of the same name by Yulian Semyonov

→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulian_Semyonov

A proletarian James Bond?
https://overland.org.au/previous-issues ... rew-nette/

By far the most successful Soviet writer of suspense and spy mysteries was Yulian (or Julian, as his name is often spelt in English) Semyonov. Once referred to by the Los Angeles Times as ‘the Soviet Robert Ludlum’, Semyonov was a pioneering Soviet journalist and novelist whose books reportedly sold thirty-five million copies worldwide.

Semyonov’s father worked as secretary to prominent Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin before being arrested in one of Stalin’s many purges. The younger Semyonov was expelled from the Komsomol and would himself doubtless have been arrested, if not for Stalin’s death in 1953.

Semyonov worked for Soviet news magazines in the sixties and seventies, reporting from Latin America, the United States, Asia and Europe. He tracked down escaped Nazi war criminals and reportedly took part in combat operations with Lao and Vietnamese guerrillas. A 1990 stroke left him bedridden; he died in 1993. According to one account he was actually poisoned to prevent him publishing material on KGB collaboration with the Russian Orthodox Church.

His best-known work, still popular in Russia today, was a series of thirteen books featuring a Soviet spy called Max Otto von Stirlitz, the code name for Colonel Maxim Maximovich Isaev.

→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stierlitz

Stierlitz has become a stereotypical spy in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, similar to James Bond in Western culture. American historian Erik Jens has described Stierlitz as the "most popular and venerable hero of Russian spy fiction".

now, to the film proper...

After the triumph of the October Revolution, Russia is a gigantic game board. The Tsarist opposition plots from abroad to overthrow the Bolshevik government, Western powers attempt to infiltrate their agents within the country to destabilize the Eurasian giant, and the Soviet government try at all costs to revive the country's ailing economy.

Therefore, when evidence emerges that someone is smuggling seized Siberian diamonds and jewels out of the country, the Cheka, the Soviet political police, assigns its young agent, Maxim Isayev, to infiltrate the exiled counterrevolutionaries to stem the flow of wealth, essential to carrying out the communist revolution.

In the city of Revel, Estonia, Soviet spies, White Russians, Western agents, and international gem traffickers will meet to play a ruthless game in which no one is who they claim to be.

With this masterful work, Yulian Semyonov began the most famous saga of Soviet crime fiction, starring the intrepid double agent Isayev/Stirlitz.

fundamentally, there are two (valid) ways of interpreting the complex amalgam of all the conspirative games this epic dilogy offers.
you can say either...

→ https://letterboxd.com/kai_white/film/d ... oletariat/

This is as badly a presented narrative film as I've ever seen. There are SO MANY CHARACTERS, and none of them get any development.





It's just a series of "gotcha" moments, really. Everybody you see is conspiring against someone else in the movie, but as funny as that sounds, this isn't a comedy.



The plot, as much as I could discern, revolves around some rarely seen or even mentioned diamonds, which start off being appraised post revolution, then are transported, then are stolen during transport, then are somehow back in a safe in the state's possession (that's never explained), and then are stolen again, but before they're stolen again, somehow they're shipped off in some dolls, and somebody is arrested for that but there's no proof that they shipped the diamonds, and there's murder and arrests and paranoia a plenty.




If you enjoyed that run on sentence, and made any bit of sense of it, perhaps you will enjoy this movie! Although, let's be real, you probably won't.

or...

https://letterboxd.com/malvad/film/diam ... oletariat/

While the amount of deals and counter deals and counter counter deals among the myriad of plot points that get buried in and among this paranoid epic, it becomes rather dizzying. I'm inclined to think that that's a good thing on this showing.
It shows some real Machiavellian spirit that feeble minds like mine can't keep up with. And I applaud the film for this.
The continual switching between colour and black and white had me perplexed because I wasn't sure what was the motif behind this but I don't think it really mattered and I'm not going to begrudge it for that either.

i can supplement the two major (aforementioned) viewpoints with two additional side notes...
first, the institution that’s in the epicenter of the whole complex plot is called Gokhran!

→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gokhran

The Gokhran was created by the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic decree of 3 February 1920. In the first post-revolutionary years, Gokhran collected the jewelry of the Romanovs, the Kremlin Armoury, the Russian Orthodox Church and other religious communities, as well as valuables confiscated from private collections.

second, the antipode of the “proletarian Bond” (agent Isayev/Stirlitz) is Count Vorontsov who is rehearsing here for a Stalker!


anyway, maybe just watch the film and read nothing!?!?

Our plans are the thinning of our works in the name of nothing.
So, everything comes from nothing!
Our aim is infinity.
Infinity is nothing!
There are no poets but nothingness poets!
Write nothing!
Read nothing!
Print nothing!
Nothing!



Right!
Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!



And who are those in the corner?

Poets, artists.
Squeaking cowardly, working for Lunacharsky.

[Jürka]

Empty (Veiko Õunpuu, 2006) #CoMoEstonia

The young man Mati spends a weekend with his wife Helina and her lover Edouard.



