First on the Moon

		First on the Moon The Totalitarian Echo in New Russian Cinema Julia Vassilieva

In 2005, Alexei Fedorchenko, a Russian director known until then only to a narrow circle of documentary fans through his works David (2002) and Children of the White Grave (2003), made a film titled First on the Moon. The film simultaneously continued and derailed the trajectory Fedorchenko had been following: First on the Moon became one of the first attempts in Russia to experiment with mock-documentary. Less than a handful of works can be named as its predecessors: Sergei Kurechin’s Lenin-Mushroom (1992) and Sergei Livnev’s Hammer and Sickle (1994).

All kinds of neologisms, mainly inspired by English terms, were introduced in Russia to describe these works – such as насмешка над документом (mockery of the document), документальная драма (drama documentary), постмодернистская мистификация (postmodernist mystification), поддельная документалистика (counterfeit documentary film) or, for those who wanted to look really cool, стеб (amusing spoof). This diversity reflects not only terminological problems, but also the problem of defining the genre as a distinctive screen form.

1. Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Actuality ( Manchester University Press, 2001).

At a time when ‘the association between factual discourse and factual means of representation is increasingly tenuous’ (1) – a situation aggravated by advances in digital technology that seriously undermine the assumption that image in the film should necessarily have a prototype in the real world – the mock-documentary has emerged as a genre that questions the basic assumptions of documentary and takes a reflexive and critical stand towards it. As a distinctive screen form, it adopts documentary codes and conventions to create a fictional rather than factual account of events. It deliberately falsifies the images which purport to represent the social-historical world – asking, in effect, whether we can really believe what we see. Mock-documentary addresses itself to an audience which is not only familiar with the expectations associated with documentary but is ready to explore the much more complex issue of factuality itself. Its intervention ranges from parody, via critique, to deconstruction of the basic assumptions of documentary. The issue of truth is central to its development.

No wonder that mock-documentary has been finally appropriated by Russian filmmakers. The issue of truth has equally become a central theme of post-Soviet Russian art, a large proportion of which rightly goes under the heading of Russian postmodernism. The definitive moment in its emergence and development was the collapse of the Soviet empire – an empire that relied for its existence on the production and maintenance of a complex and elaborate system of lies, producing an effect that Mikhail Epstein aptly termed ‘Soviet hyperreality’. The first years of Gorbachev’s glasnost took on the task of ‘revealing the truth about the past’ in a serious and passionate way, re-playing Khrushchev’s thaw on a larger scale. From publication of Alexandr Soljenistsin’s Gulag Archipelago and Nadejda Mandelshtam’s memoirs, to the release of such feature films as Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance (made in 1984 and released in 1987) and such documentaries as Marina Goldovskay’s The Power of Solovki, the nation engaged in the task of facing its dramatic and traumatic past in a thorough way, with an expected and appropriate reaction of shock and horror.

However, no one can stay paralysed by horror for too long, and, as in the therapeutic progression, the former Soviet people moved to the next stage of ‘working through’. For the first time, Russian art displayed irony without bitterness towards the Soviet past, engaging in a playful manipulation of both the content and forms of the previous period. In the novels and short stories of Pelevin and Sorokin, the mechanisms of Soviet power were not only exposed, but also ridiculed; not from a position of an already defeated and overpowered-by–the-system underdog (typical for Russian artists of the Soviet era) but from the position of an equal. For the first time, people were able to laugh at their past – demonstrating the liberating effect of laugher as a catalyst for historical change, and proving once again Bakhtin’s insight on this issue.

2. Nina Khrushcheva, ‘Money and Wealth in Russia : Politics and Perceptions’, International Affairs Working Paper 2006-06 (April 2006); text no longer on-line.

Such was the situation in the ‘90s, when the newly established freedom of speech was tested to its limit in Russia . However, this was paralleled by an almost complete evaporation of law and order in the country; a general anarchy that became the most visible characteristic of the Elstin era. It should be kept in mind that, as well as establishing free-market economy and experimenting with other Western-style institutions, the decade led the majority of Russian people to levels of poverty without precedent even in the Soviet era; educational, medical and housing systems were generally dismantled, and the hidden effects of those deprivations in human lives reached an estimated ten million. The words democracy and reform became synonymous with thievery, gangsterism and oligarchy. Significantly, such disillusion was achieved in less than ten years – a record revolutionary burnout that would be the envy of any anti-Bolshevik, as political analyst Nina Khrushcheva remarked. (2) It was out of these circumstances that nostalgia for the Soviet era emerged, coupled with longing for a stronger power – thus facilitating Putin’s ascent to the position of President. This marked a definitive turn back towards at least partial re-installment of a Soviet-type system. Pelevin captured the essence of the time aptly in the title of his 2003 novel Dialectic of the Transition Period (From Out-of-Nowhere and Going-Nowhere).

