Condee (16 April 2021): 1

Word count: 6553 words

DEATH OF BELIEF (Izgnanie, Leviathan); check “vera” elsewhere in his work
Failure of intimate, family love
Job 41:1-34
"Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? Or press down his tongue with a cord? "Can you put a rope
in his nose Or pierce his jaw with a hook? "Will he make many supplications to you, Or will he speak to
you soft words?

BBC News Europe http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30234194

30 November 2014 Last updated at 21:11 ET; Russian cinema's 'masterpiece' Leviathan bucks backlash
By Stephen Ennis BBC Monitoring
Russia's much-acclaimed submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2015 Oscars is
Leviathan - a bleak vision of provincial corruption in the land of President Vladimir Putin.
Director Andrey Zvyagintsev's new film tells the story of Kolya, a car mechanic battling
to save his property from the machinations of the brutish and unscrupulous local mayor. Played
out against the harsh landscape of the far north, it is a vodka-soaked study of crooked dealing
and moral decay sharply at variance with the image of Russia touted by President Putin and the
Kremlin-controlled media.
The film was premiered in May at the Cannes festival, where it won the award for Best
Screenplay. Since then, it has been gathering accolades and plaudits across the world.
The Guardian's film critic Peter Bradshaw called it a "new Russian masterpiece". Amid the
acclaim, there has also been some incredulity that a film like Leviathan can still get made in
Putin's Russia. The Observer and BBC film critic, Mark Kermode, suspected it had "slipped
under the authorities' totalitarian radar". But Leviathan has had official backing all along the line.
Over a third of its funding came from state coffers and in September it was nominated by the
country's Oscars Committee to represent Russia at next February's Academy Awards.
Despite the official endorsements, Zvyagintsev make no secret of the difficulties of
working in Russia's increasingly reactionary and restrictive political environment. "It is like
being in a minefield. This is the feeling you live with here. It's very hard to build any kind of
prospects - in life, in your profession, in your career - if you are not plugged in to the values of
the system," he told the Guardian's Moscow correspondent, Shaun Walker.
One film-maker who is currently at odds with the system is Vitaly Mansky, who is also
president of Artdocfest, Russia's largest international documentary film festival. But this year,
Artdocfest's funding was cut. In fact, Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky said that none of
Mansky's projects would get any money as long as he was in post. "With his anti-state
rhetoric, he should finance the festival at his own expense," the ministry told journalists on
19 November.
The culture ministry had earlier turned down an application for Mansky's project
Motherland - a look at the history of modern Ukraine told through the medium of the director's
own family. Mansky himself was born in Ukraine and in March he was one of the leading
signatories to an open letter entitled "We are with you" - a message of solidarity from Kino
Soyuz (Cinema Union) to Ukrainian film-makers who expressed dismay at the propaganda
campaign against their country being waged in the Russian media. Kino Soyuz was set up in
2010, and is a smaller rival to the official Union of Cinematographers of the Russian Federation
presided over by Oscar winner Nikita Mikhalkov, a staunch supporter of President Putin and his
policy on Ukraine.
 Condee (16 April 2021): 2

Some commentators have suggested that the culture minister's blacklisting of Mansky
may be related to the "We are with you" letter. But Zvyagintsev was also among its signatories.
Film critic Anton Dolin thinks that, in the case of Leviathan, the desire for international prestige
outweighed political or moral qualms. "Though the film is extremely critical of the modern
Russian state, this did not impede its promotion, because it works in favour of Russia's image as
a leading country in the realm of cinema and culture," he told the Open Russia website.

A film about the composer Tchaikovsky has been put on hold. But the list of cinematic
projects facing problems in Russia is growing. Director Kirill Serebrennikov's plans for a
film about the composer Tchaikovsky has been put on hold indefinitely because of a lack of
funding. It received a grant from the culture ministry but was turned down by another part of
the state arts nexus, the Cinema Fund - apparently because of its portrayal of the composer's
homosexuality. Other films have been falling foul of a new body set up to enforce standards of
historical "accuracy", and also the burgeoning array of extremism, incitement, blasphemy and
obscenity laws coming out in Russia. A drama about the deportation of the Chechen and
Ingush peoples in 1944 - Ordered to Forget - was banned by the culture ministry earlier this
year on the grounds that it might "inflame ethnic divisions". More films could soon be sharing its
fate.
A draft government decree published online on 21 November lists as reasons for banning
the distribution of films not only extremist content or language breaching new obscenity laws,
but also material "denigrating the national culture or creating a threat to national unity and the
national security of the Russian Federation". Leviathan went on general release in the UK on 7
November. It is due in cinemas in Russia in February, though it will not be quite the same
version as in the West. The earthy language will have to be edited out. Despite these and other
difficulties, Zvyagintsev still sees his future in his homeland rather than abroad. "If there will be
obstacles to what I do in Russia, for example the release of Leviathan or my next project; if
everything turns what I want to do into Soviet-style gibberish, then, of course, I will be faced
with that choice [to leave]. But that hasn't happened yet," he told US film critic Anne
Thompson earlier this year.

