Discovering Muratova on the Internet: A Personal Case Study, a Few Baby Steps

This essay was proposed to Another Gaze, an excellent feminist journal based in the U.K., in June 2020, lightly revised with their helpful suggestions over the next several months after I received a go-ahead from them, and still hadn’t appeared by October 8, 2021. I wished them well, but the editor was no longer responding to my emails, which is why I posted this essay here. P.S. My thanks to Scott Moore for pointing out several typos in the original posting of this piece, now corrected.

P.P.S. (12/16/21): I’m reposting this to celebrate the arrival in my mailbox of the hefty new issue of Another Gaze, including my essay, where I find myself among such fellow contributors as my old pal Lizzie Borden and A.S. Hamrah. My apologies to the editors for my journalistic impatience; it was well worth the wait. — J.R.

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Long before the Coronavirus pandemic set in and many of us suddenly had more time to explore new modes of online viewing and even canon-building, I had been trying to develop and expand my limited acquaintance with the films of Kira Muratova (1934-2018), initially sparked by my 1989 encounter with her masterpiece The Asthenic Syndrome (1989) at the Toronto film festival, two years after I began my twenty-year stint as the principal film reviewer for the Chicago Reader.   Read more

Weird and Wild [on Kira Muratova]

From the May 6, 2005 Chicago Reader. –J.R.

Take No Prisoners: The Bold Vision of Kira Muratova

at the Gene Siskel Film Center

The most original filmmakers working today tend to be identified more with their respective national cultures than with the world at large. The work of directors such as James Benning, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kiarostami, Kira Muratova, Jafar Panahi, Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, and Edward Yang is seen as specialized, local, and esoteric. But I’d argue that what they have to say about their countries is secondary to their larger concern: the bewildering, tragicomic, and often disastrous effects of modernity on traditional modes of life and thought.

The dozen obstinately weird and wild films of Kira Muratova, seven of which are playing this month at the Gene Siskel Film Center, are described by some critics as Russian to the core, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call her the greatest living Russian filmmaker. (I’d link Alexander Sokurov’s work to the 19th century rather than to the 20th or the 21st.) Yet I’m not entirely sure what “Russian” means these days or how it applies to her.

Born in 1934 in Romania to a Romanian mother and a Russian father, Muratova went to both Romanian and Russian schools, often hiding her Russian identity at the former and her Romanian identity at the latter. Read more