Take No Prisoners: The Bold Vision of Kira Muratova
Born in 1934 in Romania to a Romanian mother and a Russian father, Muratova went to both Romanian and Russian schools, often hiding her Russian identity at the former and her Romanian identity at the latter. Her parents were both high-ranking communist officials, so she had a relatively privileged childhood. Though for most of her life she’s lived in the Ukrainian city of Odessa, her films are in Russian and said to be full of references to Russian literature. But her vision clearly isn’t limited to Russian culture.
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Altogether I’ve seen half of Muratova’s features, including five of those in the Film Center’s series, and clips from most of the others. The more I see, the more complex her talent seems. The shocking apocalyptic bleakness and harshness of The Asthenic Syndrome and Three Stories (1997) didn’t prepare me for the cheerfully laid-back goofiness of Passions, and none of these three truly anticipates the demented, hypnotic brilliance of Chekhov’s Motifs. The studied drabness of her black-and-white films–Brief Encounters, Long Farewells, Chekhov’s Motifs, the first part of The Asthenic Syndrome–is a world apart from her intoxicating, riotous use of color in Getting to Know the Big Wide World (1978), Passions, and Three Stories, yet it’s impossible to describe either mode as more Muratovian than the other.
Long Farewells
