Kossakovsky

I really enjoyed the insight and context that the reading provided on Kossakovsky’s ideas, and his experience with “The Belovs.” I’m impressed that the way it is made is painterly, and surreal, while at the same time, it is observational of the everyday-mundane parts of reality- but in such a universally profound way. I love the refusal to tell a “journalistic,” factual, story while still leading the viewers to experience the drastic emotional arcs of the characters throughout the film. Remembering how I reacted to different points of the film: I laughed several times, felt frustration and compassion at others, and always felt displaced in space and time. Kossakovsky ingeniously refuses to hand the viewer an explanation or context for the subjects. He beautifully plays with tensions of the banality, despair and non-sensical humor of –-well, the beauty and woes of life and humanity as a whole(-with the risk of sounding totally pretentious). And he conveys all this through the visuality and sound of every scene. In the way he frames and holds still shots- that become almost moving paintings- puts the audience in the eyes of the observing camera—making you feel as though it is an authentic account of what is happening. But at other times, it is clearly a cut-and-edited stream of intentionally ordered moments and scenes.  Kossakovsky said that the scene with Anna listening to the recordings and dancing was “the most important part of the film,” and was intentionally put at the end, in anticipation of how the audience would “read” the character if it was placed elsewhere. So I guess in a way it is “biased towards her,” as we questioned in class. Also Kossakovsky plays with the interviewer by claiming that some things were not artistically intentional, but choices made because of technical limitations (such as: the family dinner discussion being replaced with the family photo; the sound cutting out at the pinnacle of Anna and Mikhail’s argument, and when the old man is giving his monologue over a black screen). He’s clever to remind us of the intentionality that there is vs. the potential intentionality that we, as viewers, read into—and that such instances could very well be from both.

Another thing is how the film highlights (by universal characters and de-contextualized soundtrack) our own situated cultural perspective as we watch the film. Kossakovsky references the bollywood ballad over the river scene, saying that in Russia, it was a familiar and popular song.  What came off as a deliberate, almostly humorously strange choice of visuals for me, could be perceived as a natural or conventional choice elsewhere. Because different music triggers different associations of mood, perhaps the bollywood music set a tone for the film that I couldn’t even culturally perceive.