A laconic portrait of love the Estonian way in the style of Aki Kaurismäki or Jim Jarmusch.

long (academic) read → https://sciendo.com/article/10.1515/bsmr-2017-0004
snippets ↓
Transcending ‘Cold Intimacies’ in Veiko Õunpuu’s Works
(by Eva Näripea & Ewa Mazierska, 2017)

the characters of his films typically reject the conventional romance promoted by neoliberal discourses, including Hollywood cinema, yet this does not make them happy, but disoriented and restless.

capitalist institutions, technologies and discourses have rationalised and commodified emotions and selfhood, which, in turn, has ‘contributed to creating a suffering self’ (Illouz 2007: 108–109). It is precisely these ‘suffering selves’ that inhabit the very centre of Õunpuu’s cinematic universes, craving for true emotional intimacy that keeps slipping out of their reach.

In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels observed that capital transforms every aspect of human life, including the most intimate one.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — free trade. [---] The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced family relation to a mere money relation. (Marx, Engels 1988: 211–212)

While Marx observed the marketisation of personal life, Eva Illouz noticed a seemingly opposing, but in fact complementary trend, namely capitalism becoming ‘emotional’. In her Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, she argues that the year 1909 can be considered a turning point in American emotional culture. In 1909, Sigmund Freud gave five lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University. The lectures had a major impact on the formation of the ‘therapeutic emotional style’, a dominant force on the American (and, we suggest, on the Western) cultural landscape throughout the 20th century (Illouz 2007: 5ff) which was spread widely by films and advice literature (Illouz 2007: 9).

According to Illouz, the new emphasis on the verbalisation of emotions affected not only domestic/intimate relationships. It also reshaped the workplace when clinical psychologists, ‘many of whom were inspired by Freudian psychodynamic views ... were mobilized by the corporation to help formulate needed guidelines for the new task of management’ — to increase productivity and facilitate discipline (Illouz 2007: 12). In particular, Illouz cites the importance of Elton Mayo, an Australian (self-assigned) psychologist, industrial researcher and organizational theorist, who conducted his famous Hawthorne experiments between 1924 and 1927, which led him to conclude that ‘productivity increased if work relationships contained care and attention to workers’ feelings’ (Illouz 2007: 12). As a result of Mayo’s work, the ‘languages’ of emotionality and productive efficiency started to interlace and influenced each other (Illouz 2007: 14). For managers and corporation owners, this psychological discourse promised to increase profits and to neutralise class struggles ‘by casting them in the benign language of emotions and personality’ (Illouz 2007: 17). For workers, it carried the promise of democracy and success based on their personalities rather than their social status — that is, a certain kind of equality, including in terms of gender (Illouz 2007: 17–18). However, this approach obscured the fact that individual progress is largely shaped by factors beyond personal control, placing responsibility for failure on the individual.

Therefore, most importantly the ‘therapeutic culture’ of emotional capitalism depends primarily on an ethos of verbal communication, both in the workplace and in intimate relations. Further facilitated by the explosive expansion of virtual spaces of interaction, this has led to the rationalisation of emotions and the loss of a sense of irrational mystery that arises from traditional, deeply bodily matrices of contact. We argue that the cinematic equivalent to these processes can be found in the way that mainstream commercial filmmaking has become increasingly dependent on a certain representational system — one that has been thoroughly rationalised and cleansed of potentially confusing ambiguities in the name of earning maximum profits. The definite point of departure for all films is the screenplay — a verbal blueprint for ‘a story told with pictures’ (Field [1979] 2005: 20).

Since Empty took Estonian audiences by surprise in 2006, Õunpuu has never ceased to express his utter dissatisfaction with the usual toolkit of commercially-driven, mainstream narrative cinema that serves the ‘quick-profit-oriented mentality’ of the entertainment industry (Tuumalu 2009). In a speech he wrote on the occasion of receiving the annual award from the Estonian Society of Film Critics for Autumn Ball in 2008, Õunpuu stated,

The good people of the Estonian Film Foundation should forget about the screenplays analysed to death by brainy experts, the meticulous storyboards and the call for dull dramatic structures — this kind of risk management is nothing but repressive. We need more playfulness and ecstasy; we need creativity, freedom and the courage to risk. Give the cameras to madmen and cut them loose on the streets – the sober and the reliable have not justified themselves. (Õunpuu 2008: 127)

his repudiation of the conventions of Hollywood-esque psychological realism (see, e.g., Teder 2009) can be seen as a counter-hegemonic move against capitalism and its ‘therapeutic culture’ as defined by Illouz. In Õunpuu’s own words,

Indeed, I don’t particularly like the [conventional] narrative structure, which seems to be the sole domain of the Ego. The psychologism stemming from the pathetic story of a human being is small and trivial. Not insignificant! I’m not a psychopath. Film simply offers room for so much more than this. Losing oneself is much more pleasant than constantly constructing oneself. I’m not really that interested in stories. I don’t know why. I watch films that tell stories when I need a dose of escapism, and I need to escape when I feel bad. I feel bad, in turn, when I do things I don’t want to do. When I’m put under pressure and need to find a way out. This is the function of this kind of films. I’d like to delve deeper, to return to the initial cause and to do something about it, not just to let some protagonist to make an escapist fuss with a story. There’s something tragically infantile about that. (Varts 2015)

...

