Dirs. Konstantin Ershov and Georgi Kropachyov
To quote a user on YouTube, Viy is not a horror film, something I am guilty of viewing it as
too all these years being enticed by its existence. It's really a mixture of
comedy, the supernatural and a moral tale based on a short story by Nikolay Gogol, (who've I've been
pleasantly introduced to in September of 2013 through Dead Souls), which is based on Ukrainian folktales. It just happens
to have a flying coffin at one point though, more than enough to qualify it for
such a series with the rest of the films covered. Viy very much plays out like a short story if it was transferred
through the cinematic medium of film, adjustments to the vastly different art
forms taken into account. Its brisk at seventy or so minutes, no fat on it and
with a clear goal structure to each part of the plot in contrast to the more
complicated areas a full length novel would reach with its length let along
having more plotting and/or text. Viy's
favour is that it never feels pointless nor wasting time, and baring in mind
seeing a Soviet supernatural film from the Sixties is inherently catnip for a cineaste
like me, it's pretty special in how not a lot of films can be compared to it. A
philosophy student Khoma (Leonid
Kuravlyov) finds himself caught up within a series of unexpected events. A
student that is learning at a monastery, he's forced to use his religious
education for once when the dying daughter of an important landowner requests
him, to the surprise of everyone, to do her funeral rites for her soul's
salvation. Even when she dies before he gets there, Khoma is forced by her
father to pray for her soul, for three consecutive nights until the crack of
dawn, locked in the church her body is laid in. Things are not that simple by
the context of this being including in this season of films reviews about
strange, potentially gruesome things happening, and in that, to reference Dead Souls despite being different in
tone, no one can succeed in having a truly meaningful life unless you're
prepared to be selfless and willing to deal with such hard tasks, something
Khoma is clearly not willing to do. And finishing Dead Souls, it's also clear that while Gogol strives for inherently moralistic, nationalist values that
rejects pretension and celebrates rural, ordinary life, he had a tendency for
his characters to make things difficult for each other and themselves, already
a problem before you would have to deal witchcraft and a flying coffin as Khoma
has to. 
It's amazing to thing, while Viy is so different than them in many
ways, that the film managed to evoke Evil
Dead II (1987), A Chinese Ghost Story
(1987), and Sergei Parajanov at
the same time. It's clear that Viy
must have been made as a spectacle for its day in its simplistic presentation
and its bombastic practical effects, but it feels completely different from
being a mere shiny bauble to distract people. The effects have a real,
crafted-by-hand magic to them, and even if the back projection and costumes are
obvious, the noticeable flaws (unlike most computer effects) actually make the
film better and more stronger, adding to their otherworldliness. The connective
tissue to Parajanov is very obvious
in just the fact that you're seeing something, despite being made in the Soviet
Union, that is not really "Russian". The Iron Curtain housed many
different nations, and as I'll slowly go through the cinema by all those
countries, this'll become more obvious in terms of the drastic cultural
differences. It's quite amazing that Viy
is how it is in terms of depicting Christianity and folk law, considering how
traditional culture and religion were frowned on by the Soviet State. Maybe in Viy's favour was that 1) Gogol is a celebrated author in Russia
who influenced later masters of the country's literature, to the point
tampering with his work would be seen as blasphemous, that 2) Viy is effectively entertainment, not a
"political" film in the perceived idea of that type of movie, but
placing neglected traditions through a palatable slice of genre filmmaking, and
3) even the central Soviet power structure would have had to let countries like
Ukraine, which this film is as much a celebration of, be able to see their own
individualist cultures onscreen, including those against modernist,
"rational" socialism, to avoid cracks in the structure when animosity
could have taken place. Parajanov,
unfortunately attacked by the State and imprisoned for a long time at one
point, nonetheless managed, befitting his cross-national upbringing, to make a
series of films based on the individualistic cultures of nations within the
Soviet Union - Armenia with The Color of
Pomegranates (1968), Azerbaijan with Ashik
Kerib (1988), Georgia with The
Legend of Suram Fortress (1984), and the important one for this discussion,
Ukraine with Shadows of Forgotten
Ancestors (1964), Gogol born in
Ukraine and drawing from Ukrainian culture for this story. The aesthetic seen -
the clothes, the music, the colour - is drastically different from anything
else as much in Viy as with a Parajanov film, and Viy adds so much to this type of cinema just because of doing this.
It's a fun film. Legitimately
fun. Not a difficult one. You can take away its key idea, from the ending, but
the spectacle of the fantasy is whole heartedly worth the viewing of it and its
made very well. Instead of empty ideas cribbed from watered down myths, this is
based original ones directly, and the sense of texture and creativity to them
is more than matched by the film's virtues.
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| Sorry, I couldn't resist the GIF [From http://www.20three.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/witch05.gif] |
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