THE ASTHENIC SYNDROME (KIRA MURATOVA, 1989)
ASTENICHESKIY SINDROM
Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
4:40 PM
Saturday 09 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
6:15 PM
Wednesday 13 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 153 minutes
Country: USSR
Language: Russian with English subtitles
Cast: Olga Antonova, Sergei Popov, Galina Zakhurdaeva
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4:40 PM
Saturday 09 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
6:15 PM
Wednesday 13 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 153 minutes
Country: USSR
Language: Russian with English subtitles
Cast: Olga Antonova, Sergei Popov, Galina Zakhurdaeva
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
‘Mean-spirited and assertive one moment, narcoleptic and in complete denial the next, [The Asthenic Syndrome] bears an astonishing resemblance to the disconcerting rhythm of contemporary public life.’ – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
After attending her husband’s funeral, a middle-aged woman makes her way back home through the streets of Odesa, navigating an urban landscape full of animus and hysteria. This exhilaratingly acidic portrait of everyday life is soon revealed, however, to merely constitute a film-within-the-film. As the movie ends and patrons flee the cinema, an audience member emerges into a kaleidoscopic outside world that’s every bit as chaotic as what he (and we) just saw on screen, taking us on a discursive and bleakly funny tour through a crumbling USSR: from classroom to psychiatric hospital, from bohemian party to animal shelter.
The pre-eminent Ukrainian filmmaker of the second half of the twentieth century, Kira Muratova has long been championed by critics even as her work has rarely been exhibited on international cinema screens. A free-flowing black comedy that steadfastly defies narrative norms, The Asthenic Syndrome is largely considered her greatest masterpiece: a pure cinematic representation of late-Soviet malaise.
Introduced by Greg Dolgopolov at Ritz Cinemas and David Heslin at Lido Cinemas.
‘Mean-spirited and assertive one moment, narcoleptic and in complete denial the next, [The Asthenic Syndrome] bears an astonishing resemblance to the disconcerting rhythm of contemporary public life.’ – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
After attending her husband’s funeral, a middle-aged woman makes her way back home through the streets of Odesa, navigating an urban landscape full of animus and hysteria. This exhilaratingly acidic portrait of everyday life is soon revealed, however, to merely constitute a film-within-the-film. As the movie ends and patrons flee the cinema, an audience member emerges into a kaleidoscopic outside world that’s every bit as chaotic as what he (and we) just saw on screen, taking us on a discursive and bleakly funny tour through a crumbling USSR: from classroom to psychiatric hospital, from bohemian party to animal shelter.
The pre-eminent Ukrainian filmmaker of the second half of the twentieth century, Kira Muratova has long been championed by critics even as her work has rarely been exhibited on international cinema screens. A free-flowing black comedy that steadfastly defies narrative norms, The Asthenic Syndrome is largely considered her greatest masterpiece: a pure cinematic representation of late-Soviet malaise.
Introduced by Greg Dolgopolov at Ritz Cinemas and David Heslin at Lido Cinemas.
FILM NOTES
By Cerise Howard
By Cerise Howard
Cerise Howard is a Melbourne Cinémathèque co-curator, an RMIT University media studio leader, and a widely published commentator on film who is steeped in local and international film festival culture.
‘This is my only film that has a sociopolitical side to it’ – so asserted Kira Muratova (1934–2018), ‘the arch anti-sentimentalist of Odesa’ (Ysabella Smith, 2023), in 2016, of her exuberantly miserabilist, caustically humorous, cacophonic 1989 masterpiece, Astenicheskiy sindrom (The Asthenic Syndrome).
While abundant with the hallmarks of Muratova’s eclectic, digressive signature style, riddled with ludic repetitions, twinnings, parallels and reprises subject to variations, it was indeed a singular work, speaking to a very particular time. With Mikhail Gorbachev’s mid-1980s policies of glasnost and perestroika, her wonderful earliest solo directorial features – 1967’s Korotkie vstrechi (Brief Encounters) and 1971’s Dolgie provody (The Long Farewell) – were reintroduced to circulation in 1987 after nigh-on two decades in the vaults. Muratova was, moreover, now able to make films as she saw fit … only for The Asthenic Syndrome to become the sole film withdrawn from circulation during the glasnost era.
