My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Final Paper)
The IMBD description of this film reads something like “Ivan Lapshin is the head of the local police in the 1930’s and he does what he needs to do”. The immediate film that pops into my mind is a menacing bad ass action film about a cop who doesn’t take any crap from anyone. However, what we get in reality is a man’s reflections and memories of his childhood. It’s the story of the police and other “grownups” that occupy the same apartment as this boy. This is a really interesting choice the filmmakers made here as it adds so many things to every shot we see on screen. We only see this boy a few times in the background or walking down the hallway, he is not “in the room” per say when most of the events depicted on screen happen. Meaning this is not first-hand information, or even second hand, it’s third hand. The events happen, the characters involved in these events talk about it around the flat and keep people updated, the young boy’s dad hears this and learns of the happenings. Then when the boy asks what is going on his dad tells him whatever he can, whatever the child can handle, perhaps he tells him that he will find out when he is older as that is a common thing for parents to say. Therefore, the information we receive is third hand information from a nine-year-old’s memory. Censored through a police officer and a father. So not only do we have an unreliable narrator, we have third hand information and we run into the pitfalls in the forms of nostalgia and imagination.
One thing that immediately strikes me about this whole perspective of childishness is the idea that Tarkovsky put forward, that his films didn’t make sense because people watched them too much like adults. In this film it’s almost like these events don’t make sense to the people experiencing them because they are not looking at them with the same childlike lens that Tarkovsky films require. The events in the film potentially don’t make sense to the people experiencing them because it takes place in the 30’s, in a time of much suffering for all the people living in it. This was well into Stalin’s rule and the whole liquidation period we have seen in films like Burnt by the Sun. It was the sadly the case that in this era that if someone didn’t like you, or you stepped just the slightest bit out of line, or even if you got too powerful, that was it for you. As a grown person living at the time, knowing of human empathy and compassion, and remembering better times, I imagine that it would be very hard to explain why so much suffering and cruelty was occurring around you. But as a child it would be easy to kind of divide people into “good guys” and “bad guys” and sort of live in this difficult situation as he had no idea that it could be better. This seems to be exactly what happens. The people that this child knows are the supposed good guys and the group of “criminals” that they are after are the bad guys. He is told that the Solovyev gang have killed people and need to stop, however, the only real violence we see from this supposed criminal are acts of self-defense. What I believe is that Ivan Lapshin is the villain of the this film and if he was portrayed in some of the previous films we have watched in the class like Burnt by the Sun he would be portrayed as such.
I could be wrong and the man in the gang that everyone is hunting could actually be a bad guy, but based on what we know about the Russian police, the time period, and the whole idea of liquidation, it isn’t out of the question that this very vague character isn’t as bad as we hear. This is another interesting theme in the movie, the withholding of information, this, as I have mentioned before with the third hand information idea, sort of works the same way. The police man definitely does not tell all to his roommates, and the father would not tell all to his child as it is pretty dark stuff being dealt with. So now we have to add censorship onto the list of pitfalls. All that we learn is that this Solovyev guy has broken out of prison, or has been released, and now Ivan is determined to get him back in there. Whatever happened between them in the past seems intense as Ivan shows a lot of determination and intensity when he talks about these gang members. We learn that they are supposedly killers, however this could be in the same vein of the accusation thrown at the patriarch of Burnt by the Sun, when we finally get a glimpse at these evil men they seem to be living relatively peacefully in a similar commune to the one that the narrator occupies. We do not see any criminal activities occur on screen except the ones perpetrated by the police and the others living in the commune with the narrator, however most of those acts of violence are carried out under protection from the law.
This film is very hard to follow, that is why I spent the previous paragraphs deciphering it’s layers of shrouded storytelling. Each scene must be taken with a grain of salt and an open mind that what we are seeing is so far from the actual events that we really cant trust any of it. While that may sound like an annoyance it is actually kind of a beautiful exploration of times of uncertainty and even childhood in a way. In a time as tough as the 30’s or more specifically the 40’s to come, there is really no way of knowing if what is going on is real or not, when it is so far from what we know from regular life. In childhood in a similar way, a normal day for a kid isn’t remembered and their ideas are not fully formed or shaped yet, they are moldable, they are uncertain, their culture and their acquittances form them into however they want or even however they just coincidentally just happen to. The fact that this film is titled My Friend Ivan Lapshin is interesting with this thought in mind. We do not really see Ivan be kind or even friendly to our narrator, we barely see them interact at all. I imagine this is to show that the other people in the compound most likely spoke very highly of him as to not be liquidated, if everyone in the house kept their mouth shut to look good in front of Lapshin there is no doubt the kid would grow up thinking that he is the greatest.