This was accompanied by a strong impulse to reclaim the past from iconoclastic attacks of the previous decade and rehabilitate Soviet culture – at least symbolically. From toppling down Soviet monuments people went on to their glorification. Vera Muchina’s sculptures started to become integrated with images of glamour and the power of New Russians’ style. Pictures in the socialist-realist manner became prized possessions and preferred décor in the offices of politicians and businessmen. Films such as Pavel Chuchrai’s A Driver for Vera (2004) and Stanislav Govoruchin’s Not by Bread Alone (2005), both of which were enthusiastically received by the audience and acclaimed by the critics, captured this mood particularly well. They delivered a new view of the Soviet system – though not unproblematic, at least overwhelmingly ‘ours’– and they tried to depict the Soviet officials not as soulless parts of the machine, but real human beings with feelings, problems and ethical dilemmas. Negative moments in the functioning of the Soviet state were not attributed to the system as such, but conceptualised as bad deeds of individuals, all the while putting strong emphasis on the powerful, protective and fair empire – something to be proud of. There has been a strong drive to rehabilitate the ‘common people’, their naïve enthusiasm, their idealistic belief system, their aspirations and hopes. Some parallels can be established with recent developments in German cinema – particularly those films that deal with the legacy of Eastern Germany, such as Wolfgang Becker’s Good-bye Lenin! (2003) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006).

The theme of space exploration or Cosmos (as it was called in Russia) has emerged as a powerful nostalgic presence in recent Russian cinema. Aleksei Uchitel’s highly successful Dreaming of Space (Koсмос как предчуствие) (2005) articulated this nostalgia by alluding to the immense feeling of optimism that filled the Soviet people when the Soviet Union launched its first satellite into space in 1957. In Uchitel’s film, Cosmos is presented as a rather vague background, as transcontinental and extraterrestrial ‘otherness’ – but more real and accessible for the Soviet people than any other territory on Earth, as the very existence of such territories were routinely doubted by homo soveticus, separated from the rest of the world by the Iron Curtain.

3. P. Weil and A. Genis, The 1960s: The World of the Soviet People (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obosrenie, 1996).

However, the Soviet mythology of Cosmos represented a rich and multilayered system and, as such, could be exploited in a variety of ways. Cosmos provided an ideal setting for projecting Soviet utopian ideals. Not limited by physical borders, Cosmos was open for conquest, providing an unlimited space for advancing the progressive Soviet ideology. In theory, it could allow an extension of revolution from the planetary to the inter-planetary level – ideas favored by such Russian intellectuals as Khlebnikov, Zabolotsky and Platonov. While developing his theory of space flight, Tsiolkovsky also advocated the idea that society and personality could be completely transformed through escape into Space, where cells, molecules and atoms comprising human beings would unite in a more sophisticated, harmonious way. Veil and Genis argued that spacecrafts, with their forcefully established vertical orientation, provided the only viable alternative to the archetype of the cathedral – which, after the Russian church was destroyed in the physical and symbolic sense, no Soviet institution managed to replace successfully. (3) Cosmos became a sacred space, untouched by blood, cynicism and corruption. It was a perfect receptacle for the most precious Soviet ideals. And, of course, it was closely linked with scientific development, technological advances and competition with the West.

Five years after the final act of the space race was played out, when the Soviet station Mir was finally put out of action – thus delivering one of the final blows to an already badly injured Russian self-esteem – Fedorchenko’s First on the Moon, being made on a relatively large budget for Russian cinema industry (one million dollars), re-articulated the grand narrative of conquest of Space in its classic Soviet form. The advertising posters claimed boldly ‘We were there first!’ – i.e., Russian men were first on the Moon. The film reconstructs and investigates the allegedly ‘unknown’ Soviet space program, which is said to have begun in 1937.

The story line is simple: while the genius constructor Suprun builds and tests the first manned space ship, four carefully selected cosmonauts undergo their training and finally, on the 16^thMarch 1938, one of them, Ivan Kharlamov, is sent to the moon.