This was due to an outburst of obscenities, unprecedented in Soviet cinema, towards the film’s close. Or was it the plentiful, full-frontal male nudity, or simply a function of its kaleidoscopic, sum total transgressiveness, as it clangorously rang death knells for Soviet society? (After winning the Silver Bear at the 1990 Berlinale, its ban was lifted.)
The Asthenic Syndrome exemplifies the liberties Muratova routinely took with cinematic language and form, wildly at odds with yesteryear’s doctrinaire norms of Soviet aesthetics and socialist realism. It exhibits her disdain for classical composition and continuity; a fragmentary, non-linear approach to constructing narrative; a contrapuntal approach to (mis)matching sound to vision, and a reflexivity intended to collapse any notion that anything depicted be taken literally – or, pessimistically, that it might even matter.
Characters soliloquise, and there are direct addresses to camera, as with the film’s opening when three babushkas utter, in wobbly unison, ‘As a child and a young girl, I believed that everybody should read Leo Tolstoy. Once they read him, they would understand everything and become good-hearted and intelligent’ – moral qualities scantly exhibited by anyone across the film’s following two and a half hours, whether central or peripheral to its bipartite narrative.
Part one principally concerns Natasha (Olga Antonova), a doctor attending her husband’s funeral. Blink, and you mightn’t clock his resemblance to Joseph Stalin. Natasha’s grief overpowers her, manifesting variously as fits of banshee-like wailing, wanton acts of aggression towards friends, colleagues and strangers, and blithe dissociation.
Forty minutes in and The Asthenic Syndrome ruptures, with its black-and-white first section revealed as a film-within-a-film, which is now in colour. A farcical attempt to run a Q&A with its star, Olga Antonova (now playing herself), sees scuffles break out in people’s haste to exit the cinema. This is despite the exhortations of an earnest MC who insists ‘we don’t often engage seriously with films … by directors like [Aleksei] German, [Alexander] Sokurov and Muratova […] I urge you not to miss a chance to discuss the movie we’ve just seen. Serious cinema today merits in-depth discussion.’
The Soviet audience has been put on notice … and found wanting. Muratova has likewise thrown down the gauntlet to her audience. Can they – can you – be roused from your torpor into engaging with the provocations that follow, without looking away? Even from the goading, Godardian digression late in the piece, where animal lover Muratova incorporates an uncomfortably long documentary montage of impounded dogs over a plangent piano accompaniment?
Pointedly, much of what transpires in the longer second part echoes the nihilistic behaviours of Natasha in the first, as the narrative’s focus shifts to the last person remaining in the cinema: a narcoleptic man named Nikolai.
A secondary school teacher and frustrated author, Nikolai is played by Sergei Popov, the film’s co-scenarist, who appeared in several of Muratova’s films. Prone to outbursts of rage, Nikolai also regularly falls asleep in public at inapt moments, as if unconsciousness will buttress him psychologically against the moral turpitude of the society disintegrating around him.
Throughout, Nikolai and others’ vocalisations and behaviours shift tonal registers abruptly, lurching from narcotic impassivity to histrionic verbal or physical violence. Interpersonal exchanges play out like a live-action extrapolation upon the pessimistic lessons of Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion classic, Možnosti dialogu (Dimensions of Dialogue, 1983); characters talk at cross-purposes with one another – sometimes pausing only for one to scold the other for their tone – until someone succumbs to attrition.
The characters are variously embodied by known actors and eccentric non-actors whom Muratova would encounter in Odesa and insert into her films; there’s something akin to Miloš Forman’s enthusiasm for ‘beauty in unrepeatable faces’ (Harriet Polt, 1970) in Muratova’s casting practices. Sergei Popov wasn’t an actor before falling in with Muratova; nor was Aleksandra Svenskaya, who memorably plays the shrill school director, one of Nikolai’s antagonists. (Svenskaya also appears in a bizarre, tangential domestic scene as the mother of an adolescent son, apropos of … just the general societal malaise?)