I mentioned that this film was hard to understand and follow, now that is not only from the complexity in narrative but also in the unfolding of events. It is not confusing in the same way as say Mirror. In that film there are a lot of artistic and metaphorical tools being used. There is an abundance of symbolism and surrealism, the whole film seems very dreamlike, at times there are barely any ties to reality. In this film it is almost the opposite, while of course it is artistic, with its own share of symbols and metaphors, it is very realistic in what it shows. The whole film is based in reality, it shows event after event with no stopping sort of like normally is, there are hints of nostalgia but not in the same vain as Mirror it is definitely more of a documentary style. Perhaps this is because he has sat down to write instead of reflecting natural as the narrator in Mirror does. This film has many characters with many storylines all happening at once, it is as much a whirlwind for the audience as it is for the people in the house. There is a constant stream of actions and happens and relationships changing and growing. I imagine being a kid living around a dozen people, hearing all their stories, trying to figure out what each of them does, would result in a comprehension of events something like this.
I have mentioned child’s comprehension before and childlike thought. This film opens in a bizarre way, after we get the intro from the narrator where he strangely introduces us to his grandson, we cut immediately to two grown men doing a comedy routine that goes on for way too long. We are meant to see it as incredible as a child would, while it is really quite silly and overly long. The first view of this world we see is children acting like adults and it is not the only time we see this. Soon after two of the men lay in bed and a third man scares them resulting in one of the men to react strongly in a fit of almost terror. This is the first view of PTSD we get in the film it is talked about further later. However, this reenactment of a PTSD attack is so very childish it had to come from the memory of a child, the understanding of a child. The men talk about how their dreams are bad and they feel like they are still on the battlefield. I feel like this is a definite way a father would explain a hard concept to a child. This odd night terror scene is one of the scenes that cemented the idea of a child’s memoires for me, the other comes later and again deals in a very dark topic a father would have a hard time explaining. A depressed writer arrives in the house by the name of Khanin, his wife has left him, and he just appears to be destroyed. He makes a bed and as the rest of the inhabitants of the house fall asleep he takes a gun and attempts suicide in a very cartoon-ish and comic way in the bathroom. He struggles for about 5 minutes to find a good place to shoot, he sticks the barrel of the gun in his mouth and gags, he looks at the gun cluelessly until he finally misfires the gun into the tub, alerting the inhabitants to come and stop him. If a child heard that a man put a gun in his mouth, or attempted to shoot himself, an image like the one we just saw is what they would think. They would have no experience with sadness or suicide, it would all be dumbed down in a way for them. Far later in the film one of the characters attempts to woo a woman who they have all come to know, an actress, however she does not love him she loves Khanin, the writer. The way we see this happen feels very much childish as well. He brings a large almost cartoon ladder to outside her window and sneaks in like a bad teen movie. Once again if a dad had to tell a young kid why someone was sad he could say something along the lines of what we saw, he tried to sneak in to see her and tell her he loved her, but she didn’t love him back.
This film contains many storylines, a troupe of actors arrives and puts on a not-so great play. I was not very interested in this plot, I feel like there is definitely meaning there however I was not invested in it. A young boy runs a small zoo and learns the ways of nature and predators and prey, a theme relating to Ivan Lapshin I believe. The writer Khanin goes from a depression over his wife’s departure to a workaholic, on his typewriter in most of the scenes we see him in. Ivan Lapshin hunts down his criminals. There is just so much going on in every inch of the house, every place is full of life and stories. Some of the men are soldiers, some are cops, some are writers and actors. We just get a glimpse of every angle of life at the time. If I had to describe the plot of this film it would be that a young boy watches helplessly as dozens of his roommates go on and lead exciting lives and he has to wait to hear the stories. Some of them are unremarkable but to him they must be vastly important as he could have been writing his memoir about WWII but he seems to not care about that era. That era did have his friends or his father more than likely.