Although contact with the space craft is lost after the first two minutes, we learn later that Kharlamov not only made it to the moon, but got back to Earth, landing in Chile . From there he traveled across the Pacific, and then across China to Mongolia , until he was finally captured by the NKVD (the Internal Affairs agency) and sent to a psychiatric ward. Eventually, he escaped from his cell and, assuming a series of false identities, survived for a while until his traces were finally lost.

4. Oleg Kovalov, ‘Aleksei Fedorchenko: First on the Moon’, KinoKultura, no. 11 (2006). <http://www.kinokultura.com
/2006/11r-firstmoon1.shtml>.

It is not the plot, however, but the careful and skilful use of numerous codes and devices associated with documentary that elevates the film to a level of serious statement. The film is constructed as an investigative journalistic enterprise combining expositional, observational and interactive documentary modes. Each of them is presented through a specific type of material. The most important is the historical archival material that allegedly comes from the archive of the FSB – the heir to the KGB, which secretly filmed every step of every character in the story. In the opening scene, the archivist declares that ‘Everything that happened was recorded’, and then goes on to articulate one of the major assumptions of the documentary mode: ‘And if it is recorded – it means that it really happened’ (Все что было - должно быть снято, а если снято – то значит было). Every piece of this ‘film-footage’ comes with its made-up history: a skilful imitation of defects or (on the contrary) their absence suggests how each was shot and where it was stored. (4) Apart from archival surveillance footage, documents and alleged official newsreels of the time, the director interviews some survivors and sends expeditions to the places associated with the launch and landing of the space-ship, from Crimea to Chile.

Finally, there is a team of experts from one of Moscow ’s academic Physics Institutes examining the drawings of the original spacecraft, even building and testing a model. While the interviews and the scientists at work are shot in the neutral, contemporary manner of impersonal journalism, Fedorchenko, in creating his pseudo-archival materials, meticulously reproduces the norms of officious film-journals of the ‘30s: shots of the official parade are different from those of a sports parade; the political leadership is filmed in one way, ordinary citizens in another. This is all accompanied by narration constructed exclusively in the artificial language of contrived Soviet clichés. Naturally, the footage is in black and white—which seems to carry more authority and authenticity.

5. Fedorchenko interview cited in T. Birchenough, ‘Inspired Lunacy’, Moscow Times (30 September 2005).

The tone of the film is absolutely serious, the general mood nostalgic. In Fedorchenko’s words: ‘The element of irony is very small, perhaps about five percent’. (5) The film succeeds alarmingly well in creating a glorified and romanticised image of the epoch and its dominant aesthetic. There is a powerful empire in the background; it looks after its sons and daughters well. Even surveillance is depicted as something acceptable: the citizens are constantly watched, but they are watched like little children by their caring mother who is only concerned for their wellbeing. The people are happy, enthusiastic, hardworking, prepared to sacrifice their lives for their country and the common good. Occasionally they can be locked up in a psychiatric hospital, where they will be treated – but only for their own good, for they will get better.

This naively optimistic picture of Soviet reality created by Fedorchenko – bordering on idiocy – is much scarier than Orwell’s 1984, Kafka’s The Trial and Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading combined because, unlike in those works, the moment of reflexivity, criticism or resistance to the oppressing power machine is completely removed. It is a Foucauldian nightmare: society has moved to the stage of internalised control, where human beings begin to function as their own guardians, actively engaging in operations to forge themselves into ‘docile bodies’. Fedorchenko spends a fair share of his footage presenting exactly the type of operations which Foucault described so meticulously: as Soviet ideology always argued, the collective overrides the individual in Soviet society. Consequently, people are presented mainly as members of various groups. They are not separate persons but scientists and engineers, sportsmen and sportswomen, children in the kindergarten and nurses who care for them. In the context of selecting potential astronauts for the space program, the screening procedures include the measurement of heights, weights, strength, endurance. Medical tests are shown in detail. Dozens of people of both sexes pass before the viewers’ eyes on the screen, being gradually undressed, measured, classified and dismissed. The process of de-individuation is meticulously depicted – but it is accepted by its participants without question, even enthusiastically. As the only surviving astronaut recalls later on: ‘Chances of survival were small, very small, but we were not afraid’.

