GLEB PANFILOV and INNA CHURIKOVA.
 

 When Gleb Panfilov’s Proshu slova opened in Paris in 1976, as  Je demande la parole (I can’t find any English language version), I went because it was a new Russian movie and I found myself gobsmacked, totally unprepared after having only seen the director’s slight, agreeable 1970 Nachalo / The Beginning.

In Proshu slova, Panfilov’s wife of fifty years Inna Churikova, near unrecognisable from her urchin parts, is smartly turned out as the honored Soviet Citizen whose success as an Olympic sharp shooter has been given recognition by making her the mayor of her town. Meanwhile, a writer former colleague has sent her a copy of his play to which she feels bound to provide a critique pointing out its failure to meet the guide lines for Socialist art. He acknowledges her comments but points out that it’s already doing business in two Moscow Theatres. Inna’s engulfed in the supervision of the construction of a new housing development and her unsupervised child shoots himself with one of her pistols. Her husband is outraged and he turns on her with a harangue that is a companion to Beau Bridges’ “I am completely without” monologue to his activist wife Sally Field in the 1979 Norma Rae. Churikova’s husband’s clincher argument is that in Paris there are twelve hundred restaurants, a facility barely present in their world. She takes this on board and the ending is her, as a delegate to the immense council of  the Supreme Soviets, standing up and saying “I ask for the floor.”

Proshu Slova - Churikova & Nikolay Gubenko

I’d never seen anything from Russia that so seriously reproached Communist society and I haven’t since. I would have expected that to bring the roof in on the Panfilovs but it was his next film Thema / Theme that had troubles, being suppressed for seven years and only released in 1979 after the findings of a Glasnost era committee appointed to review all bans since 1930. The sticking point was, we were told, that it had a Jewish character forbidden to emigrate to Israel. In the copy I eventually saw there’s a dissident who want to go to the ‘States.

After this Panfilov, either from choice or convenience, retreated to Maxim Gorki adaptations and TV series about the Romanovs.

I can’t help thinking of Helmut Kautner after 1943’s Romanze in Molle or Feng Xioagang and the 2016 Wo Bu Shi Pan Jinlian / I Am Not Madame Bovary, immensely popular creators whose prestige work the authorities needed but who sailed too close to the wind and found themselves muzzled. What ever you may think about Capitalism, it never managed to stop Sidney Lumet who achieved prominence from making a lifetime of films that tore into its most prized institutions - democracy in Fail Safe and more overtly Power, religion in Child’s Play and particularly the rule of law in Twelve Angry Men, Prince of the City, The Verdict and Find Me Guilty.

I’d worked at finding the Panfilovs’ output so it was with some surprise that I discovered the 1968 V ogne broda net / No Path Through Fire / There is no ford in fire, a film earlier than The Beginning (which had been touted as their first) on You Tube in a nice sharp, correct format copy with English subs. IMDB lists Panfilov as director and he discusses it as his first major

V ogne broda net / No Path Through Fire

film and first collaboration with Churikova on the sleeve notes of the French DVD, but the print has him as producer and another name as director.

Titles over the striking drawings, which become a key plot element, cut to the black and white wide screen images of bleak snow covered Russian landscape with that familiar straight line horizon. It already evokes Alexei Gherman or Andrei Tarkovsky among whom Panfilov had a certain community though each of these directors showed a distinct personality in what appears, from this distance, to be the richest period of Russian film making. Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Tarkovski’s Andrei Rublev and regular lead, is in No Path Through the Fire.

Kononov & Churikova.

A distant train crosses the screen, a mobile hospital where Churikova complete with peasant stoop and drab outfits is an orderly. First time young Mikhail Kononov, an accordionist soldier, sees her he thinks she’s a boy. His friend moves on Inna but is sent packing but she and Kononov become an item despite their inexperience and awkwardness, walking off along the sandy river bank together and necking in the shrubbery.

He’s distraught when the train moves on with her but when it comes back he's alarmed when she sells her attractive floral blouse to buy him a suit and overwhelms him with her “Psycho” undisciplined affection. Great moment of him desperately doubling back to her from the troop train taking him away and then running to rejoin it.

At their new destination, the medical train is engulfed by the horse carts bringing wounded in the rain. The shot of the mother holding a board over her injured son’s face as the water beats down registers and her exclusion from the train is significant, coming with objections from the peasant who has left his family because there is no food in the village and no food in the town, to join the team's blonde nurse.

In Churikova’s discussions with the train medics, their shared dream is of a future without exploitators. She reveals her peasant belief in The Evil Eye and they learn that Bolsheviks have even killed the Tsar.

Polit Agit car joins train

The Polit Agit carriage is attached to the train, objections nervously silenced. Their artist sees Inna with a piece of black bread (“You have food?”) and they trade - cut to him with the bowl and her joining painting the carriage side decoration. 

She starts working with the art materials, guarding her drawings from the inspection of the artist and rebuffs his advances, telling him she is spoken for.

Then, in one of the film’s great images, a hoard of soldiers, rifles slung on their shoulders,
emerge from the fog, headed for the Don. The nurse is ordered to pull her skirt over her
knees by the Bolshevik doctor. Train medical personnel, caught up in the emotion of the
moment, fall in with the troops, with the one who brings his saddle ridiculed because they
are an infantry unit.

An abrupt finale cuts to where Inna has fallen into the hands of the Whites’ Colonel, who asks what she wants to do after the war and she tells him it’s to become an artist. He releases her because he recognises her sensibility when she is able to pick out the superior icon there that its owner can’t differentiate from his other pieces. However when the Colonel orders the brutalisation of the prisoner, who turns out to be the peasant who opposed the Bolsheviks (“Orders are more important than mothers?”) she stands by the man's side until moved on and, out in the snowy yard, picks up a rock...

This is pretty much the most plausible rendition of the Russian Civil War we have on film. "Dr. Zhivago" is a glossy, romanticised presentation of the same scene. Here again the Bolsheviks are naive, idealistic, doctrinaire and brutal while the Whites are cultured, idealistic, doctrinaire and brutal but the stark, grubby handling gives Panfilov’s film real conviction. 

No Path Through Fire’s Sharp ‘scope B&W and surprisingly thoughtful criticisms of the Heroes of the Revolution constantly catch attention  but the star element is winning young Churikova, alternately plain and appealing, simple minded and unquestioning  but making perceptive instinctive choices. It is the first of her dominating, distinct characters who will head up Panfilov’s movies and make her one of the leading performers of their industry.

Inna Churikova and Gleb Panfilov.

The impressive work  of Gherman (includes Moy drug Ivan Lapshin/ My Friend Ivan Lapshin) has recently been rehabilitated and a short Gherman retrospective has been circulated round cultural events. The imposing Panfilovs are over due one of those. 

Barrie Pattison 2021