30 Years Under the White Sun

In 1968, just a few months after Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia to quell the Prague Spring, another crisis was brewing in the Kremlin. At the Kremlin dacha, to be more exact ...

General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev was having a party with his acolytes. The appointed hour came to screen the Western movie traditional at such parties. But somehow the featured film had gone missing. It was Sunday, nobody was working. The mortified representative of Goskino (State Committee for Cinema) recalled that there was a “Russian Western” sitting on the censor’s shelf. God Save the Goskino! After all, The Tsar is Permitted Everything. This weekend, instead of an American Western, Brezhnev previewed an uncut version of White Sun of the Desert.

In the middle of the night after the screening, the Goskino minister was woken by a phone call from Brezhnev. “You’re making good movies out there,” Leonid Ilyich told him. “You really know how to please me.”

This auspicious turn of events “saved” White Sun of the Desert. Shortly before the Brezhnev showing, the film’s director, Vladimir Motyl, had been told to make some 27 “corrections” to the film. After the incident at the dacha, the number of edits was whittled to three. One change the kino commissars insisted on was that Motyl “edit out the naked buttocks of Katerina Matveevna” in a scene where the film’s protagonist, Sukhov, dreams of his wife after a long absence from home. Still, Motyl, who was famous for “never bowing his head to anyone,” balked. “Brezhnev is happy,” he said, “what else do you want?!” But the apparatchik replied with an unassailable argument: “Volodya! No naked a— could ever deviate the party and the government. But you can easily deviate the Soviet people.” If only he knew how close he was to the truth ...

White Sun of the Desert went on to become one of a handful of Soviet-era films known and loved by all Russians, not just for its ironic tone and Western-style plotline (see box, page 16), but also because it was different (or, in the view of the censors, “ideologically shaky”). Some years later, when Brezhnev was readying for a détente-inspired trip to the US, he ordered Goskino to prepare the five best Soviet films to be shown in Carnegie Hall. He was quick to notice that the apparatchiks’ list did not include White Sun, so he added it to the list himself. The film came to America, where it received positive reviews.

By any measure, White Sun was a mega-hit, seen by over 100 mn Soviets in its first year alone. But Motyl saw no financial windfall, despite the fact that Soviet directors benefited financially and otherwise from successful films. He would not find out the reason for this until some years later, when a representative of Glavkinoprokat (the Soviet institution which oversaw film distribution) revealed the secret over a shot of vodka. It had been decided by the ideological watchdogs that this “politically incorrect” film must not be ranked in the top ten Soviet movies shown. So it was always ranked lower: 11th or 12th; its ticket sales were attributed to more ideologically acceptable films. “They loved me,” Motyl said, “because I helped them to overfulfill the plan for many years. Each year, data and figures relevant to the White Sun were lowered on order from Goskino and the Central Committee of the CPSU ... mediocre movies, which failed commercially but which were done by officially endorsed directors, were stealing figures from us.”

Exportfilm cheated on figures for the same reason. Over 100 countries bought the White Sun, but Exportfilm paid for only 20 sales.

Later, Mosfilm took over the copyright on White Sun. Motyl saw nothing from the huge, legal video sales of the film all over the world. Moreover, White Sun is shown on TV  at least 4-5 times a year on different channels, bringing in the most lucrative commercial contracts. Mosfilm receives $10,000 and $18,000 for each showing. Motyl gets nothing.

The only chance Motyl has been offered to obtain long overdue financial compensation was on a proposed sequel of White Sun. Numerous “people of substance,” including then Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, have offered support for a sequel. But Motyl bristles at the idea – such a venture, he said, would surely spoil the legend of the original. Besides, he said, “the actors are almost 30 years older ... the only thing I would  maybe agree to would be a remake with younger actors.”

But even this compromise, Motyl said, makes him cringe. “I understand that, commercially, the film would work well. Each of the millions of previous viewers would watch the new version at least once. But then I thought to myself: What price shall I set for silencing my conscience, which was whispering to me – ‘Don’t do this.’ For I am fatalist — if a film has to be done, it is going to happen anyway, by will of fate. That’s the way I have produced all my films.”

