2427 – Alone / Одна (1931 silent movie)

timespace coordinates: post-revolutionary Soviet Union, ten years or so after the October Revolution

Director: Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg.

Full orchestral score by Dmitri Shostakovich

We have covered here the Sino-Soviet Split, Soviet Science Fiction, Tetris, 1990s shock therapy that led to Putin’s Russia (Lenin is according to Putin latest speech the complete anti-hero), and Big Computer Socialism. Now it is time to watch a social realist movie from the early Soviet period about a young teacher Yelena Kuz’mina who is sent to Siberia, or more exactly the Altai mountains to introduce socialism and to alphabetize the local population (which is evidently non-Russian speaking, altough they all seem to speak the same language). Empowerment of women, alphabetization, and education were key elements of the young Soviet state. The movie also depicts three ‘hot’ political topics at the time (or even today?!): education, technology, and the elimination of the kulaks.

Why watch this movie?

I take my cues mainly for watching this movie from the analysis of Bogdan Popa’s De-centering queer studies: Communist Sexuality in the flow during and after the Cold War (Manchester University Press 2021). It is important to watch these movies that are freely available online, of course, playing them from YT still offers the platform ways to monetize, and streaming still contributes to the climate crisis we are currently in, but considering that Alone is such a low-definition, non-HD movie, I would still follow Bogdan Popa here basically echoing Boris Groys – perhaps the greatest contemporary theoretician of Soviet and post-Soviet art and theory: “Currently, socialist realism and its objects function as an aesthetic avant-garde because they are outside a circuit of cultural incorporation, or so Groys argues”. The ‘sexomarist’ detournement of Stalinist era Alone – is one of my favorite pieces from the book (before I had never seen this movie).

(The most common example of price scissors is from the Soviet Union: agricultural prices continued to fall while industrial goods prices rose)

To me, Alone is also a movie that reflects the whole dialectic and division between the countryside and the city, or of how the growth of industry and new productive forces were paid for by the peasants (in a classic Price scissors case), something that will early be a point of contention between the Soviets and their Chinese counterparts, even if initially the Chinese followed the Soviet example.

I would also recommend watching this movie in today’s context of current degrowth eco-socialism and solarpunk aesthetics that should openly embrace a communist and anti-capitalist outlook. While there is an inner debate between the eco-modernists (roughly those who still embrace the amenities of modernity for all, but are still tributary to a sort of limitless cornucopian idea of growth) and degrowth socialists (those who roughly question how Global North lifestyles are easily translatable to the Global South and also ask for a climate justice and climate reparations) this movie gives scope to what it means to actually confront the material realities and political contour to the experience of leaving the city and moving to the countryside. Many sent-down youths in China already did this, and some willingly, some forced, but in total this experience left a long impression and brought together people from different milieus, and made them face and address China’s problems, poverty and country/city divisions and make the first steps towards economic reform.

The movie critiques the residues of the market economy (NEP – New Economic Policy) in the Soviet Union that were part of the Leninist rebuild of the economy during the early days of the young Soviet state. We meet Kuz’mina, the young teacher in Moscow in an ideological setting that the socialists denounced: living alone in a single in Moscow, sleeping in a laced nightgown, easily enchanted by the symbols of comfort, window shopping or eyeing the glittering commodities. The kitchenware shop (think IKEA) is the place where one is seduced by the materiality of consumer objects. Luxury items are part of the exchange economy. >>”Like her the viewer is placed in a position of “refusing the sensory pleasure of a haptic encounter with the material” because they are encouraged to live in a different economy of [socialist] affects.>>

In Altai, Kuz’mina enters another world because she becomes a producer of things and just a consumer. In the Soviet imaginary, the local Shamanist indigenous people are shown to be “close to the labor production and the material world of objects. This tactile sensuous materiality -this involvement with actually existing communism, its programmatic productivism in terms of bodies or experiences is being bypassed in a lot of recent radical thought (see Frederic Lordon’s communism realism).

“The book [Figures] can also be cursory verging on the cavalier in its stated decision to do without any but the most oblique discussion of ‘actually-existing communism’ – which, whether we’re thinking of workers’ councils, Cuban experiments with medicine, socialist planning, or what have you, certainly harbours pertinent lessons and materials for present debate.” (Alberto Toscano’s review of Lordon’s books) 

That is why it is intersting to see how in Aline the Easterners (while being fully aware of what the East holds for both Imperial and Revolutionary historiography) “grasp, cut and rub wool, and live in a world where they are part of the natural life”. Emma Widdis (from the volume below) “argues that Kuz’mina develops a different sensory relationship to objects when she moves to Altai, which is the springboard for her becoming a communist.” In a sense, Kuz’mina gets educated first, in a more fundamental way leaving back her bourgeois, individualist self, before educating the children of the region.

Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema
Edited by Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina

1561 – Tampopo (1985)

Director Jûzô Itami

Writer Jûzô Itami (screenplay)

 

With Ken Watanabe, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto

Tampopo or Tampopo is not only “ramen western” or “noodle western” in the tradition of the spaghetti westerns but so much more. There is a constant of eating and food plays a preeminent role in Japanese movies and manga. There is even food or cooking mangas, and so food becomes an almost default aspect where everything meets, wheressurfaces touch and coalesce, where sociabilty gets tested out and remade, where stranger and friends meet, juices mix and gourmet erotica gets played out, where the entire material universe gets made and unmade, where everything combines, joins at the same table, differences aside, and slurping at full power levels is required.

During the COVID SARS 2 pandemic all Instagram and social media got rapidly inundated by endless streams of home cooking, umami quests or generalized hipster craft. Disappearing spaghetti’s and instant yeast scaricity was the first sign that people in the order-online, prosperous West where finally cooking on a daily basis. Africa, Brasil and India, where a majority still cooks but where reserves and storage is problem started to suffer from shortages and choosing btw food rations and getting infected became an issue. On the Romanian social media “Breadism” was cynically called the only true COVID art moment fermenting out of the quarantine, since everybody started proudly posting his own selfmade bread photos. This is the moment where hate started accruing against a world wide phenomenon that has been gaining attention and force as climate action and Extinction Rebellion and Meat Industry seemed to fuse into one. Whatever you might think about ethical cooking or food artist residencies, branding the foodies in your group of friends or whatever u might think of food tourism and grand chef series(still a male reserve – but that starts to change), COVID has seen restaurants dead and dying at a time when restaurant level or food critic level photos with home made ramen bowls and lavish dinners just got nominated as the most apolitical and insensitive trend of the last decades. In those lucky countries or city that have returned to the new normal – terraces & restaurants have been invaded, ppl defintely cannot abide cooking at home anymore and uses any occasion to get eat out.

Because of that I am moving into another register, I am willing to risk drawing more ire with Tampopo – a film that everybody needs to see. Without a doubt, it is one of the most endearing, horny and delightful movies of all times. It not only eats sex in a bowl and features live shrimp tickling action, but also reflects on the medium of cinema as serving and feeding an insatiable lust.

It arrives to us from a time of Japanese tech preeminence and bubble economy, where everything seems to grow and grow and grow and Lazer disks are the future. From the time when American car workers union members smash Japanese car imports publicly as a protest comes a comedy on par with the best comedies in the world. It is as silly, zany and no worries as we imagine that decade before the Asian Crisis must have felt. It is super colorful and also veers towards the surprisingly ‘pure skills’ non-automated, non- technological soba or ramen privately owned businesses catering to busy white collar workers. It sports a TV cook show aesthetic that increasingly exhibits a nostalgic streak for the analog smells, of secret recipes more valuable than stolen patent or industrial espionage scandals, full of sensual bodily pleasures in the midst of increasing digitization and arcade disembodiment. Good to figuring out the perfect umami of such a movie. In spite of Japanese specificity, it is an universal movie, it translates trough and trough and is also about translations, from one kitchen into another, from one pot into another, about honing body intelligence, about things that you learn only by doing. How to figure out the order of servings, what is the good distance or how to train for lifting heavy pots, the mind boggling proper moment of patiently tasting each element swimming in your soup. It also figures an erogaro gangster yakuza neo-noir hero cutting his lip while sucking the contents of an oyster handed to him by a underwater maiden in an incredible gesture that reminds Suehiro Maruo’s works.

What makes it so irresistible? Well, apart from its constant humorous bursts, it has at its center an incredible heroine called dandelion – Tampopo that gives the name to the ramen joint and to the movie. A heroine that is a single mom, not at all the clichee success woman of the 80s, even if she is the total fast food entrepreneur. Tampopo cooks the mind as the body as the soup becomes a Japanese bath.

Of course there are lots of sexist and macho action overtly satirized (Japanese trucker cowboy cook critics beware!) and what even back then might appear as insensitive Chinese stereotyping, but what the movies lacks it overcomes as a metaphysical level study of Ramen and trough it of how to think and enjoy food that has no bounds. Ramen noodles soup is the total Asian melting pot, and maybe even a clear broth look into the way Japanese culture offers so many repackaged Chinese recipes (Buddhism, Confucianism, architecture etc) In spite of its nationalist darkside, in spite of hardly saying sorry and a very late recognition of massacres by the hand of Japanese occupation troops and its politically toxic attitude towards its Imperial past or its isolationist pretense, in such movies as Tampopo, Japan comes across as a fast uninhibited learner, always able to laud & applaud the magic pot that has fed it and recognize at its very heart how much it cherishes what it learned and kept simmering from mainland China.

It also features the most incredible gourmet hobo gang – sneaking into hotel or restaurant institutions to cook or – the biggest experts on the best wine, choosing the best morsels and the only one commission to award the five stars. It is very hard to pay tribute to such an amazing movie and I sadly I left out a lot of details that one has to taste alone (or in good company).

imdb