There has been a movement recently in regards to this director and his films. People believe that he is underrated and in fact My Friend Ivan Lapshin is actually one of the best Soviet films ever produced. I am not sure how I feel about this but in a sense I feel it a very complete and whole Soviet film. I see aspects from every other film we have watched in it. I see the exploration of memory and childhood from Mirror, the depiction of liquidation from Burnt by the Sun, as well as the exploration of who is good or bad from it as well. I see the look into the world of theater and performance from Circus in the acting troupe scenes that I did not touch on too much, and the attempt to depict life in its entirety from Man with a Movie Camera. We get distant relationships and explorations of how people interact within a house together like Child of the Big City, and the camaraderie of Battleship Potemkin and Ballad of a Soldier. Along with this all I feel too that we really get a sense of realism like Little Vera, and I can’t be sure but there appears to be a Chapaev film poster in on the bedrooms. Really its all the great things about previous films we watched rolled into one, it tackles a lot of topics and is a really ambitious film overall. With all this in mind however I do not feel qualified to pick the best Soviet film.
I feel that there is so much I am missing and misinterpreting in this film it was easily the hardest film I have watched, there was just information overload and on top of that about three layers of obscuring over it. There was a large cast of characters all in their own stories and we had to just be in the same position as the narrator. We had to be right next to him, at the dinner table with 5 different conversations going on at once, that is what this film felt like. I loved it honestly, it really at times felt more like a documentary than a piece of fiction, this could be because of the lack of a traditional plot structure, or the sort of mundane nature of the some of the things we saw but it all seemed real in the headspace the film wanted us to be in. When observed closer we see that it was a terrible time in Russian history with a gleam of child-like imagination and innocence poured over it. It was a look at a terrible event with innocent eyes and a naïve mind. Similar to other characters we have learned to love in Russian film like Chapaev or Danila, our narrator was naïve, and innocent put in (but mostly around) a violent situation. There were so many interesting things going on in this film, the lack of the presence of the character we were told we were seeing the memories of, the bizarre and limited use of color in the film that seems to have correlation to what is happening on screen, unless it is just a more vivid memory for our narrator. Even down to bizarre scene mishap at the theatre. There was no way of telling where this film would go but it was very much like watching a friend try to remember what he did three summers ago, thoughts knock out others and stories ramble into others. There is no telling what will come next or how it will end but you have to just be like the kid in the backseat and just go along for the ride.
One thing that immediately strikes me about this whole perspective of childishness is the idea that Tarkovsky put forward, that his films didn’t make sense because people watched them too much like adults. In this film it’s almost like these events don’t make sense to the people experiencing them because they are not looking at them with the same childlike lens that Tarkovsky films require. The events in the film potentially don’t make sense to the people experiencing them because it takes place in the 30’s, in a time of much suffering for all the people living in it. This was well into Stalin’s rule and the whole liquidation period we have seen in films like Burnt by the Sun. It was the sadly the case that in this era that if someone didn’t like you, or you stepped just the slightest bit out of line, or even if you got too powerful, that was it for you. As a grown person living at the time, knowing of human empathy and compassion, and remembering better times, I imagine that it would be very hard to explain why so much suffering and cruelty was occurring around you. But as a child it would be easy to kind of divide people into “good guys” and “bad guys” and sort of live in this difficult situation as he had no idea that it could be better. This seems to be exactly what happens. The people that this child knows are the supposed good guys and the group of “criminals” that they are after are the bad guys. He is told that the Solovyev gang have killed people and need to stop, however, the only real violence we see from this supposed criminal are acts of self-defense. What I believe is that Ivan Lapshin is the villain of the this film and if he was portrayed in some of the previous films we have watched in the class like Burnt by the Sun he would be portrayed as such.