Knowledge Imperfective (Andrei Zviagintsev and Contemporary Cinema)1

Nancy Condee

Though a skeptic, I will cite biblical verses relevant to Zviagintsev’s films:

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; […] as for
knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part; and we prophesy
only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.”
(Corinthians 13: 4-10)

1
I am grateful to the following scholars and experts for their support as this chapter was being
written: Sitora Alieva, Birgit Beumers, Joel Chapron, and Evgénie Zvonkine.
 Condee (16 April 2021): 3

In these verses, two features stand out. The first feature—conceptual—is love’s contrast to both
prophecy and knowledge (not, at first glance, an obvious choice). The second feature—stylistic
—is the verses’ millennialist tone, its invocation of an end, when “the partial” will fall away.
Prophecy and knowledge—with their temporal limits and epistemological drive—are superseded
by love, whose value lies not in the realm of “knowing” but in the realm of “meaning.” Love’s
association with the millennial suggests that love’s distinction is registered is not so much along
the axis of good and evil, but of sacred a-temporality and worldly temporality. The worldly
duplet (prophecy and knowledge), in their temporal embodiment, is a Janus-faced pair: prophecy
makes claims about the future; knowledge—principally—about the past and present. And love?
In the discursive world of this biblical passage, love is exempt from secular time: “love never
ends.”

The Corinthian verses appear explicitly only in Zviagintsev’s second film The Banishment
[Izgnanie, 2007], but they might be viewed—I would argue—as a key to his cinema more
broadly. It is not incidental that two of Zviagintsev’s most admired directors—Ingmar Bergman
in his 1961 drama Through a Glass Darkly [Såsom i en spegel]; and Krzysztof Kieślowski in his
1993 Blue [Bleu]—have also drawn on the same Corinthians passages.2 In The Banishment, the
verses are read aloud (at much greater length) by two young girls, Flora and Frida, at a critical
moment when the heroine—Vera (“belief,” after all)—is undergoing an abortion that will
contribute to her death. These two on-screen children, reading from the Bible, contrast with the
unseen child—unborn and being killed as the Bible is read—present a key juxtaposition in
Zviagintsev’s parable about the failure of family love.

****
Let me provide brief biographical notes on Zviagintsev’s work. The director comes from an
artistic background initially distinct from film production.3 Born in 1964 (Novosibirsk), he was
educated under the supervision of Lev Belov at the local Novosibirsk Theatre School, from
which he graduated in 1984.4 After a stint in the army (1984-1986), he moved to Moscow to
study acting (1986-1990) with actor-director Evgenii Lazarev at the Russian Academy of Theatre
Arts (in Russian abbreviation, GITIS). After graduation and without immediate professional
success, Zviagintsev picked up minor roles as a theatre, television serial, and film actor (1992-
2000), even working as a street cleaner while auditioning for parts. As he later tells Erica Abeel:
1993 was a bad year in Russia post-Perestroika and I had trouble finding work. So
I took a job filming a commercial for a furniture store. I learned the craft that way,
came to understand the shooting process.
In 2000, Zviagintsev was hired by Dmitrii Lesnevskii, a co-founder of REN-TV, where he
directed three episodes of the 2000 television series Black Room [Chernaia komnata]:
2
The specific citation from Corinthians (in particular, the phrase “through a glass, darkly”) is, of
course, much broader than these directors, though not relevant here. The most familiar examples
include Agatha Christie’s 1939 short story (“In a Glass Darkly”); Isaac Asimov’s 1967 collection
of four short stories (Through a Glass, Clearly); and George Steiner’s 1987 contribution to the
Dutch Huizingalezing.
3
For greater detail, see http://az-film.com/ru/Bio/.
4
Lev Belov, together with Aleksandr Galibin and Grigorii Gobernik, was also associated with
the Globus Novosibirsk Academic Youth Theatre, the major youth theatre production stage in
the region. See http://www.globus-nsk.ru/press/169.html.
 Condee (16 April 2021): 4

“Bushido,” “Obscure,” and “Choice” [“Vybor”], all with DoP Mikhail Krichman, with whom he
would continue to work for all his subsequent films.

It was therefore a surprise to the festival and journalist communities when Zviagintsev’s first
feature film, The Return, won the Leono D’oro, as well as the Leone del futuro (Best Debut), at
the 2003 Venice International Film Festival. After all, Zviagintsev’s own technical crew, for the
most part (including Krichman), were debuting their first full-length feature film. To many
Russian and Western experts, Zviagintsev seemed to have come from “nowhere” (namely,
theatre and television, not yet as intensely integrated in the 1990s into the film world as it would
later become). Zviagintsev had not passed through the conventional vetting system of the All-
Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) or the Higher Courses of Scriptwriters and
Directors (VKSR); nor had he yet worked on a full-length feature film as First Assistant Director
(“Second Director,” in Russian production terminology) or as a film scriptwriter who
“graduated” to shoot his own debut. Instead, he moved from a short stint in a television series
directly to the Venice Golden Lion. Apart from the top award at an A-level festival, the film
garnered twenty-seven other awards and thirteen nominations, including several major domestic
awards: the 2003 Golden Eagle for Best Film; the 2003 Best Film and Best Debut awards from
the Russian Guild of Cinema Scholars and Cinema Critics; and the 2004 Nika for Best Film.5
No wonder, therefore, that Zviagintsev’s sudden visibility triggered considerable envy among his
peers. This envy was surely magnified by the historical comparison with Russia’s last Golden
Lion recipient (another debut director) Andrei Tarkovskii, for his 1962 war drama Ivan’s
Childhood [Ivanovo detstvo].6 The opportunity for unfavorable comparisons with the earlier
filmmaker, who later went on to become Russia’s premiere auteurist director, was irresistible.