Muratova studied under Sergei Gerasimov at Moscow’s All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, named after Gerasimov since 1986 and commonly known as VGIK, graduating in 1959. (Other alumni include Andrei Tarkovsky, Larisa Shepitko, Elem Klimov, Sergei Parajanov, Otar Iosseliani and Alexander Sokurov.) Gerasimov had an acting background in the 1920s with experimental theatre workshop FEKS (the Factory of the Eccentric Actor), ‘which cultivated a stylised, grotesque and pointedly antirealistic approach to acting’ (Jane A. Taubman, 1993). The overwrought performance style in The Asthenic Syndrome might seem alienating to some Western viewers, but it has a long, distinguished history.
Beauty and grotesquerie are kissing cousins in Muratova’s cinema. Interiors in The Asthenic Syndrome are decorated with kitschy maximalism, while exteriors are typically unprepossessing, utilitarian and unkempt. An ironised appropriation of Soviet iconography is liberally strewn throughout the film, inside and out.
In all its mordant absurdity, and framing of the death throes of Soviet rule – which could just as readily be late-stage capitalism – as a soul-devouring malaise rendering all the world a madhouse, The Asthenic Syndrome is a very rich text, as abundant with pleasures as it is discomforts, and one meriting in-depth discussion … if you’ve the stomach for it!
While abundant with the hallmarks of Muratova’s eclectic, digressive signature style, riddled with ludic repetitions, twinnings, parallels and reprises subject to variations, it was indeed a singular work, speaking to a very particular time. With Mikhail Gorbachev’s mid-1980s policies of glasnost and perestroika, her wonderful earliest solo directorial features – 1967’s Korotkie vstrechi (Brief Encounters) and 1971’s Dolgie provody (The Long Farewell) – were reintroduced to circulation in 1987 after nigh-on two decades in the vaults. Muratova was, moreover, now able to make films as she saw fit … only for The Asthenic Syndrome to become the sole film withdrawn from circulation during the glasnost era.
This was due to an outburst of obscenities, unprecedented in Soviet cinema, towards the film’s close. Or was it the plentiful, full-frontal male nudity, or simply a function of its kaleidoscopic, sum total transgressiveness, as it clangorously rang death knells for Soviet society? (After winning the Silver Bear at the 1990 Berlinale, its ban was lifted.)
The Asthenic Syndrome exemplifies the liberties Muratova routinely took with cinematic language and form, wildly at odds with yesteryear’s doctrinaire norms of Soviet aesthetics and socialist realism. It exhibits her disdain for classical composition and continuity; a fragmentary, non-linear approach to constructing narrative; a contrapuntal approach to (mis)matching sound to vision, and a reflexivity intended to collapse any notion that anything depicted be taken literally – or, pessimistically, that it might even matter.
Characters soliloquise, and there are direct addresses to camera, as with the film’s opening when three babushkas utter, in wobbly unison, ‘As a child and a young girl, I believed that everybody should read Leo Tolstoy. Once they read him, they would understand everything and become good-hearted and intelligent’ – moral qualities scantly exhibited by anyone across the film’s following two and a half hours, whether central or peripheral to its bipartite narrative.
Part one principally concerns Natasha (Olga Antonova), a doctor attending her husband’s funeral. Blink, and you mightn’t clock his resemblance to Joseph Stalin. Natasha’s grief overpowers her, manifesting variously as fits of banshee-like wailing, wanton acts of aggression towards friends, colleagues and strangers, and blithe dissociation.
Forty minutes in and The Asthenic Syndrome ruptures, with its black-and-white first section revealed as a film-within-a-film, which is now in colour. A farcical attempt to run a Q&A with its star, Olga Antonova (now playing herself), sees scuffles break out in people’s haste to exit the cinema. This is despite the exhortations of an earnest MC who insists ‘we don’t often engage seriously with films … by directors like [Aleksei] German, [Alexander] Sokurov and Muratova […] I urge you not to miss a chance to discuss the movie we’ve just seen. Serious cinema today merits in-depth discussion.’
The Soviet audience has been put on notice … and found wanting. Muratova has likewise thrown down the gauntlet to her audience. Can they – can you – be roused from your torpor into engaging with the provocations that follow, without looking away? Even from the goading, Godardian digression late in the piece, where animal lover Muratova incorporates an uncomfortably long documentary montage of impounded dogs over a plangent piano accompaniment?
Pointedly, much of what transpires in the longer second part echoes the nihilistic behaviours of Natasha in the first, as the narrative’s focus shifts to the last person remaining in the cinema: a narcoleptic man named Nikolai.
