At the opening of Alla Surikova’s A (Wo)Man from the Boulevard des Capucin-oks, two construction workers philosophize about the deplorable state of cinema. Their grievances repeat almost verbatim Rudolf Arnheim’s 1933 denunciation of the “complete film”: sound and color have ruined silent cinema, robbing it of its artistry and turning it into a banal reproduction of reality. Arnheim claimed that technical limitations would bring out cinema’s art; the workers’ recipe is to cut off all money supply to filmmaking: “no one should ever be paid.” To be fair, Surikova’s film both displays signs of a shoe-string budget and does not refer to reality in any meaningful way. The only reference is to Surikova’s own 1987 A Man from the Boulevard des Capucines,[1] a parody of a Western starring Andrei Mironov in his last cinematic role, alongside a dozen other heavy weights of Soviet cinema on the eve of its collapse: Nikolai Karachentsov, Oleg Tabakov, Mikhail Boiarskii, Lev Durov, Galina Pol’skikh, etc. <...>
Elena Prokhorova, kinokultura.com