Four years later, Zviagintsev shot his second full-length feature film, the 2007 drama The
Banishment, with a script loosely based on William Saroyan’s 1953 novella The Laughing
Matter.7 Premiering at the 2007 Cannes International Film Festival and nominated for the Palme
d’Or, The Banishment suffered the frequent fate of second films—inflated festival expectations
—and met with considerable domestic and international criticism. Nevertheless, serious domestic
scholarly interest in Zviagintsev’s work originates from this same period (Kliueva 2010;
Dykhanie 2014).8 Zviagintsev subsequently broadened his profile, contributing to two almanac
films: his short “Apocrypha” (cut from theatrical release, but available on DVD) was included in
the 2008 almanac New York, I Love You; his short “Mystery” [“Taina”] contributed to the 2011
almanac Experiment 5IVE [Eksperiment 5IVE1].

5
The Nika Award (Russian Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), established in 1987
by Iulii Gusman and often compared with the Oscars (Academy Awards), is the country’s oldest
and most prestigious national film award. The Golden Eagle Award (National Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of Russia), established in 2002 by Nikita Mikhalkov, is often
viewed as a competing award (but is awarded in both cinema and television).
6
Tarkovskii shared the Lion with Valerio Zurlini’s 1962 screen adaptation Family
Diary (Cronaca familiare).
7
See Beumers 2007 for an invaluable account of the relation between Saroyan’s novella and the
script, co-written by Artem Melkumian and Oleg Negin.
8
Serious Anglophone scholarship (Beumers, Graffy, and Strukov) had begun already in response
to The Return.
 Condee (16 April 2021): 5

Of greater interest to our discussion here was Zviagintsev’s third full-length feature Elena, which
premiered in 2011 at Cannes in Un Certain Regard (the festival’s major “sidebar” to the main
competition since 1978, held in the festival’s Salle Debussy). Un Certain Regard awarded its
Jury Prize to Elena and the film went on to win several other awards (2012 Nika Best Director;
2012 Golden Eagle for Best Fiction Film and Best Director; and the 2011 White Elephant for
Best Film and Best Director from the Russian Guild of Cinema Scholars and Cinema Critics.

At the time of this writing, we await the release of his fourth full-length feature film, the 2014
drama Leviathan [Leviafan], with a script by Oleg Negin, who had authored “Mystery,” The
Banishment, and Elena. At shooting locations that include Kirovsk, Monchegorsk, and Apatity
(Murmansk District), the film stars Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Aleksei Serebrikov, and Elena
Liadova, who had played Vladimir’s (Andrei Smirnov’s) daughter in Zviagintsev’s Elena.
Produced by Alexander Rodnyansky, Leviathan tells the story of a family—father Nikolai, son
Romka, young wife Lilia—who lives in a small bay on the Barents Sea. Scholars of
Zviagintsev’s work will recognize the large mythological frame, replete with biblical references,
within which the profane details of gritty secular life are played out: here, a corrupt, small-town
mayor who challenges Nikolai’s rights and triggers a series of retaliations.

****
Why does Zviagintsev stubbornly resist critical interpretations of his work as social drama,
sociological portrait, or political allegory? After all, a plausible interpretation of The Return, for
example, might expound on social issues, yet Zviagintsev insists instead on a strikingly different
version (“I would say that it’s about the metaphysical incarnation of the soul’s movement from
the Mother to the Father” [Abeel]). And while some critics (again, quite plausibly) might see
Elena as a film about class difference, Zviagintsev repudiates this view (“They saw socio-class
struggle in the film! What class struggle!” [Matizen 671]). Repeatedly in interviews,
Zviagintsev has stressed that any viewing of his work that proceeds “from the standpoint of
everyday life” is “a mistake, because […] the mystery of the film won’t reveal itself to you”
(Abeel).

These otherwise banal statements—what work of art does not invite sublation?—are part of an
artistic strategy that situates Zviagintsev, along with other descendants of Andrei Tarkovskii, in a
spiritual domain, directing our attention away from the profane to the world of spiritual
abstraction. Zviagintsev’s work engages three specific techniques that cohere into a distinct
signature for Zviagintsev and differentiate his film style from such kin as Aleksandr Sokurov. It
is the intent of this chapter to capture that style. In that respect, the chapter is less interested in
the familiar debates, such as whether Zviagintsev is a descendent of Tarkovskii—an argument
both indisputable and contingent9—as it is in how Zviagintsev uses recognizable devices to
engage with the legacy of Tarkovskii’s filmmaking in contemporary world cinema.