The Road to Karakum

Fate has played a large role in Motyl’s life and career. As a young boy growing up in the Urals in the 1930s, he was mesmerized by the new cinema. His mother, Berta Levin, had been exiled to the region after her husband was arrested. Films shown in a local club were the only local distraction and Motyl’s only window to the outside world. Glued to the screen, he says he swore to his mother: “I will make movies.” Despite her meager salary, his mother, a nurse at an orphanage, bought her son a subscription to an illustrated film magazine.

After high school, Motyl failed to enter a film institute, so he became a theater director instead. And it was there, in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) that he had a fateful clash with a local komsomol boss. The apparatchik banned two of Motyl’s theater performances because they were impregnated with the spirit of Khrushchev’s thaw. In a bizarre twist worthy of a movie script, this party boss would dog Motyl throughout his career.

Motyl made the jump from theater to film when a director in Tadzhikistan was fired from a film team. Motyl reworked the script, replaced the actors and broke through with his team to the hitherto inaccessible Pamir. His finished film,  Children of Pamir, was a smashing debut. It earned him a State Prize in the Soviet Republic of Tadzhikistan as well as the title Honorary Citizen of Dushanbe (the capital). Still, the film commissar from Sverdlovsk used his influence to ensure that the film did not participate in the International Class A Festival in Venice. There, Soviet films for children had a strong track record for bringing home the coveted Golden Lion award.

Motyl’s next film project was quashed when party bosses disallowed both of his screenplays for a film about the Decembrists – the scripts apparently had “too much of a touch of dissidence.” So the embattled director turned to a lighter subject, an ironic comedy about the Second World War, Zhenya, Zhenechka, Katyusha (1961). But this only added fuel to the fire. Back then, irony was not a tone used to portray the Great Patriotic War. Motyl was dressed down and blacklisted for making “pacifist films denigrating the heroism of the Soviet Army.”

Yet, this setback had a silver lining. Zhenya, Zhenechka, Katyusha attracted the attention of the famous Soviet director Pavel Chukhrai, who headed the Experimental Studio, which Motyl said was an “oasis of common sense amidst the absurdity of socialist cinema production.” At the Experimental Studio, there was unheard of artistic freedom: the studio head was authorized to hire scriptwriters and directors at his discretion and there were even financial incentives for writers, contingent upon a film’s performance.

Chukhrai asked Motyl to direct the movie that would become White Sun. But Motyl accepted the offer only half-heartedly. When he read the first script — the story of a soldier who saves a harem from a bandit, he turned the project down. “I didn’t want to do an adventure movie,” he said. Yet the writers, Ezhov and Ibragimbekov, were persistent: Motyl was the only director they wanted to work with and they explained to him that, because of the scandal with his war comedy,  Chukhrai’s Experimental Studio was his only chance.

Backed into the corner, Motyl secured an important concession: he would have carte blanche to rewrite the script, change the dialogue and the plot, etc. This was no small achievement at a time when a script was a sacred document requiring signatures and stamps at every stage.

The film was shot on location in the Karakum desert. “I worked under stress in a suffocating heat, realizing it was my last resort,” Motyl said. “But I worked easily, as if the scenarios were dictated to me from the heavens ... many phrases were born off-the cuff.”

Notwithstanding the film’s huge public success and the significant revenues it brought the state, Motyl received only scorn from the Soviet film elite (despite the fact that the head of the party, General Secretary Brezhnev, loved the film). They labeled the film “an ideologically alien imitation of Hollywood,” good only for distraction and replenishing the state coffers.

The fate of White Sun may actually have been preordained. Motyl’s long-time party nemesis from Sverdlovsk had since risen to the position of head of Goskino. “The White Sun of the Desert was not sent to any international film festivals,” Motyl said, “because of my 25-year old conflict with the Minister of Cinema.” (It took another Sverdlovsk communist party alum, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, to right this wrong. In 1997, Motyl was awarded the State Prize and the Award of Honor. That same year, a new general director at Mosfilm decided to begin paying some royalties from their White Sun TV earnings to the film’s authors and director.)

So it was that even after White Sun of the Desert, Motyl had to push his next film like a debutante. It took him nearly five years to get permission to shoot his romantic-historical saga dedicated to the Decembrists, Zvezda plenitelnovo szhastya  (“The Star of Captivating Happiness”). But the result was as stunning artistically as White Sun. And the film, while on a more somber topic, was commercially successful and is still frequently aired.

