{"id":1773,"date":"2015-04-15T13:04:23","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T13:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=1773"},"modified":"2019-01-04T02:44:11","modified_gmt":"2019-01-04T02:44:11","slug":"aleksei-balabanov-the-castle-1994-mackaysussman-double-feature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/film\/aleksei-balabanov-the-castle-1994-mackaysussman-double-feature\/","title":{"rendered":"Aleksei Balabanov, &#8220;The Castle&#8221; (1994): MacKay\/Sussman Double-Feature"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1><em>The Castle <\/em>(<em>Zamok<\/em>, 1994)<\/h1>\n<h2>Cast<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Nikolai Stotsky \u2013 K., the surveyor<\/li>\n<li>Svetlana Pismichenko \u2013 Frieda (dubbed by Anzhelika Nevolina)<\/li>\n<li>Viktor Sukhorukov \u2013 Surveyor\u2019s assistant<\/li>\n<li>Anvar Libabov \u2013 Surveyor\u2019s assistant<\/li>\n<li>Igor Shibanov &#8211; Brunswick<\/li>\n<li>Andrei Smirnov &#8211; Teacher<\/li>\n<li>Vladislav Demchenko \u2013 Barnabas<\/li>\n<li>Olga Antonova \u2013 Innkeeper<\/li>\n<li>Viktor Smirnov \u2013 Erlanger<\/li>\n<li>Aleksei German, Sr. \u2013 Klamm<\/li>\n<li>Bolot Bejshenaliev \u2013 Village chairman<\/li>\n<li>Konstantin Demidov \u2013 Schwarzer<\/li>\n<li>Vladimir Kuznetsov \u2013 Hans<\/li>\n<li>Svetlana Sviroko \u2013 Olga<\/li>\n<li>Svetlana Serval\u2019 \u2013 Amalia<\/li>\n<li>Iuliia Sobolevskaia \u2013 Milena<\/li>\n<li>Irina Sokolova \u2013 Mizzi<\/li>\n<li>Iurii Eller &#8211; Gerstecker<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Production crew, etc.<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Aleksei_Balabanov\">Aleksei Balabanov<\/a>\u2013 director, screenwriter (based on the unfinished novel by Franz Kafka)<\/li>\n<li>Sergei Sel\u2019ianov \u2013 producer, screenwriters<\/li>\n<li>Sergei Iurizditskij, Andrej Zhegalov \u2013 cinematographers<\/li>\n<li>Vladimir Kartashov \u2013 sets<\/li>\n<li>Nadezhda Vasil\u2019eva \u2013 costumes<\/li>\n<li>Sergei Kuryokhin \u2013 music<\/li>\n<li>Production of Lenfil\u2019m\u2019s Studio, Bioskop Film, CNC, Orient Express, Roskomkino<\/li>\n<li>Winner of two Nikas for set design and costumes<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>* \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0* \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0* \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0* \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0* \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0* \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0* \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0* \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0*<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Balabanov\u2019s <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Castle<\/span>: De-Sovietizing Kafka<\/em> \u2013 John MacKay<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe were born to make Kafka a reality\u201d (\u00ab\u041c\u044b \u0440\u043e\u0436\u0434\u0435\u043d\u044b, \u0447\u0442\u043e\u0431 \u041a\u0430\u0444\u043a\u0443 \u0441\u0434\u0435\u043b\u0430\u0442\u044c \u0431\u044b\u043b\u044c\u044e\u00bb): this phrase was evidently flying around in the late Soviet period, when Kafka\u2019s writings finally became widely accessible (including two different translations of <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">The Castle<\/span> that appeared in 1988, at least one of which had been completed over a decade earlier). Among the various long-problematic modernist writers \u2013 Joyce, Proust, Beckett and others \u2013 Kafka had perhaps been the most controversial in the USSR, in part because no one could quite figure out what his books were criticizing (if anything), and how far the critique extended (if critique it was).<\/p>\n<p>Across much of the lifespan of the USSR, Kafka was denounced for his pessimism, his \u201cdenial of social progress,\u201d his dead-end absurdism and universalization of \u201cthe filth and vileness of bourgeois relationships,\u201d and his supposed belief in \u201cthe inscrutability of the world, the omnipotence of evil, and man\u2019s insuperable loneliness.