The First Technique

To the literalist, Zviagintsev’s film titles might seem puzzling: The Return is less about a return
than about an extended voyage away from home. The Banishment is not—as the title might
9
See, for example, Naum Kleiman’s intriguing comment on The Return: “This is not a
Tarkovsky film. Tarkovsky’s films are Protestant. This is more in the tradition of Greek tragedy”
(Meek).
 Condee (16 April 2021): 6

imply—a Biblical couple’s expulsion from Eden out into the fallen world, but the opposite: the
couple’s trip from the benighted cityscape to the pastoral surroundings of the original home. It is
in the heart of this “Eden” that its tragedy is acted out.

These “mismatches” are neither the scriptwriter’s lapses nor the critic’s misinterpretations (the
misattribution, for example, of a biblical reference). Are we so sure that Zviagintsev’s The
Banishment invokes an Edenic subtext? The protagonist’s daughter is named Eva; she is offered
an apple. Flora and Frida read from a Bible bookmarked with a reproduction of Masaccio’s
1425 fresco The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Cacciata dei progenitori dall’Eden). In an
interview (if we lend credence to a director’s statements), Zviagintsev has explicitly made the
connection between the film title and the biblical story (Matizen 664). Why then the odd
disjuncture between title and script? Something else is in play. What we are seeing here and
elsewhere in Zviagintsev’s work are inversions, a series of what might be thought of as “counter-
symbols,” a strategy necessary to communicate the complex, distractive functions of
Zviagintsev’s secular world.

While these counter-symbols appear through much of Zviagintsev’s work, the technique is most
traceable in The Banishment. Here, for example, the association of the Virgin Mary with the
pregnant heroine (whose blue and white clothing signals this supposition) is underscored by
passages from Johann Sebastian Bach’s 1723 Magnificat (“Song of Mary,” BWV 243). The
pregnant heroine’s children put together a puzzle reproduction of Leonardo da
Vinci‘s and Andrea del Verrocchio‘s 1472-1475 painting Annunciation (Luke 1:26-39), in which
Gabriel appears to Mary with news of the Christ child, whose reign whose will have no end.
This cultural strategy is not (as we sometimes find in Sokurov) mere snobbery: Bach, da Vinci,
del Verrocchio, masters of European culture who—Sokurov would have intimated—far surpass
his modest cinematic competencies. Instead, the references have a larger, refracting function.
Zviagintsev’s intent is the creation of—among other things—a secular counter-Mary: her
pregnant condition is stripped of spiritual value; her earthly child is aborted; the child’s father is
(in all likelihood) neither a lover nor God, but merely the husband himself. As for the husband
—a kind of counter-Joseph—he does not welcome the unexpected child; instead, he kills it.

The film, therefore, functions as an inversion of two stories, Eden and the Virgin Birth,10
revealing (through inversion) their mundane, sublunary status: the little Eve is sinless; the
pregnant “Mary,” by contrast, is subjected to her husband’s censure. And, as if this were not
capricious enough—where the Bible tells first the story of Eve and (only much later) the story of
Mary—Zviagintsev’s world gives us an inverted chronology: Eve is daughter to “Mary.” In
conversation with critic Viktor Matizen, Zviagintsev has gone so far as to suggest that the
heroine’s pregnancy might be conceived as modern-day sinless conception, a miracle
unrecognized by the profane world. While an early version of the script had pointed to the
heroine’s adultery, the scriptwriters (including Zviagintsev himself) rejected that choice in favor
of the implicit miracle:

We rejected the idea of the adulteress. The rational motive disappeared; her
behavior became inexplicable. After that, some [viewers] decided that she was
10
In conversation with Viktor Matizen, Zviagintsev mentions that he had considered both
“banishment” and “annunciation” as possible titles for the film (664).
 Condee (16 April 2021): 7

simply an idiot, and lost interest in the film. But another group of viewers,
immured into a wall of the inexplicable, into paradox, lifted their eyes upward and
saw the sky. These viewers stayed with me. To those who had turned away, I
have nothing to say. (Matizen 662)

Retrospectively then, let us turn backwards to Zviagintsev’s first film, The Return. Here, the key
elements cluster first around the figure of Christ. The sleeping father’s resemblance to Jesus,
underscored by a visual citation of Andrea Mantegna’s 1480 painting Lamentation over Dead
Christ, is reiterated near the film’s end, when the father’s corpse is returned in the boat (Vickes).
The father’s association with Christ triggers a series of related choices: the children bear the
names of Apostles Andrew and John (Andrei and Ivan); the family sits down to a final supper
where the father shares wine with them before the trip; their journey lasts seven days, ending on
Sunday, and so on.11 And yet, pushing back against these Christian conventions, is Zviagintsev’s
signature strategy: the earthly father—neither Christ nor Christlike—is vengeful, punitive, and
unforgiving. At the moment of his death, the father’s corpse—far from offering hope (as Christ
does, raised from the earth)—leaves us instead with sorrowful relief, as his corpse is consigned
to the water. This is not a satanic Anti-Christ (any more than Vera, the heroine of The
Banishment, had been a slatternly Anti-Mary), but an inverse strategy that transforms the sacred
figure into a profane, earthly counterpart. By this playful logic, therefore, it is not “Christ” who
walks on water in The Return, but the “apostles” Andrei and Ivan who appear to do so. Whether
this series of inversions is caprice or philosophical statement about the secular world is never
entirely offered to us as a fixed solution. I will reserve speculation about this question until the
end of the chapter.