Cinema is, after all, a visual medium and images can say a lot. The way characters are composed in the filmic space, how they relate to their surroundings — all of this is information and these arrangements can tell a story. I feel much more at liberty in pictorial language than in the world of a narrative, text-based story. (Teder 2009)

Empty, a screen version of Mati Unt’s short story of the same title (1971), revolves around entangled axes of desire and heartache, break-ups and reunions. Mati, an ‘intellectual’, his wife Helina, and the violinist Eduard, her new eye-candy (and possibly Mati’s friend), end up in Eduard’s seaside summer cottage for a weekend, after Mati has maneuvered himself out of his teaching obligations in order to join Helina’s escapade. Mati’s feelings for Helina have cooled, only to be reignited, even if somewhat reluctantly and disdainfully, by Eduard’s amorous advances towards her. To make his unfaithful wife jealous, Mati has started an affair with Marina, one of his painting students. After sleeping with Marina in a hay barn seemly somewhere near Eduard’s cottage, Mati asks Helina for a divorce, announcing, clearly half-heartedly, that he is now in love with Marina. This prompts Helina to reconsider her already planned future with Eduard. Disappointed by this turn of events, Eduard drops Mati and Helina at a small airport where, in yet another twist, Mati escapes through a bathroom window.

[Jürka]

The Adventurer AKA Happy-Go-Lucky (Kaljo Kiisk, 1983) #CoMoEstonia

based on the novel Toomas Nipernaadi (1928) by August Gailit → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Gailit

The title character is quite an iconic fictional figure and has been immortalized in everything from travel agency names to alcoholic drinks. A 1983 film based on the book is also quite popular. His very name is now a synonym for wanderlust in the Estonian language.

[Jürka]

Firebird (Rein Raamat, 1974, 7m) #CoMoEstonia

A bored future society starts to come alive with the addition of primary colors, as its world gradually becomes a groovy hippy paradise.

[Jürka]

Arvo Pärt: Even If I Lose Everything (Dorian Supin, 2015) #CoMoEstonia

Dorian Supin’s third documentary film of Arvo Pärt

1/ Arvo Pärt — And Then Came the Evening and the Morning (Dorian Supin, 1990)
2/ Arvo Pärt: 24 Preludes for a Fugue (Dorian Supin, 2002)

The title “Even if I lose everything” refers to an entry in Arvo Pärt’s musical notebooks, which the composer browses in the film, together with Immo Mihkelson. The musings and recollections inspired by the notes in these journals,



in parallel with domestic scenes, shed light on the composer’s life and creative philosophy, painting a personal, in-depth picture of Arvo Pärt.
The film’s soundtrack includes excerpts from Pärt’s works.

Filmmaker Dorian Supin created this intimate portrait in 2015 to mark Arvo Pärt’s 80th birthday.

mature creative geniuses are never short for words of wisdom...


they can offer practical advice too...


it’s beyond doubt Arvo Pärt watched at least one movie by Miloš Forman!

[Jürka]

nearing the end...


Encyclopaedia Cinematographica Gentium Fenno-Ugricarum, Pt. 5/5

Shaman (Lennart Meri, 1997) #CoMoEstonia

The Shaman was filmed on July 16th, 1977 in the northernmost corner of Eurasia, on the Taymyr Peninsula, at the Avam River, concurrently with the shooting of the documentary “The Winds of the Milky Way”. The Nganasan Shaman Demnime was 64 years old at the time. The documentary about Demnime’s incarnation ritual was completed 20 years later.

[Jürka]

epilogue (all my sighs & pains in full flow)...


SN Retrospective, Pt. 2/2

Men Don't Cry (Sulev Nõmmik, 1968) #CoMoEstonia

A group of sleepless nerds should be taken into the sanitarium for hard therapy.



They are taken to a lonely island but no sanitarium is in sight.



Suddenly turns out that the nurses have kidnapped the men and are about to give them the only useful medicine they need — fresh air and work. But the patients decide to disobey. There's only one solution — to escape.



The film is an absolute cult in Estonia.

In some sense 'Men Don't Cry' is the first real Estonian science-fiction movie, as it was filmed and released in 1968, but the story was set in the future — in 1973. One can argue, that it barely qualifies as science fiction, but there are a couple of scenes about some experiments that fit perfectly into the SF category.

i must admit that the cult status of Sulev Nõmmik’s comedies is beyond my grasp.
i was not much bemused by Young Pensioner and throughout this film “about insomniacs” i mostly struggled with slumber.
however, this “SN Retrospective” (plus the swashbuckler in the other Retrospective) was (were) probably the only “misfire(s)” during the entire month-long adventure of trying to get attuned to the Estonian psyche.