I could be wrong and the man in the gang that everyone is hunting could actually be a bad guy, but based on what we know about the Russian police, the time period, and the whole idea of liquidation, it isn’t out of the question that this very vague character isn’t as bad as we hear. This is another interesting theme in the movie, the withholding of information, this, as I have mentioned before with the third hand information idea, sort of works the same way. The police man definitely does not tell all to his roommates, and the father would not tell all to his child as it is pretty dark stuff being dealt with. So now we have to add censorship onto the list of pitfalls. All that we learn is that this Solovyev guy has broken out of prison, or has been released, and now Ivan is determined to get him back in there. Whatever happened between them in the past seems intense as Ivan shows a lot of determination and intensity when he talks about these gang members. We learn that they are supposedly killers, however this could be in the same vein of the accusation thrown at the patriarch of Burnt by the Sun, when we finally get a glimpse at these evil men they seem to be living relatively peacefully in a similar commune to the one that the narrator occupies. We do not see any criminal activities occur on screen except the ones perpetrated by the police and the others living in the commune with the narrator, however most of those acts of violence are carried out under protection from the law.
This film is very hard to follow, that is why I spent the previous paragraphs deciphering it’s layers of shrouded storytelling. Each scene must be taken with a grain of salt and an open mind that what we are seeing is so far from the actual events that we really cant trust any of it. While that may sound like an annoyance it is actually kind of a beautiful exploration of times of uncertainty and even childhood in a way. In a time as tough as the 30’s or more specifically the 40’s to come, there is really no way of knowing if what is going on is real or not, when it is so far from what we know from regular life. In childhood in a similar way, a normal day for a kid isn’t remembered and their ideas are not fully formed or shaped yet, they are moldable, they are uncertain, their culture and their acquittances form them into however they want or even however they just coincidentally just happen to. The fact that this film is titled My Friend Ivan Lapshin is interesting with this thought in mind. We do not really see Ivan be kind or even friendly to our narrator, we barely see them interact at all. I imagine this is to show that the other people in the compound most likely spoke very highly of him as to not be liquidated, if everyone in the house kept their mouth shut to look good in front of Lapshin there is no doubt the kid would grow up thinking that he is the greatest.
I mentioned that this film was hard to understand and follow, now that is not only from the complexity in narrative but also in the unfolding of events. It is not confusing in the same way as say Mirror. In that film there are a lot of artistic and metaphorical tools being used. There is an abundance of symbolism and surrealism, the whole film seems very dreamlike, at times there are barely any ties to reality. In this film it is almost the opposite, while of course it is artistic, with its own share of symbols and metaphors, it is very realistic in what it shows. The whole film is based in reality, it shows event after event with no stopping sort of like normally is, there are hints of nostalgia but not in the same vain as Mirror it is definitely more of a documentary style. Perhaps this is because he has sat down to write instead of reflecting natural as the narrator in Mirror does. This film has many characters with many storylines all happening at once, it is as much a whirlwind for the audience as it is for the people in the house. There is a constant stream of actions and happens and relationships changing and growing. I imagine being a kid living around a dozen people, hearing all their stories, trying to figure out what each of them does, would result in a comprehension of events something like this.
I have mentioned child’s comprehension before and childlike thought. This film opens in a bizarre way, after we get the intro from the narrator where he strangely introduces us to his grandson, we cut immediately to two grown men doing a comedy routine that goes on for way too long. We are meant to see it as incredible as a child would, while it is really quite silly and overly long. The first view of this world we see is children acting like adults and it is not the only time we see this. Soon after two of the men lay in bed and a third man scares them resulting in one of the men to react strongly in a fit of almost terror. This is the first view of PTSD we get in the film it is talked about further later. However, this reenactment of a PTSD attack is so very childish it had to come from the memory of a child, the understanding of a child. The men talk about how their dreams are bad and they feel like they are still on the battlefield. I feel like this is a definite way a father would explain a hard concept to a child. This odd night terror scene is one of the scenes that cemented the idea of a child’s memoires for me, the other comes later and again deals in a very dark topic a father would have a hard time explaining. A depressed writer arrives in the house by the name of Khanin, his wife has left him, and he just appears to be destroyed. He makes a bed and as the rest of the inhabitants of the house fall asleep he takes a gun and attempts suicide in a very cartoon-ish and comic way in the bathroom. He struggles for about 5 minutes to find a good place to shoot, he sticks the barrel of the gun in his mouth and gags, he looks at the gun cluelessly until he finally misfires the gun into the tub, alerting the inhabitants to come and stop him. If a child heard that a man put a gun in his mouth, or attempted to shoot himself, an image like the one we just saw is what they would think. They would have no experience with sadness or suicide, it would all be dumbed down in a way for them. Far later in the film one of the characters attempts to woo a woman who they have all come to know, an actress, however she does not love him she loves Khanin, the writer. The way we see this happen feels very much childish as well. He brings a large almost cartoon ladder to outside her window and sneaks in like a bad teen movie. Once again if a dad had to tell a young kid why someone was sad he could say something along the lines of what we saw, he tried to sneak in to see her and tell her he loved her, but she didn’t love him back.