Just as The Banishment pairs an inverted Mary with Eve, The Return offers a male pair, Christ
and Abraham. Discovering their sleeping father, the children run to find an old photograph,
slipped into the family Bible, next to an image of Abraham. This image sets the same inversive
technique in motion. Like Abraham, the film’s father wields a knife, but the outcome is
different: he is under no compulsion to kill his son. The young boy steals the knife; the scuffle
results in the father’s death. It is as if the jumbled elements of the Abraham story produced a
counter-story, barely legible as such because each individual piece finds its own inverted
equivalence.12

This technique does not seem to be as strongly operative in Zviagintsev’s third full-length feature
film, and I will not stretch the case here. Instead, I would like to move on to a second recurrent
element of Zviagintsev’s signature.

The Second Technique

For viewers sensitive to local particularities, Elena, Zviagintsev’s third full-length feature film,
has a distinct, dual setting: on the one hand, Moscow’s wealthy Ostozhenka; on the other,
11
Zviagintsev is explicit in interviews about these religious references: “In The Return, I was
rebuked because a Russian man, returning home after a long absence, sets wine on the table
rather than vodka. But I needed wine in the shot, precisely to point towards the biblical model.
So, too, with the shot in which the father in shown from the same angle as Christ in Mantagna’s
picture” (Matizen 670).
12
For an elaboration of inverse value more broadly in Russian culture, see Condee (1999).
 Condee (16 April 2021): 8

Biriulevo, the city’s poor industrial suburb. The film is so firmly grounded in the quotidian
details of each locale that the misguided, secular critic might well blunder into sociological
commentary from these details alone. In this respect, Elena is more circumspect in its self-
assigned tasks than the previous two films. If The Return and The Banishment accelerated
rapidly into spiritual abstraction, Elena could plausibly be mistaken as a socially engaged text
about contemporary urban class disparities. This is precisely the challenge—though “spiritual
temptation” is perhaps the more accurate term—that Zviagintsev and his scriptwriter Oleg Negin
have set for themselves. The success of the film lies in its capacity to transform a secularly
grounded event into a plausibly universal human story of family loyalties and greed. Naum
Kleiman’s comment, for example, that Zviagintsev’s work is “in the tradition of Greek tragedy”
(Meek) reveals the capacity of this talented team to move towards a larger transcendence—
equipped with the classical moment of catharsis—that is an explicit part of the filmmaker’s
aesthetic credo.13 Retaining a minimalist design and verbal restraint from the first two films, the
director balances his accustomed mythic sweep with a distinct cultural particularity.

This balance of the universal with the particular may have been forged in the film’s own
production history: Elena was originally a British project with an English-language script
(translated for the project). The original screenplay was produced in response to an offer
(February 2009) to four directors by British producer Oliver Dungey for each to shoot a full-
length, English-language feature, with a budget of about $ 6-7 million apiece on the topic of the
Apocalypse. By late March 2009, Zviagintsev’s scriptwriter Oleg Negin had finished the script
Helen about a British couple, Helen and Richard. Further progress on the project was delayed by
funding complexities; by mid-May 2009, Zviagintsev had withdrawn from negotiations with
Dungey. By the end of August, the director had found alternative support from Aleksandr
Rodnianskii (Non-Stop Production) and by early October 2009 was in pre-production. The
British drama had become a Russian drama.

I mention these details for an additional reason, pertaining to his second technique: they pertain
to Zviagintsev’s pattern of strategic effacement. The script—written in Russian, translated into
English for a British film, then recast as a very specific Moscow drama—may transfer easily
from culture to culture because it is a work of genius; this journalists’ issue is not our concern
here.14 Instead, we are interested in Zviagintsev’s selective withholding of cultural information
to throw other details into high relief, moving the work towards the moment of transcendence.
This technique is most evident in the wealthy protagonist Vladimir. Despite the very specific
context of Ostozhenka, he remains an indeterminate figure: is he a former Soviet research
scientist turned wealthy businessman? A former security agent? A former high-ranking
Komsomol functionary?15 This question, which haunts the film in its opening shots, fades into
the background, not only because of actor Andrei Smirnov’s performance. The film allows these
13
“I belong to the old school of theatre and cinema and I believe that every work needs a
catharsis. A film is basically another reality. It’s like a dream. It’s important that the viewer can
give themselves to that dream and live within it, so when they enter the cinema they are in one
kind of space and when the leave it they are in a different space” (Davies).
14
By this logic (translatability is the measure of genius), Pushkin must be a third-rate poet.
15
While the director, together with lead actor Andrei Smirnov, considered all these alternatives,
they leaned towards the choice of former scientist, only because Smirnov physically resembled
neither a former KGB officer nor a Komsomol functionary.
 Condee (16 April 2021): 9

categories—commercialized science, state security, patriotic activism— to reveal their dark

underlying compatibilities, fused into a single credible character, a filmic hieroglyph, a high-
functioning abstraction.

