Director and artist Boris Blank, shortly before his 85th birthday, presented his colleagues with a new film “Oh, why this night …”, in his words, of an indefinite genre. Once he already had a painting with the same name. In 1997, he made a film of the same name based on the works of Leonid Andreev with the participation of Mikhail and Oleg Efremov. Now he turned to Gorky’s play The Zykovs, written in 1912. It was worth coming to the show just to meet the director and hear his call to hurry up, because every day can be the last.
Blank is the president of the Guild of Film Artists, director of the films The Career of Arturo Ui by Brecht and The Death of Tairov. He made his debut as a production designer in 1964 in the film “Welcome, or No Trespassing” by Elem Klimov. At the same time, The Good Man from Sezuan directed by Yuri Lyubimov was released at the Taganka Theater. Blank made his debut there as a theater artist. He worked on the following films: “Burn, Burn, My Star” by Alexander Mitta, “Stalin’s Funeral” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “My Sweet and Gentle Beast” and “Anna Pavlova” by Emil Lotyanu, “Joke” by Vladimir Menshov. Classic, in a word. He likes to go back to old names. Once he worked on the film “Ladder” by Alexei Sakharov, and after a while he himself shot the autobiographical “Ladder”.
It is generally accepted that the Zykovs are weaker than the Petty Bourgeoises and Vassa Zheleznova, and therefore this play was staged much less frequently. Boris Blank contacted the Zykovs about five years ago. He staged them at the Vladimir Drama Theater as a director and set designer. According to the plot, Antipa Zykov, a lumberman, is wooing his son Mikhail to Pavel, who spent several years in a monastery. And then he marries her. However, family life is not going well. Pavla confesses that she loves Mikhail, and he will try to commit suicide. Blanc had another character ready to commit suicide.
“I love you a priori because you are with me,” he told the audience before showing his film. – You may not like it. You can say that this is not a movie at all, but I will not love you less, because I myself do not know what we have done. The audience left the hall in bewilderment, and those who sat to the end said something like this: “This is not a movie. There are no people here. Some masks. In some ways they were wrong, but in their own way they were right.
Blank is experimenting, creating radical cinema, as an aspiring aspiring director trying to surprise the world with something new could do. The co-author of the script was the operator Vladimir Soldatov. unusual graphics and editing was done by Nikolai Nasedkin. It seemed to Blank that the real faces on the screen would not give the desired effect, they would be taken away into everyday life, hence the unexpected graphic solution arose. The actors on the screen exude an anthracite radiance. The face of Alexander Korshunov is as if covered with brilliant paint, silvered. The camera is static. The faces of the actors too. Everything is based on monologues. There is simply no dialogue. Actors communicate through the viewer as an intermediate link. At the best moments, a current arises, and the audience connects to what they see on the screen, feel its energy and tension.
The film was shot completely disinterestedly, in the name of the idea and pure art, the artists of the Sphere Theater, headed by Alexander Korshunov, who played Antipa Zykov, who suddenly fell in love with the bride’s son. He is unable to overcome the passion that pulls him into the abyss. Sister Sophia was very nobly played by Alexandra Chichkova, the son of Mikhail – Sergey Zagorelsky, Pavel – Evgenia Kazarinova. Singer Irina Epifanova, who once worked in the Bravo group and with Boris Moiseev, and who is extremely appreciated by Boris Blank, together with accordion player Igor Sklyarov and violinist Mikhail Orlov breaks the action with songs. Blank loves Brecht and follows his ideas. The musical solution of the film is based on the famous petty-bourgeois romance “Oh, why was this night so good …”.
And it begins with scenes of a pandemic, where everyone is wearing masks. Boris Blank took it hard, lost friends and among them Nikolai Gubenko, who just in those days invited him to the production. “Many have experienced tragic moments, including me,” admitted Boris Blank. – But the Almighty gave me the opportunity to survive, gave me a little more time so that I could say what I had not done before for various reasons. What you will see is a kind of preview that needs to be completed. I need to have time to show and understand what to do next. justify the life that the Almighty has given me so far. I realized that I need Gorky, whom I respect. There is a great triad – Shakespeare, Brecht, Gorky. His dramaturgy is the greatest translation of the Old Testament into the language of Russian drama in terms of its passions and understanding of man. I realized that the pandemic is with us forever. The microbe will sit in us, adapt. We will mutate with him. Nobody now knows what will happen tomorrow, so everything must be done today. I started shooting without a penny. Still no money. But Volodya Soldatov appeared, the Sphere Theater, all these unique people who said: “We will act without remuneration. We want creativity.” I answered them: “We must speak now. Love – speak out soon. If you don’t like it, if you hate it, speak up. Forgive – say. You may not be able to do it tomorrow.”
If something didn’t work out for us, then it’s my fault. I forgot about passions and switched to the Stanislavsky system, began to consider the characters. And it was necessary to consider only passions. I tell the story at the beginning of the film. It is primitively simple. Then there will be only passion. As a demanding person, I could not show a film where not everything is brought to the absolute, but I spit on it. I needed to convey to you my living feeling. We will finish everything and get a perfect film, although I don’t know if perfect is better or worse. Our film is of a new formation, and not because I wanted to do something new, but because I was making a free film. If there was not enough text spoken by the actors, and we shot the film in two weeks, then I introduced a caption that replaced the scene. It is free from all canons except my feeling, a film with a new way of communicating with the audience. I didn’t have the money to build big sets, but I needed an image like Caravaggio, that is, burnt light, failed shadows and dark backgrounds. Actors voice a silent film, they speak directly into the frame, they work with each other not in paired scenes, but through the viewer, they speak directly to you.
GITR students were involved in the work – operators and sound engineers. They filmed and worked as best they could, learned by doing and supported the classic. Out of desperation, a valuable experience was born for aspiring filmmakers. Boris Blank believes that his film is a forerunner of the future, when the cameraman will only need technologically competent fixation of the film action, because in the future he will become just a high-class technician, and the director will completely deal with the art of the frame with the help of a computer.
At the end of the film, they showed Nikolai Nasedkin’s ten-minute film “Gorky”, filmed during work, as a film about the film. Boris Blankt, like Yuri Lyubimov once at the Taganka Theater, loudly replicated from the darkness of the hall, urging them not to disperse. Conceived as an impression of working on a big picture, it became partly its mini-repetition. There is no creation process.
Boris Blank is planning a dilogy, the second part of which will be “Luka” based on Gorky’s play “At the Bottom”.