This movie, about revolutionaries and the wives that followed them to exile in Siberia, was, Motyl said, a tribute to his parents. His father was a Polish political émigré “who arrived in Soviet Russia, believing in the Bolsheviks, only to fall prey to their guillotine ... He was soon arrested and perished in the Solovki [labor camp], so [my parents] lived together for only two-and-a-half years ... My maternal grandfather—a Jew from Belarus—was dekulakized in the 1930s and exiled with eight children to a permafrost area in the North, where my mother’s young sister went insane ...”

His next film, The Forest, inspired by Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, was banned after being labeled a distortion of the Russian classic and an insult to the Russian people. This sealed Motyl’s fate. For the next decade he was a pariah in Russian cinema. He was only able to work on TV movies, write  scripts, teach, consult young directors, stage theater plays and lecture. Only the collapse of the communist regime would enable Motyl to return to film-making.

Aiming at Viewers’ Hearts

So what is it about White Sun that makes it popular even today, 30 years after its release? How can a film situated in Soviet realities strike a chord with post-Soviet Russians?

Lenkom theater director Mark Zakharov, a long-time friend of Motyl’s (he also wrote the script for Sukhov’s dream letters to Katerina Matveevna), said he thinks it is because White Sun “is a huge social and state phenomenon, a success from heavens ... Everything is great there — the actors, the scripts, the editing of the film. There are no delays, good dynamics, lots of professional merit. Plus there is nothing from our day-to-day life, there are great quotes and a great song by [Bulat]Okudzhava. It is a great, deeply Russian movie using the laws of a US Western.”

Political “heavyweight” Alexander Lebed certainly agrees. When he recently met Motyl, he called White Sun a movie that “will last for centuries.” Lebed was himself beholden to White Sun: a famous line from the movie: “I feel sorry for the country” (Za derzhavu obidno) was the title of Lebed’s autobiography. (Not surprisingly, Motyl expressed a reciprocal affection for Lebed. “I do see some traits of [White Sun’s main character] Sukhov in him ... He is natural, strong, brave and self-abnegated man like Sukhov,” he said, citing Lebed’s crucial role in stopping the war in Chechnya.)

Of course, phrases like Za derzhavu obidno strike a patriotic chord with Russians. And the landscape and scenery of the movie is a modern Russia in miniature: a desolated customs point ignored by bandits and smugglers, but rife with ethnic problems and aching for a folk hero of Sukhovian proportions. Russians unite in their love of the film’s simple themes of honor, bravery and trust – much more than they might around some elusive “national idea.”

But it is the film’s focus on eternal themes and human values that won it its initial admiration by the public. “Our people,” Motyl said, “lost a lot as a result of this godless Soviet propaganda, which caused the country’s moral decay ... No matter how hard our propaganda tried to stigmatize American pragmatism, in fact we were faced with the monstrous, Soviet “scratch my back” type of pragmatism ... we were perverting our country by this approach to life: how to get some goods and benefits by cozying up to the higher-ups and kissing-up to those working in our deficit-based system of trade. It was tough to survive in that immoral system. So I liked the fact that the hero is not subordinated to anyone. And the fact he was already demobilized and coming back home. He obviously  didn’t need anything from these women from the harem—he dreams only of his Katerina Matveevna. But, on the other hand, he risks his life. In the name of what? Just because he is such a fairytale hero. He doesn’t get burned in fire, nor is he drowned in water, as we say in Russian folklore.”

The movie takes place in the aftermath of the Civil War (1918-1922), but Motyl readily admits that he did not seek to make the movie an authentic reflection of that war. “My Sukhov was not fighting with national extremists or with the White Guards,” Motyl said. “He was just fighting with bandits. That’s why I introduced the character of this customs officer, to make this conflict between Sukhov and the bandit Abdulah purely criminal, not ideological. So,  one didn’t need to know well the country’s history, but rather to accept the story with one’s heart. And it was precisely the heart of the viewer that I was targeting with my film.”