The absence of information about the male protagonist is never simply something the director
did not get round to; it is a strategy we can trace backwards in the earlier films. In retrospect, we
recognize we had had similar uneasy hesitations about Zviagintsev’s other male protagonists:
who was the unnamed father (The Return) and why had he returned after twelve years? Who
were Alek and his brother (The Banishment), educated men somehow involved with the criminal
underworld? Little by little, we are trained by Zviagintsev to expect no answers, in part because
even more foundational information is missing. In The Return, the anonymous cast is referred to
only with common nouns (Mother, Father, Grandmother, Hooligan, Ringleader [Zavodila],
Waitress). This streamlined choice is utterly compatible with the director’s minimalist visual
style and laconic script. But then, in strategic contrast to this dominant namelessness, the two
named boys—Andrei and Ivan—are thereby linked together; we are encouraged to see the
narrative through their eyes; their stark differences from each other are magnified in importance,
another example of Zviagintsev’s employment of high relief.16

This strategy of effacement continues in The Banishment, where its execution is carried out in a
different fashion. Here, his characters have proper names, but largely unmarked by national or
ethnic identifiers—Alex (not Alek), Mark, Vera, Robert, Max, Viktor, Liza —and are often
chosen for their emblematic value: Alex (defender, an ironic choice), Vera (faith), Mark
(warrior), and Eva (Life). National locale is missing: shot in Moldova (the countryside scenes),
Belgium and France (the urban scenes), and Russia, the film erases all visual clues: street signs,
currency, license plates, and other cultural indicators either in production or in postproduction to
obscure their national origins. We will not explore here the trans-European marketing and
exhibition advantages for such a decision. Our interest here instead lies in the ways that erasure
supports Zviagintsev’s project of sublation.

The Third Technique

A third element in Zviagintsev’s work is his love of indeterminacy, of loose ends or puzzles
never solved: what does the strongbox contain (The Return) and why are we never permitted to
know?17 Why do we never return (The Banishment) to Mark’s gunshot wound for a post hoc
explanation? Who, finally, is the father of Vera’s child and why—if it is her husband after all—
did she mislead a man whom she loves? Critics have—quite reasonably—seen these lacunae as
flaws (Bradshaw). This is a critic’s conversation. The interest here concerns a distinct cinematic
style.

16
By “high relief,” I mean the director’s casting some elements of the script into darkness
(characters’ names [The Return]; Vladimir’s profession [Elena]), while heightening our attention
to other information (Andrei and Ivan [The Return]; the class contrasts of Ostozhenka and
Biriulevo [Elena]). This technique, akin to high-contrast lighting, does not seem to be ethically
marked: elements withheld from the viewer’s attention are not necessarily sacred or profane.
The technique seems to be deployed independent of axiological categories.
17
An earlier draft of the script contains the answer, but this fact tells us more about Zviagintsev
than about the contents.
 Condee (16 April 2021): 10

One should acknowledge immediately that this trait of indeterminacy is confoundingly akin to
Zviagintsev’s love of effacement. Let us pause for a moment to clarify this issue. If
Zviagintsev’s effacement is carried out by deleting empirical information of the past and present
(origins, locale, profession, name), then here indeterminacy is sustained by withholding an
anticipated revelation, the advent of which the director himself had signaled: surely in time, the
film would come to reveal the contents of the strongbox (The Return), the motive for Mark’s
shooting and the paternity of Vera’s unborn child (The Banishment). Our anticipation is
frustrated; the narrative scroll does not unroll in the manner we had expected. All three films
mix an incomplete knowledge of the past with these unreliable omens of the future. The men of
all three films have had a murky past—in The Return and The Banishment, perhaps a criminal
past, in Elena, perhaps a state-security past. The film’s disorienting mood suggests that the dark,
unsubstantiated intimations of that past are densely correlated to the dark, unfulfilled omens of
the future in ways that will remain unavailable to us.

In this respect, Zviagintsev is a kind of counter-Chekhov. In Chekhov’s work, the gun hanging
on the wall in Act One must be shot in Act Four; otherwise it has no place either on the wall or in
the script.18 In Zviagintsev’s work, the gun hanging on the wall turns out to be assurance of
nothing—unless, perhaps, a knife fight in the closing scene. Surfeited with omens, his world
remains increasingly unstable and unpredictable as the signs accumulate. The tower (The
Return) from which the fearful young Ivan jumps at the film’s beginning is not the tower from
which his fearless father topples to his death. The photograph the children find in the film’s
beginning is not the photograph they find at the end. Such occasional framing devices are not
signals of predictability, similarity, or even repetition, but of irrecoverable loss.