Later, a detailed depiction of the functioning of a psychiatric hospital is presented: here, variously disturbed patients submit themselves with a weak smile to treatment methods ranging from art-therapy (dancing) and work-therapy (tree-felling, which is more commonly associated in the Russian mentality with the routine preoccupations of Gulag inmates) to the administration of insulin coma. Wherever they are – in a psychiatric hospital or outside of it – people in Fedorchenko’s world live under constant surveillance: as we learn in the beginning, most of the footage is NKVD recordings. It is a society of complete transparency, implemented through the use of constant video-monitoring: people are filmed on the streets and in their bedrooms, during collective festivities and in individual moments of pensive self-reflection. In the opening shots of the film, there is a fragment from a ‘manual on the usage of hand-held cameras’ for NKVD observers: first the camera is presented with a list of its technical characteristics, then the instructions are given on how to use it discreetly and unobtrusively under various circumstances. It is not clear whether people are aware that they are constantly filmed or not, but there is a sense that, even if they had been, they would not protest.

6. Ibid.

It appears that distinctions between good and evil, just and unjust, are eradicated in this world; it is a space beyond morality and ethics. As such, it comes alarmingly close to the image and idea of the camp as it has been manifested on several occasions throughout the history of the twentieth century, and reflected in philosophical writing from Hannah Arendt to Giorgio Agamben. The emergence of this picture in the film is probably accidental as – paradoxically – it goes against the director’s declared wish to pay ‘homage to the generation of our fathers and grandfathers, including their honesty, their genuine belief in an ideal’. (6) Fedorchenko tries very hard to gloss over any contradictions of the Stalinist era, to eradicate any references to negative moments, to avoid any value judgments or critical statements.

He also tries to rescue and reinstate the lost, disgraced ideals of the Soviet epoch – making a passionate statement against the postmodern smear campaign against the Soviet era. To achieve this, the film uses intertextual references of two kinds: it vigorously deconstructs the postmodern take on Soviet reality (especially Pelevin’s work), and lovingly recreates a kind of socialist realism (the dominant aesthetic of the ‘30s) with inherent aspects of neoclassicism and the sublime. In 1991, Pelevin delivered a chilling, sarcastic take on the Soviet space program in his novel Omon Ra (the title reflects the transformation of the name of the protagonist, a young Soviet astronaut, named by his father after the Soviet OMON, the Interior Ministry riot police, who later adopts the name Ra – the Egyptian sun god), dedicated to the Heroes of the Soviet Cosmos. In the novel, Pelevin exposes the underlying mechanics of the Soviet space program which supposedly launches automated, manless spacecrafts, but in fact uses human bodies as parts for its machines. Like hundreds of astronauts before him, Omon is ordered to make the ultimate sacrifice by killing himself, after secretly piloting a supposedly unmanned lunar expedition. The program plays an important part in the operation of the Soviet propaganda machine, the simulacra-like nature of which is further reinforced by the final discovery of the protagonist: everything he experienced in fact took place in a gigantic hangar (reminiscent of the setting of The Truman Show [1998], Philip K. Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint or J.G. Ballard’s story ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’), and nobody ever left Earth (here, traces of conspiracy theory can be easily detected, expanding Pelevin’s critique beyond Russian borders). The twisted logic of this enterprise is best captured by a KGB Colonel’s words: ‘The more consciously you perform your feat of heroism, the greater will be the degree of truth’. If Pelevin’s account was aimed at exposing the illusory nature of Soviet reality and discrediting the macabre mechanisms of producing the collective consciousness of the Soviet people, Fedorchenko’s aim is exactly the opposite: he passionately defends and glorifies illusions.

7. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 37.

As in the previous stage of Russian postmodernism, First on the Moon re-uses and re-cycles tropes, themes and clichés of socialist realism. This time, however, they are not transformed into objects of semiotic play, not used as a means of pastiche or allusion – rather, it is direct repetition. And to paraphrase Linda Hutcheon, (7) it is not a repetition that includes difference: in Fedorchenko’s narrative structure, there is no double-voicing signalling the difference between the parodic and the discourse which is parodied. The film is astonishingly flat, mimicking so successfully the documentary mode that it was awarded first prize at the 20065 Venice Film Festival in the documentary genre! The question to ask is whether this reflects genuine confusion over genre boundaries and definitions – prompting a deserved homage to the craft of the DOP Anatolii Lesnikov and set designer Nikolai Pavlov – or whether it reveals the complete loss of critical distance in the director’s appropriation of methods and (more worryingly) in taking the ideological position of the past that these methods served to articulate.

