Posts From Author: vladimir putin
Films To See In January: Leviathan; Ida; Two Days, One Night
As awards season looms, with its predictable bows to prestige and heritage movies, three reasons to venture down the road less traveled by. Leviathan has been receiving messianic reviews since its premiere at Cannes last year, where it won the Best Screenplay award, and by the end of its two-and-a-half-some hours it’s easy to see why. I have an undeveloped theory that so-called “foreign” films do well in direct proportion to their correspondence with national stereotypes. With a land dispute, a visiting lawyer from Moscow, sublime landscapes, political corruption, and titanic quantities of vodka on display, you could say that Russia’s submission to the 87th Annual Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film ticks all the boxes. But Leviathan, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, is also a serious film of grand scope and ambition that deserves to be seen both in and out of the context of Putin’s Russia. At the outset, Kolya (Alexey Serebryakov) is locked in a dense legal battle against local mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov) over a plot of land his family has lived on for generations. Eventually shanghaied out of the property by corrupt officials, and cuckolded by the lawyer friend (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) he’d called on to […]
Read MoreThe Ink Runs Dry
Borgesian understatement, Nixonian analysis, Putinian philosophy, and a rediscovered Kodak disc camera. The ink, the wine, and the laughs were all flowing at Tuesday’s Seriously Entertaining show as another smashing line-up of writing talent mused aloud on the creative process and the terror that one day the ink might just dry up altogether. Amanda Vaill was first in the spotlight with a tale from her new book, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). When war broke out, the writers who answered the call to arms were all generally afraid that “their ink was running dry”, not least Ernest Hemingway, one of the stars of Hotel Florida, whose writing career in the mid-1930s was far from soaring. “But those who were the new face, the new day,” said Vaill, “were the photographers, the film-makers.” Most famous amongst them were Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, whose philosophy was summed up by Capa’s maxim, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Capa and Taro are perhaps best known for the image of the “Falling Soldier”, which Vaill contends was a staged shoot gone fatally wrong. Whatever the circumstances, it made their name, […]
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