An additional attraction of White Sun is that Motyl strayed from the uni-dimensional characters of Socialist Realist films. Here the characters are more complex. Even the bandit, Abdulah, is somehow charming and attractive. Wrong, yes, but still capable of change and repentance. The point, Motyl said, was “to show how a stranger (Sukhov) arrived with his own rules at somebody else’s monastery. I wanted to show that the best intentions in a foreign country can’t become an imperative. Abdulah is a cruel husband towards his harem, but these are their customs and traditions. Therefore I always remember the words of Kipling about the East and the West.” In marked contrast to the prevailing ideology of Soviet film at the time, Sukhov’s good intentions do not end happily. In fact, the end result is largely tragic. Sukhov’s aide is killed, the customs officer perishes and his wife goes insane, Abdulah’s most beloved wife is strangled and Sukhov himself is wounded. As Motyl said, because he made his Abdulah a “courageous, charming,  strong hero ... the price of victory of my hero Sukhov over Abdulah increased.”

These sentiments of White Sun were perhaps best summarized by Sukhov’s famous line in the movie, “the East is a very subtle thing” (Vostok – delo tonkoye). And it is a theme which was also at the center of Motyl’s first post-Soviet production. The film, Let’s Part While You are Kind, inspired by a short story by Fazil Iskander, focuses on betrayal and Russia’s blind interference in the Caucasus. The film was shot before the Chechen war and showed “how clumsily the Russians interfered in affairs in the Caucasus,” Motyl said. In the film’s finale, Russians act on a false signal and send troops and artillery into a village against one man, an Abkhaz who is fighting with a local prince to defend his dignity.

Russia and the Caucasus, Motyl said, is a “painful historical theme ... we have been conquering the Caucasus for over half a century ... Today you can’t solve these issues with a truncheon. That we sent our troops to Chechnya was a terrible crime perpetrated by our ex-Defense Minister [Pavel Grachev], who said he could take care of Chechnya with just one regiment of paratroopers. He was just ignorant and showed no knowledge of history. The ruler of the Caucasus under the tsar, General Yermolov, noted long ago that the Chechens are the most warlike, cruel and ferocious people. They can be only liquidated but not conquered.”

Let’s Part While You Are Kind met with its share of difficulties, indicative of the post-Soviet order of things. The nouveau riche “wild capitalist” producer who underwrote the film had earned a fortune in video sales while Motyl was filming in the difficult conditions of the war-torn Caucasus. After the film was finished, the jaded producer turned out to be little interested in promoting something with uncertain prospects. The film also fell victim to the very types of mindless conflict it spoke out against. Georgian intellectuals boycotted the film because, in it, Georgian actors played Abkhazians, their sworn enemies.

Motyl’s latest film, Gone with the Horses (1996), takes on the themes of loyalty and repentance. Based on several Chekhov stories, it stars Andrei Sokolov (star of Little Vera) as an inveterate womanizer. After becoming disenchanted with his latest “conquest” (played by Agneshka Wagner), a sudden crisis (a duel) brings him to the brink of physical death, and face-to-face with his emptiness. “When he finds himself in this deep spiritual crisis,” Motyl said, “when he looks deep into his soul, he realizes he is alone in the world and all he has as a refuge is [Wagner]. He comes back to her spiritually. He looks at her as if he sees her for the first time.”

The film’s plot echoes events in the director’s own life. Motyl left his family to live with another woman for three years, during which he became increasingly depressed that his child was growing up without him. “This poisoned the happiness I found with this other woman,” he said, “and finally led to our alienation, as she began to feel my inner, second life ... And then I began helping my family financially ... then I began meeting with my daughter, then my wife, who was such a loyal friend. During my entire absence, whenever someone talked me down, she defended me with passion. She simply won me back with her generosity. I didn’t expect it, so I came back to her.”

The critics have not been so universally kind to Gone with the Horses. While more traditional, mainstream critics have praised the movie, younger critics have savaged the film as a creative failure, one even suggesting that “certain directors should be shot after they reach a certain age.” Commercially, the movie was no White Sun, but has done “quite okay,” Motyl said, and was invited to the Montreal Film Festival.