The use of the mock-documentary format requires special consideration since, although (as in any work of art) form is not separable from content, here form is the film’s main performative medium. If, in the West, mock-documentary takes a critical stance towards documentary truth-claims, in Russia the situation is further complicated by the fact that such documentary claims have already been seriously compromised (if not totally dismantled) by the seventy-odd years of the use of documentary and journalism for the purpose of Soviet propaganda. Individual attempts to use mass media to tell the truth have persisted throughout Soviet history, ensuring that the nation’s ethical value-system endured and the moral health of the nation survived. However, those heroic individual efforts could not alter the dominant way that the Soviet propaganda machine operated. Official Soviet documentary, particularly of the period Fedorchenko has re-created so lovingly, contained not a single speck of truth: while optimistic happy crowds were marching on the Red square in the footage of film-journals, much larger and sadder crowds were marching towards Siberian prison/death camps; while on the screens of cinemas across the country lines of combines were harvesting wheat, millions were dying from government-staged starvation in Ukraine and Kazakhstan; while news reports were celebrating Soviet achievements in art and science, the best of Russian intelligentsia were persecuted, tortured and killed. In a way, documentary in the Soviet Union has always been mock-documentary. Consequently, in Russia the use of mock-documentary responds to a questioning previously undertaken, making a paradoxical argument in favour of rather than against the fully constructed or artificial representation of reality. While the director claims that his intention was to pay tribute to real people, the only thing that his film pays tribute to is the mesmerising power of illusions.

The years over which Fedorchenko chose to position his narrative deliberately test the re-interpretation of history to its limits. The years 1937 and 1938 mark the darkest period in Soviet history, becoming synonymous with Stalin’s terror itself. To present, in 2005, a glamorous and romantic image of those particular years goes far beyond an amusing spoof, or simply a provocative statement – rather, it seems designed to promote amnesia and repression, hardly the most constructive ways of dealing with a traumatic past. However, perhaps the underlying intention of the film can be better linked with a different symptomatology: false memory syndrome, which has become a much more popular diagnostic category in psychology over the last two decades. Its increasing explanatory power is closely linked with the constructivist perspective gaining prominence in social science: false memory syndrome demonstrates not only that it is impossible to distinguish between ‘real’ memories and artificially (albeit unconsciously constructed) ones, but also, more importantly, that perhaps the very distinction is unnecessary. As Jung noted more than a century ago, psychological reality knows no lies. For all intents and purposes, false memories can work just as well as real ones.

8. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985 (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 7. (This book has also appeared under the title The Postmodern Explained to Children.)

First on the Moon responds quite accurately to this need to be reassured – a need which is acutely felt by a substantial segment of the Russian population. It articulates a nostalgia for a past which, after the turmoil of perestroika, has become idealised. It also corresponds to the growing centralisation of power and curtailing of freedom of speech in Russia under Putin. Not only its content matter, but also the carefully recreated Soviet aesthetic, serves this purpose particularly well. As Jean-François Lyotard noted in The Postmodern Explained: ‘“correct images”, “correct” narratives – the correct forms that the party solicits, selects and distributes – must procure a public that will desire them as the appropriate medicine for the depression and anxiety it feels’. (8) On one level, the film’s message can be read as a verdict on the period of postmodern experimentation, as well as a revision of Soviet history – both of which seem to be over.

However, the uneasy and disturbing feeling that film produces stems not only from its open and passionate desire to re-instate the old Soviet ideology. The mock-documentary format allows Fedorchenko to take a postmodern insight about the constructed and relativistic character of the world fully on board, in accordance with the famous dialectical law of cyclical development advocated by classical Marxism and Leninism. The film does not simply pursue a polemic about Soviet history on objective grounds – it is not arguing about access to reality and its accurate representation. The power of the film’s statement comes from its skilful adoption of the postmodern paradigm, since effectively it is saying that, in this fully constructed world, we are free to choose a version of the past and the present to live by. This makes the fact that Fedorchenko willingly advocates the most monstrous version of the totalitarian regime doubly scary. The much-celebrated sensitivity to difference turns against its postmodern founding fathers’ aspirations here, demonstrating how easily postmodern means and devices can be adopted to deliver the most suffocating ideological message. Reflecting on another Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman once said: ‘When film is not a document, it is dream’. First on the Moon has a quality of a nightmare – a nightmare which, one hopes, will never be repeated.

		© Julia Vassilieva and Rouge October 2008. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.