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Letters from a Dead Man is another film that deals with the theme of the nuclear nightmare. It falls into a mini-genre of nuclear holocaust film along with others such as On the Beach (1959), Dr Strangelove or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Fail-Safe (1964), The War Game (1965) et al. But what makes Letters from a Dead Man unique in this case is that the treatment is one that comes from the opposite side of the Iron Curtain. Every single other treatment of the nuclear holocaust theme was made in the West and comes based on the speculation (or at least implication) of what would happen if the bombs falling were coming from the Soviet side; this is one which shows everything from the other perspective. In both cases though, the films are almost identical in their treatment of the subject matter and are certainly agreed upon what an horrific experience the nuclear holocaust would be. Letters perhaps comes without the sentimentalized approach of other contemporary views of the holocaust, as shown in The Day After (1983) and Testament (1983), which related the horrors to the effect on Middle America and the destruction of the family unit. Rather Letters comes closer to the celebrated pseudo-documentary The War Game in its almost unimaginably bleak depiction of the grim reality of a nuclear blast. Even more so it is most surprising to see a pre– i>glasnost film that comes from the heavily state-censored Soviet Union and yet manages to be so outspoken against the arms race and moreover rule by military.

Despite the bleakness of the subject, Letters manages to be an extraordinarily optimistic film. The final image of Rolan Bykov’s professor walking away into the blizzard with the children, “Along as a man walks he shall have hope,” is a remarkably proffering of humanist faith. There are some moments of quite striking poetry to the dialogue, especially the narrated letters of the professor to his son. This is possibly due to the hand of sf writer Boris Strugatsky, who with his brother Arkady was one of the few sf writers in the Soviet Union, the two producing works like Tale of the Troika (1968), Hard to Be a God (1973) and Roadside Picnic (1977), the latter liberally adapted by themselves as Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). The detonation of the bomb itself is an image of great beauty – where the detonation of a model cityscape is strikingly contrasted with a soundtrack that only consists of an operatic score and the half-intelligible babblings of a child in the background. There are times when Letters trips up in the stodgy ponderousness that seemingly dogs all Russian sf films – the scenes with one of Bykov’s colleagues toasting the nobility of the human race and then sitting in a grave to blow his brains out, or one woman’s lectures on how she can try and spontaneously evolve to live with radiation, which have a contrarily humorous note to them where it is hard to tell whether the film was approaching things with tongue planted in cheek or not. Most of the film is shot in sepia-tone alternating with a harsh fluorescent blue black-and-white, with the exception of a single colour scene.

1.26GB | 1h 22m | 888×648 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/81DD1D9281A5C20/Konstantin_Lopushansky_-_Dead_Man’s_Letters__1986_.mkv

Language:Russian
Subtitles:English

The post Konstantin Lopushansky – Pisma myortvogo cheloveka AKA Letters from a Dead Man (1986) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Based on the novel of the same title by the Strugatsky brothers

“Konstantin Lopushansky was a student of classic Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, and master’s influence is highly visible in “The Ugly Swans” — not just as a ghost in the background, but as full-fledged foreground presence. Which is not to deny Lopushansky his originality. More than anything, it’s a sign of a certain artistic style being handed down over the generations… The film is …aesthetically outstanding and emotionally moody in a way that’s very hard to gauge… Tarkovsky would have been proud.” (Tom Birchenough, “The Moscow Times”)

Synopsis

Victor Banev, a Russian writer now living in America, is seeking his daughter, Ira, in the expanse of his former homeland. Banev’s ultimate destination is a remote Siberian town of Tashlinsk, where military forces are now in control after some sort of unexplained catastrophe.
In a city of Tashlinsk, mysterious circumstances have led to non-stop rainfall and the appearance of eerie characters called ‘mokretsy’ (the Wet Ones, or “Aquatters”), who are either aliens or mutants, and who generate a special energy barrier to protect themselves from or to prevent communication with undesirable human specimens.
The mokretsy appeal to gifted children who in the past had been in a special boarding school in Tashlinsk. And amongst them is Victor Banev’s daughter. Under the keen supervision of the mokretsy, the gifted kids are gradually transformed into a cadre of twisted mental geniuses with seemingly no humanity, no attachments or sentimentalities. And if indeed “Truth comes from the mouths of babes…”, what we, mere mortals, should do if we simply cannot accept this Truth? …And so, the confrontation unfolds.

The imagery of light, sound, and plasticity is exquisite. The scenery is eerily lit in dominating red tints as the rain pours down everywhere, the entire time. The brilliant musical score, recorded before the shooting to inspire the makers, comes from Andrei Sigle, Alexander Sokurov’s regular composer.

IMHO…
It is not a thriller. It is not an ecological warning.
Some may find it visionary, others infuriating.
It is philosophical sci-fi, highly atmospheric and beautiful, created in the best arthouse tradition.

http://nitroflare.com/view/F4A8F96517BCCE8/Gadkie.lebedi.avi

Language:Russian
Subtitles:English build-in subtitles

The post Konstantin Lopushansky – Gadkie lebedi aka The Ugly Swans (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.