While he is not a wealthy man these days, Vladimir Motyl is doing better than in the difficult days when he was ostracized by the Soviet film bureaucracy. He receives a modest stipend from the state that allows him freedom to write. But  his greatest wealth is that of the love of several generations of Soviet — and now Russian — viewers. As journalist and  cinema critic Ishtvan Yulash wrote, “the circle of admirers of his cult film is not limited by differences in age, profession, political views, nationality, educational level, or even intellect or temperament.” At a recent Russian TV festival, White Sun of the Desert was awarded the title “Russian Viewers’ Most Loved Film.”

Many of the film’s lines have become proverbial in Russian, used in media articles and headlines, cited by politicians, advertisers and marketers. For 25 years Russian cosmonauts have made it a ritual to watch the film before going into space. Cosmonauts even took a video of White Sun into space. According to Alexei Leonov, a member of the Soyuz-Apollo flight, his American colleagues were delighted with the film.

There have been some unique perks for Motyl as well. GAI officers let him go in peace once they find out he is the author of White Sun. In the 1990s, the Federal Customs Service bestowed on Motyl a unique corporate watch as thanks for the character of the incorruptible customs officer. The watch serves as a special talisman that lets him pass through Russian customs smoothly.

“Not so long ago,” Motyl recalled, “I helped a producer who accompanied me on a trip to Italy. This lady had far exceeded her duty-free limit of $500 and was about to be stopped by the customs. But she was let go as soon as I waved  my hand at the customs officer, intimating she was with me.”

Even in Soviet times,  Motyl compensated for a lack of official recognition using his wits, not unlike his hero Fyodor Sukhov. He said his “favorite pastime” has always been traveling – not something enabled on a fixed income. So he tagged along with groups of filmmakers sent on lecture trips throughout the USSR by the Soviet Bureau of Film Propaganda. “But my wildest dream,” he said, “was to see the Kommandor islands — the ones neighboring the Kamchatka Peninsula. But there was no affiliate of the Film Propaganda Bureau in those closed, secret areas ...”

Not one to give up easily, Motyl found out how to call the Border Guards division of the KGB in Moscow. As soon as he mentioned White Sun of the Desert, an appointment was set.

“I paid a visit to the KGB general supervising the Border Guards. I told him I love travelling

and offered to distract the border guards of these areas with my lectures and film excerpts. The general looked at me with human eyes like I have never seen in a KGB officer. He said, ‘It’s great that you have such a spiritual, noble thrust. So go ahead, fly to Kamchatka. There the commander of the local political department of the Border Guards will meet you and satisfy your every wish. You will have a helicopter, a patrol boat ... anything.’”

The reality surpassed Motyl’s wildest dreams. A naval destroyer was put at his disposal. The Soviet border guards not only showed him the geysers near Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, but also provoked a scrambling of American fighter planes and let him witness the search of a Japanese fishing boat.

“This huge destroyer approached a miniscule boat and for the first time I saw Japanese at close quarters. The Japanese captain came out in casual sportswear, glanced at us, then turned his back and sat in an oriental, Zen-like pose throughout the search. But I could read a lot in this glance of his ... The boat was shortly released after a document check. So I told the captain: ‘you should not have.’ But he said, ‘Don’t worry, we saw them let the poached fish go from their special holding tank.”

Later, Motyl met some Japanese poachers under arrest on Shikotan island (in the disputed Kuril chain). He was told that, in cases where there were really gross violations, they would detain the poachers and make them sit in a library full of Lenin’s and Brezhnev’s works in Japanese, which each poacher was required to read. “I think it was the worst torture they had to endure,” he said

Today, when so many creative types in the Russian arts are focused on international awards and working in the West, Vladimir Motyl remains firmly rooted in Russian soil. If he had total creative and financial freedom, he said, he  would make a film about Tsar Alexander I, the reformer whose epoch reminds him of the Gorbachev era. Then, as now, he said, there was this “frenzied resistance to reform from the corrupt and greedy aristocracy on the one hand, and a no less frenzied resistance from the ignorant, retarded lower classes on the other.” To bring the story to film, he envisions telling the tale through the lives of three couples. Indeed, not waiting for an idyllic time of “total creative and financial freedom” to fall in his lap, he has already written one-third of the script. Obviously, those local critics who questioned Motyl’s continued worth got it wrong. The white sun of this director’s creativity continues to burn brightly.  RL

For information on where to get copies of Vladimir Motyl’s films, see the listing on page 7.