Two Auteurs' Shorts (Patreon)

The Potemkinists (Radu Jude, 2022)

Jude's short film is not so much a tribute to Sergei Eisenstein as it is a reconsideration of the actual mutineers of the Russian ship the Potemkin, using a little-known historical footnote to address the broader problem of cultural history in the former Soviet bloc. While Eisenstein concludes Potemkin with the tsarist ships joining the Potemkin in revolt, this is (as Jude's onscreen counterpart says) "bullshit propaganda." In truth, Romania's King Carol II gave the Potemkin safe harbor and permitted its crew to legally immigrate to Romania. This was a political flex, as Romania was looking to assert itself against Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe.

So in The Potemkinists, a sculptor (Alexander Dabija) is trying to convince an arts funding bureaucrat (Cristina Draghici) to give him money to repurpose a Communist-era monument on the Danube. He wants to turn it into an homage to the sailors of the Potemkin, and a public remembrance of the aid that Romania gave them. The artist's motives are also political, a fuck-you to present day Russia and a protest of the fact that, in his words, "the world is sucking Putin's dick." Alas, the bureaucrat is unconvinced, since paying tribute to the Potemkinists might be perceived as a pro-Communist gesture, and absolute no-no. Jude presents the conundrum of intellectuals on the Romanian left, the fact that any vaguely pro-working class or anti-racist gesture is castigated as a throwback to communism, giving the right wing an all-purpose political trump card. At the same time, Jude mocks the tendency of so many artists to use history as a means of their own self-aggrandizement. 

Last Screening (Darezhan Omirbayev, 2022)

A significant improvement on last year's Poet, this miniature narrative from Kazakhstan's best-known filmmaker begins rather conventionally before taking a surprising new formal approach. We first see the main protagonist (Illyas Shakirov) alone in his bedroom, scrolling through the Instagram of a classmate (Dina Bekseitova) he's attracted to. The next morning we see him in the back of a calculus class, half paying attention, while the young woman is seated a few rows up. It's clear she doesn't know he's alive, and after class she goes to the cafeteria with a girlfriend and two beefy himbos. Our hero looks on in bitterness, and heads back home.

The extended middle section of Last Screening reflects a bold new approach for Omirbayev, as he partly abandons the young man in favor of a broad semi-random cross-section of contemporary Kazakhstan. During a long bus ride, we focus on various passengers, all of whom are fixated on their mobile devices. Two young boys play a digital soccer game. One person is watching a clip of an interview between Godard and Fritz Lang. Someone is listening to a lecturer describe agrarian vs. urban society in Kazakhstan, and how it has produced two distinct cultures. And during the bus ride, Omirbayev films out the windows of the bus, showing the post-communist construction boom in Almaty, with high-rise apartments, Saks Fifth Avenue, Burger King, and other capitalist totems.

In the final section, the young man gets off the bus early and goes to a movie. As it happens, he is the first person to buy a ticket for the afternoon matinee, and they will only screen the film if five or more people are present, and only he and an old man have paid. So he offers to pay admission for three soldiers he finds outside. The movie starts, the soldiers fall asleep and then leave, and the two remaining patrons leave the theater and head out into the snow. This portion of Last Screening is more than a bit familiar, and instantly calls to mind Tsai's Goodbye Dragon Inn. But Last Screening places Omirbayev's nostalgia for moviegoing in a different context. He ruefully observes capitalism's rapaciousness, while casting its critics (like himself) as marginalized curmudgeons, feckless and embittered. Cruel, but fair.