****
These three techniques—inversion, effacement, indeterminacy—are the hallmarks of
Zviagintsev’s visual and narrative style. They are deployed by the filmmaker to induce in his
viewers the conditions within which he would like to stage his central drama. Zviagintsev
arrives at his core topic by forcing the viewer to experience repeated failures of knowledge and
prediction: through the director’s strategic effacement, we struggle with a failure of knowledge
about the past and present; through indeterminacy, a failure of prediction about the narrative
future. To return to the Corinthians, once knowledge and prophecy are revealed as limited,
earthly practices, the ground is cleared for the central theme: the failure of love in a fallen world.

What unites Zviagintsev’s feature films—thus far, at least, in an unfinished career—is his
preoccupation with mortal love adrift from the sacred, its incipient failure commensurate to its
spiritual distance from “the complete.” The filmmaker’s portrait of “human error and its
consequences” (Bitel) is not concerned with abstract error as such, but with wayward missteps of
humans impaired by their distance from the divine. The attendant uncertainty of survival in a
world rife with portents, unintelligible to its characters, exacerbates eternal questions of elusive
faith, uncertain loyalty, and the demands of love beyond human competence. Zviagintsev’s
18
Chekhov’s remark—”If you have hung a pistol on the wall in the first act, then in the last act, it
should shoot. Otherwise, don’t hang it there”—has taken on a life of its own over the years. It is
attributed in different variants to several different historical moments. One reliable source is its
enunciation in Yalta in summer 1889 to I. Ia. Guliand, first published in the journal Osa (1910)
45 (21 November), p. 3. For additional attribution and information, see Chekhov and Guliand.
 Condee (16 April 2021): 11

sublunary characters often seem like exiles from an earlier time when ethical guidance was still
available. Their profane environment is replete with foreboding, but often about dire events that
do not even happen: the father carries a knife, but does not kill the children (The Return); the
protagonist brings a gun, but does not kill his wife’s alleged lover (The Banishment); the rowdy
grandson is left for dead, but does not die; the toddler does not topple from the balcony (Elena).
These unexpected reprieves nevertheless are mere happenstance: they seem to exist in a universe
far too distant from the sacred original.

In Elena, the most distinct symbol of impending apocalypse—the white horse by the railroad
tracks, as Elena travels out to see her son’s family—seems to foretell the heroine’s doomed
future. By the film’s conclusion, it is the horse itself that comes to a violent end; the heroine
flourishes.19 In another filmmaker’s work, this would be a sight gag; in Zviagintsev’s work, it is
a statement about the unintelligibility of meaning in a world that has forgotten its contact to the
divine.

****
It is against the backdrop of these three dominant techniques—inversion, effacement,
indeterminacy—that I would like to conclude this chapter with brief comments on Zviagintsev’s
links to the Tarkovskian tradition. The topic cannot receive exhaustive treatment here; the links
are simultaneously self-evident and deserving of extensive elaboration.

It is unarguable that Zviagintsev has apprenticed himself to Andrei Tarkovskii in several stylistic
respects: the director’s leisurely narrative tempo (a slow camera, little movement, long takes);
the minimalist script with its sparse dialogue; the extensive use of ambient sound design (water,
birds, trains); the broad landscapes, with sudden changes of weather; the pervasive mood of
spiritual nostalgia. Given these compatibilities, it is difficult to ignore cultural affinities.
Zviagintsev’s selection (The Return) of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1791 Requiem Mass in D
minor (K 626) is arguably an homage to Tarkovskii, who selected Johann Sebastian Bach’s 1732
Choral Prelude in F Minor (“Ich ruf zu’ dir Herr Jesu Christ”; BWV 639) for his 1972 science-
fiction Solaris [Soliaris]. More verifiably, Zviagintsev has spoken at length of his indebtedness
to Tarkovskii—in particular, “his attitude toward the rhythm and flow of time”—and has
underscored his admiration for both Tarkovskii’s 1966 Andrei Rublev and his 1975 The Mirror
[Zerkalo] (Abeel).

It is inevitable, therefore, that comparisons might further be made with another filmmaker
thirteen years’ Zviagintsev’s senior, but equally indebted to Tarkovskii’s cinema. Aleksandr
Sokurov and Zviagintsev can be situated in a larger constellation of Tarkovskian descendants
loosely described as Russia’s transcendental cinema, a cluster that would also include the early
Sergei Seliianov, Aleksandr Kaidanovskii, and Konstantin Lopushanskii.20 The list is
19
This Apocalypse that does not happen is perhaps a trace of Zviagintsev’s and Negin’s original
submission to British producer Oliver Dungey, who had tendered an offer for a film on the
Apocalypse. As Julian Graffy (2012) deftly notes, an apocalyptical theme (in visual and verbal
references) runs throughout the heroine’s final visit to her family.
20
The term “transcendental film” has a rich history. For the major coordinates, see Shrader (on
Yasujirō Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer) and, more locally, Efird (on Andrei
Tarkovskii). For recent work, see Kliueva (“Fil’m” 2010; 2011). I am grateful to Natalie
 Condee (16 April 2021): 12

contingent; it implies a working distinction between itself and so-called poetic cinema
(Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Iurii Illienko, Leonid Osyka, Sergei Parajanov).21 While the categories
surely overlap, and the distinctions must advisably remain a weak one, transcendental cinema is
concerned less with visual style (perspectivalism, flatness, tableau aesthetics) than with
philosophical states of cognition and meaning that reside in distinct belief systems outside the
cinema text.

