Lights, Camera ...

It is hard to underestimate the role of the arts in Russian speech. Consider film, which, to reluctantly quote Josef Stalin, was, for communists “the most important art form” (“Важнейшим из всех искусств для нас является кино”), because it reached such a broad audience. Actually, in my school days, the most important thing about films was that going to the киношка (little movie) was a great excuse for skipping school. Today, our kids can get anything they want on video (на видеке/на видаке), but this is not to say school attendance has gotten any better.

So, when a Russian says “Инте­рес­ное кино!” (“Interesting movie!”), it is not necessarily a cinema critique. Pronounced with the right intonation and a slathering of sarcasm, it connotes indignation, disappointment or disagreeable surprise (or all three at once), i.e. a sarcastic “Excuse me!” or “Well-well-well!” For instance, this is what a creditor might say to a debtor when the latter refuses to repay a debt.

Along these lines, if certain members of the Russian government had wanted to be more inventive when they announced the August 17, 1998, default, they could have simply said: “Кина не будет – электричество кончилось!” (“Sorry, no movie, we ran out of power!”) This is a now idiomatic phrase from the film Джeнтльмены удачи. (Gentlemen of Fortune, 1971). Savely Kramarov (who actually ended his career as an émigré actor in the U.S.), starring as an escaped convict, uttered these words when he was caught by the militia. So, “no movie ...” means “the jig is up” or “oops, it didn’t come off.”

Cinema audiences, for their part, whenever there is a disruption in a movie projection on the screen, will still call the projectionist a сапожник (shoemaker), meaning they don’t think highly of his skills. Interestingly, this phrase dates back to kolkhoz times, when a film in a local club was about the only distraction available, and when cinema equipment was far from perfect.

The spiciest movie-oriented phrase is apt when you lose your patience with someone who is being indecisive: “Мы будем снимать кино или мы не будем снимать кино?!” (“Are we going to shoot the movie or not?”) This is the Russian equivalent for “fish or cut bait.”

It is interesting that Stalin didn’t rank the circus above the cinema, because Russian reality constantly seems to reflect life under the Big Top. Actually, The Circus was a famous anti-racist movie in the 1950s, starring megastar (and Stalin favorite) Lyubov Orlova as a U.S. circus star who sought refuge with her black son in an anti-racist and internationalist Soviet Union.

A couple of decades after Stalin’s passing, in the 1970s, circus parlance was the basis of a potentially dangerous political rumor. Russian rock fans whispered that their idol – lead-singer of Машина Времени (Time Machine) Andrei Makarevich – had in mind the attendees of the 25th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia (1977) when he wrote the lyrics of his then semi-underground song Puppets:

Арлекины и пираты, циркачи и акробаты
И факир,чей вид внушает страх
Волк и заяц, тигры в клетке – все они марионетки
В ловких и натруженных руках

Harlequins and pirates
Circus performers and acrobats
and the conjurer whose looks arouse fear
Wolf and hare, tigers in a cage
They are all just puppets in adroit and savvy hands.

Another two decades on, with the arrival of the August 1998 crisis, political events could be summed up by the phrase: “Цирк – да и только” (meaning “What a circus!” or “What a joke!”). You can make the insult more personal by saying “Ну ты циркач!” (“What a circus performer you are!”)

Indeed, when, in 1998, bank accounts were frozen or annihilated in a matter of hours, the “brilliant” young Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko was exposed to be just a факир на час (magician for an hour). Someone who is a факир на час is a person who enjoys success or recognition for a short time and then is doomed to oblivion. But then Kiriyenko was merely the heir to the Yeltsin government’s five years of акробатические трюки (acrobatic tricks) with privatization and T-bills. The ruble had been performing a high-wire act without a net (без страховки), and the fall was as inevitable as it was messy.

Others might compare the government’s actions in the August crisis to that of a pickpocket or a master of the sleight of hand (фокусник). Such performers like to exclaim the cliche phrase: “Ловкость рук – и никакого мошенничества!” (“Sleight of hand and no swindling!”) A popular фокус-покус (hocus-pocus) of a фокусник is to pick a spectator, ask him for a R10 bill, burn it in front of him, then take a R10 bill from his ear. But sometimes, for comic effect, they will burn the bill and then tell the hapless spectator: “Факир был пьян – фокус не удался” (“the magician was drunk, the trick didn’t work”). This is what you can tell someone who has been expecting the world from you, but whom you have just disappointed. Come to think of it, this is what President Yeltsin may, in effect, tell the electorate after he leaves office in 2000. His movie was really interesting, but at some point he simply ran out of power.