This film contains many storylines, a troupe of actors arrives and puts on a not-so great play. I was not very interested in this plot, I feel like there is definitely meaning there however I was not invested in it. A young boy runs a small zoo and learns the ways of nature and predators and prey, a theme relating to Ivan Lapshin I believe. The writer Khanin goes from a depression over his wife’s departure to a workaholic, on his typewriter in most of the scenes we see him in. Ivan Lapshin hunts down his criminals. There is just so much going on in every inch of the house, every place is full of life and stories. Some of the men are soldiers, some are cops, some are writers and actors. We just get a glimpse of every angle of life at the time. If I had to describe the plot of this film it would be that a young boy watches helplessly as dozens of his roommates go on and lead exciting lives and he has to wait to hear the stories. Some of them are unremarkable but to him they must be vastly important as he could have been writing his memoir about WWII but he seems to not care about that era. That era did have his friends or his father more than likely.
There has been a movement recently in regards to this director and his films. People believe that he is underrated and in fact My Friend Ivan Lapshin is actually one of the best Soviet films ever produced. I am not sure how I feel about this but in a sense I feel it a very complete and whole Soviet film. I see aspects from every other film we have watched in it. I see the exploration of memory and childhood from Mirror, the depiction of liquidation from Burnt by the Sun, as well as the exploration of who is good or bad from it as well. I see the look into the world of theater and performance from Circus in the acting troupe scenes that I did not touch on too much, and the attempt to depict life in its entirety from Man with a Movie Camera. We get distant relationships and explorations of how people interact within a house together like Child of the Big City, and the camaraderie of Battleship Potemkin and Ballad of a Soldier. Along with this all I feel too that we really get a sense of realism like Little Vera, and I can’t be sure but there appears to be a Chapaev film poster in on the bedrooms. Really its all the great things about previous films we watched rolled into one, it tackles a lot of topics and is a really ambitious film overall. With all this in mind however I do not feel qualified to pick the best Soviet film.
I feel that there is so much I am missing and misinterpreting in this film it was easily the hardest film I have watched, there was just information overload and on top of that about three layers of obscuring over it. There was a large cast of characters all in their own stories and we had to just be in the same position as the narrator. We had to be right next to him, at the dinner table with 5 different conversations going on at once, that is what this film felt like. I loved it honestly, it really at times felt more like a documentary than a piece of fiction, this could be because of the lack of a traditional plot structure, or the sort of mundane nature of the some of the things we saw but it all seemed real in the headspace the film wanted us to be in. When observed closer we see that it was a terrible time in Russian history with a gleam of child-like imagination and innocence poured over it. It was a look at a terrible event with innocent eyes and a naïve mind. Similar to other characters we have learned to love in Russian film like Chapaev or Danila, our narrator was naïve, and innocent put in (but mostly around) a violent situation. There were so many interesting things going on in this film, the lack of the presence of the character we were told we were seeing the memories of, the bizarre and limited use of color in the film that seems to have correlation to what is happening on screen, unless it is just a more vivid memory for our narrator. Even down to bizarre scene mishap at the theatre. There was no way of telling where this film would go but it was very much like watching a friend try to remember what he did three summers ago, thoughts knock out others and stories ramble into others. There is no telling what will come next or how it will end but you have to just be like the kid in the backseat and just go along for the ride.
Comments
Post a Comment