And yet—despite the shared characteristics of within transcendental cinema—an accurate

positioning of Zviagintsev in the contemporary cinema landscape must comment on sharp
contrasts to Sokurov’s work, principal among them the status of the narrative line. Sokurov is
committed to that state of grace best captured through the static image and an accompanying
radical suppression of narrative.22 By contrast, Zviagintsev’s concern with secular human error
and its catastrophic consequences require greater narrative depth and complexity. Zviagintsev’s
principal techniques—an inversion of cultural references; an erasure of local signs; and an
insistence on loose ends—are grounded in characters with a robust and credible earthly
existence, confused by debased sacred fragments. Moreover, Zviagintsev does not share
Sokurov’s preoccupation with death, and while Zviagintsev’s cinema is compatible with
Sokurov’s notion that art (including cinema) can afford the viewer a fleeting glimpse of
immortality beyond the visible world, no characters (in Zviagintsev’s work) have access to this
knowledge within the four sides of the cinema screen.

On a larger scale, Sokurov and Zviagintsev figure among those “transcendentalists” who share a
common philosophical engagement with the later writings of Soviet philosopher Merab
Mamardashvili.23 Mamardashvili’s voice appears in Sokurov’s 1980 short documentary
Demoted [Razzhalovannyi]; he is cited by both Sokurov and Zviagintsev with enormous
reverence (Sokurov 16; Matizen 657).24 The two directors share Mamardashvili’s recurrent
investment in pan-European culture as a measure of humanity.25

Most relevant to this argument, it is perhaps no coincidence that Mamardashvili repeatedly

returns to the trope of inverted forms to describe the ways in which humanity operates in a
distorted world it has failed to understand. Arguing that “the real social connections between
people take on inverted, irrational forms” (1963: 114), Mamardashvili takes up a tradition of
things turned on their heads, deriving from Karl Marx’s polemics on the verwandelte Form

Ryabchikova for alerting me to Kliueva’s work.

21
My argument here is indebted to two younger scholars, Joshua First and Olga Kim, whose
work has helped sharpen my thinking.
22
This argument is elaborated in Condee 2011.
23
See as-yet unpublished work by Alyssa DeBlasio on Mamardashvili’s impact on late Soviet
culture.
24
See Savel’ev (60) for a discussion of this aspect of Sokurov’s film.
25
A caveat to Sokurov’s putative regard for pan-European high culture, of course, is his three
Japanese documentaries—the 1996 Eastern Elegy [Vostochnaia elegiia]; his 1997 A Humble
Life [Smirennaia zhizn’]; and his 2000 dolce… [dol’che…]. Arguably, one might add to this list
his 2005 full-length feature film on Hirohito, Sun [Solntse], in which the Asian tyrant is a more
amiable creature than his European counterparts (Lenin in the 1999 Moloch [Molokh] and Hitler
in the 2000 Taurus [Telets]).
 Condee (16 April 2021): 13

(Nikolchina). In his most explicit treatment of this theme, his essay “Inverted Forms: On the
Necessity of Irrational Expressions” [“Prevrashchennye formy: O neobkhodimosti
neratsional’nykh vyrazhenii”], Mamardashvili speaks of such inverted forms as an “enchanted
world, placed on its head, and densely populated with ghosts and miracles,” but (in the words of
Miglena Nikolchina), “immune to a reversal, a backward inversion, so to speak, that would
reveal their truth” (94).

More research—such as that already begun by Alyssa DeBlasio—must be ventured to establish

an explicit link between Zviagintsev’s inversions and its ancestry in Mamardashvili’s “Inverted
Forms,” in circulation in the hothouse philosophical environment of Moscow’s late 1980s and
early 1990s. But these details perhaps contribute to the earlier, near-forgotten promise: are
Zviagintsev’s inversions a caprice or a philosophical statement about the secular world? I
believe the director’s inversions are most plausibly the latter. His sublunary drifters cannot set
the world right; their knowledge and prophecies are insufficient to rescue their loved ones from a
condition that requires more than human competencies. It would be banal to assert that
Zviagintsev’s core theme is transcendent love—love beyond the secular realm—but much of his
filmmaking suggests that he hopes to position the viewer for a contemplation of what precisely
such a condition might be.

****
Keywords: Zviagintsev, Tarkovskii, Sokurov transcendental cinema, Return, Banishment, Elena,
Leviathan.

Nancy Condee is Professor of Slavic and Film Studies (University of Pittsburgh). Books include
The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov (co-editor Birgit Beumers; I. B. Tauris); Imperial Trace:
Recent Russian Cinema (Oxford); and Soviet Hieroglyphics (Indiana UP/BFI). Articles have
appeared in PMLA, The Nation, and Russian journals NLO, Iskusstvo kino, and Seans.

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 Condee (16 April 2021): 14

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 Condee (16 April 2021): 15

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