Headlong: We Children of the Twentieth Century

		Headlong: We Children of the Twentieth Century (1994) Julia Vassilieva

After two remarkable, much-discussed films of the ‘90s, Freeze, Die, Revive! (1989) and An Independent Life (1992) – a directorial career begun in his mid ‘50s – Vitali Kanevski turned to documentary with We Children of the Twentieth Century, an extraordinary and little-known work. He has remained with the documentary form ever since, with the sad result that he has fallen almost entirely from international cinephile attention.

Virtually all of Kanevski’s output, in fiction or documentary, is focused on the teenage wildlife of street kids, young adolescents coming of age in a savage landscape in which they struggle to survive, hand to mouth. His first two autobiographical fictions lead, ina very real and direct way, to this first foray into documentary, the French-produced We Children of the Twentieth Century: the young male star of the fiction films, Pavel Nazarov, is now behind bars in the third, and Kanevski engineers a heartbreaking encounter in jail with his co-star, Dinara Droukarova. Stylistically, We Children offers a headlong, visceral cinéma-vérité ride as it tries to keep up with the ever-moving, shouting, brawling kids which are its subject.

Kanevski is not much talked about, written on or even screened in his native Russia. From both the conservative/nationalistic side and the liberal arthouse side, he is regarded with some degree of caution and mistrust, as an enfant terrible – but for different reasons in each case. The critique generally acknowledges that his ‘star rose’ when the historical moment was right for unveiling a ‘shocking truth’ in the midst of perestroika, when the Western public was hungry for revelations about the long-repressed Russian way of lifeand mentality; hence his prize in Cannes in 1990 for Freeze, Die, Revive!.

But if more sympathetic arthouse critique sees interesting material in this legitimate capitalisation on the historic moment, reinforced by the personal circumstances of the director’s life – the fact that he himself went through the camps, which some sources attribute to political reasons while others leave unspecified – the right-wing nationalistic critique (for example, the commentaries by the notorious conserative Valerii Kichin) sees in his work the beginning of a smear campaign: the exploitation of the ‘barbaric Russianness’ theme, continued later by Ilya Khrzhanovsky in 4 (2005).

The most recent news about Kanevski relates to his masterclass in Baku, the capital of Azerbaidzan, in November 2008. There, We Children of the Twentieth Century was screened along with some of his other films. In several interviews he has discussed his commitment to documentary, and the centrality of this film in his career:

1. Kaspii, 25 November 2008, p. 8.

I think that practically every single person from the crowd is capable of excellent acting provided that the director can explain to him his task, or rather – induce in him this special state ... That’s why for me almost every interesting typage from the street contains within himself more discoveries than a ‘movie star’... The same thing goes for cinema in general - in my view, the process of creating non-fictional, documentary cinema is much more interesting than shooting a fictional film. In documentary cinema a ‘scenario’ in the actors’ behaviour cannot be foreseen in advance – it is life as such. (1)

According to this approach, in We Children there was no script or even an expectation of a particular story development:

2. Azerbaidzan News, 14 January 2009, p. 3.

We were shooting the film in childrens’ labour colonies, but the kids were given total freedom. They were playing guitar, singing, laughing with the full force of their childlike immediacy. We didn’t plan any particular scenes in advance, but were shooting everything, and later selected the most expressive shots. (2)

Characteristically, it is in the West where the humanistic message of Kanevski’s films has been better appreciated – as is evident from regular screenings of We Children in during politically-oriented film festivals, and on the television channel SBS in Australia – the most recent examples being screenings at the Documentaries on Human Rights organised by the French Embassy in New Zealand from Nov 2008 to March 2009, and the International Rights of the Child Film Festival in New Orleans in February 2009. But We Children of the Twentieth Century now needs to be rescued from the ‘worthy human content’ circuit and reinserted, in all its messy, politically incorrect vitality, back into cinema proper.

		© Julia Vassilieva and Rouge February 2009. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.