A secondary school teacher and frustrated author, Nikolai is played by Sergei Popov, the film’s co-scenarist, who appeared in several of Muratova’s films. Prone to outbursts of rage, Nikolai also regularly falls asleep in public at inapt moments, as if unconsciousness will buttress him psychologically against the moral turpitude of the society disintegrating around him.
Throughout, Nikolai and others’ vocalisations and behaviours shift tonal registers abruptly, lurching from narcotic impassivity to histrionic verbal or physical violence. Interpersonal exchanges play out like a live-action extrapolation upon the pessimistic lessons of Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion classic, Možnosti dialogu (Dimensions of Dialogue, 1983); characters talk at cross-purposes with one another – sometimes pausing only for one to scold the other for their tone – until someone succumbs to attrition.
The characters are variously embodied by known actors and eccentric non-actors whom Muratova would encounter in Odesa and insert into her films; there’s something akin to Miloš Forman’s enthusiasm for ‘beauty in unrepeatable faces’ (Harriet Polt, 1970) in Muratova’s casting practices. Sergei Popov wasn’t an actor before falling in with Muratova; nor was Aleksandra Svenskaya, who memorably plays the shrill school director, one of Nikolai’s antagonists. (Svenskaya also appears in a bizarre, tangential domestic scene as the mother of an adolescent son, apropos of … just the general societal malaise?)
Muratova studied under Sergei Gerasimov at Moscow’s All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, named after Gerasimov since 1986 and commonly known as VGIK, graduating in 1959. (Other alumni include Andrei Tarkovsky, Larisa Shepitko, Elem Klimov, Sergei Parajanov, Otar Iosseliani and Alexander Sokurov.) Gerasimov had an acting background in the 1920s with experimental theatre workshop FEKS (the Factory of the Eccentric Actor), ‘which cultivated a stylised, grotesque and pointedly antirealistic approach to acting’ (Jane A. Taubman, 1993). The overwrought performance style in The Asthenic Syndrome might seem alienating to some Western viewers, but it has a long, distinguished history.
Beauty and grotesquerie are kissing cousins in Muratova’s cinema. Interiors in The Asthenic Syndrome are decorated with kitschy maximalism, while exteriors are typically unprepossessing, utilitarian and unkempt. An ironised appropriation of Soviet iconography is liberally strewn throughout the film, inside and out.
In all its mordant absurdity, and framing of the death throes of Soviet rule – which could just as readily be late-stage capitalism – as a soul-devouring malaise rendering all the world a madhouse, The Asthenic Syndrome is a very rich text, as abundant with pleasures as it is discomforts, and one meriting in-depth discussion … if you’ve the stomach for it!
THE RESTORATION
Source: Janus Films
Director: Kira Muratova; Production Company: Odesa Film Studio; Producer: Nadezhda Popova, Gegam Tashchan, Micha Lampert; Screenplay: Sergei Popov, Aleksandr Chernykh, Kira Muratova;
Photography: Vladimir Pankov; Editor: Valentina Oleynik; Production Design: Oleg Ivanov; Costume Design: M. Brodkina // Cast: Olga Antonova (Natasha), Sergei Popov (Nikolai), Aleksandra Svenskaya (Teacher), Galina Zakhurdaeva (Masha, “blonde”), Nataliya Buzko (Masha,”brunette”).
Ukraine | 1989 | 153 mins | 4K DCP | Colour, B&W | Russian with English subtitles | Unclassified 18+
| New 4K restoration by Janus Films/The Criterion Collection. |
Director: Kira Muratova; Production Company: Odesa Film Studio; Producer: Nadezhda Popova, Gegam Tashchan, Micha Lampert; Screenplay: Sergei Popov, Aleksandr Chernykh, Kira Muratova;
Photography: Vladimir Pankov; Editor: Valentina Oleynik; Production Design: Oleg Ivanov; Costume Design: M. Brodkina // Cast: Olga Antonova (Natasha), Sergei Popov (Nikolai), Aleksandra Svenskaya (Teacher), Galina Zakhurdaeva (Masha, “blonde”), Nataliya Buzko (Masha,”brunette”).
Ukraine | 1989 | 153 mins | 4K DCP | Colour, B&W | Russian with English subtitles | Unclassified 18+