\u201d He had not been, however, an unknown quantity; and \u201cThe Metamorphosis,\u201d \u201cIn the Penal Colony\u201d and other short works had been published in January 1964 in the journal <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Foreign Literature<\/span>, surprisingly enough in the wake of a months-long anti-modernism campaign in the press. This publication was the high point of a slow shift in opinion that began ca. 1959, and apparently came about above all because of greater contact with Western intellectuals on the one hand, and (on the other) the willingness of other East Bloc countries to publish and (perhaps more importantly) publicly discuss Kafka and other modernists starting after 1956.<\/p>\n<p>A May 1963 conference in Liblice, Czechoslovakia in honor of what would have been Kafka\u2019s 80<sup>th<\/sup> birthday celebrated the writer as \u201ca great realist \u2026 poet of alienation, and victim of the cult of [Stalin\u2019s] personality.\u201d Soviet cultural officials were aware that Kafka had been translated and published successfully in a number of East Bloc countries after 1956, and that he was already widely read by the early 1960s by intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia; some East German critics, such as Hans Mayer (who later defected), were calling for a reevaluation as well.<\/p>\n<p>As regards the West, heated debates about Kafka marked the famous International Writers\u2019 Conference in Leningrad in August 1963, attended by such luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Roger Caillois, Angus Wilson, William Golding and Hans-Magnus Enzensberger. Sartre and Robbe-Grillet in particular placed subtle pressure on the Soviets to reconsider Kafka, with the latter noting that Soviet anti-modernist criticism sounded no different to him than reactionary criticism in France.<\/p>\n<p>At home, 1959 saw the beginning of critical efforts \u2013 which mainly ceased after 1968 and the crushing of the Prague Spring \u2013 by a number of Soviet pundits to save Kafka for the \u201crealist\u201d USSR. The strategies included singling out Kafka\u2019s attacks on \u201cthe Austrian governmental military machine\u201d (in \u201cPenal Colony\u201d), the \u201cbourgeois institutions of bourgeois government\u201d (in <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">The Trial<\/span>), and the \u201cdestructive power of money\u201d (in \u201cThe Bucket-Rider\u201d); noting his \u201cpremonitions of fascism\u201d (Ilya Ehrenburg); or stressing his sympathy for the downtrodden in works like \u201cThe Metamorphosis,\u201d and his muted valorization of resistance to authority in (say) <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">The Trial<\/span>. The power that weighs upon K. in <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">The Castle<\/span>, wrote one critic, is \u201ca completely real power\u2026which is hostile to man and crushes and enslaves him.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To be sure, most critical discussion of Kafka took care to affirm that the alienation and bureaucratic madness represented in his works referred only to capitalist societies. But fascinatingly, it seems that two other historical factors, with the potential to open up painful wounds, also worked to enable Kafka\u2019s belated appearance in Russia in the 1960s. In 1964, a critic named Velikovskii actually linked Kafka to the de-Stalinization campaign, noting that the Stalinist cult of personality demonstrated that alienation (from the truth, from sound judgment, from reality) clearly <em>did<\/em> exist in the Soviet Union. Kafka\u2019s writings, he argued, are \u201can instrument, if not for the elimination, then undoubtedly for the detection and disclosure of the cancers of alienation.\u201d Later, the split with China (and especially after the advent of the Cultural Revolution) opened the possibility for more open discussion of bureaucracy and authoritarianism, sometimes by sociologists with an interest in Kafka, who took the novelist onboard as one of the first to see how \u201cin the world of alienation, under arbitrary totalitarian rule, the ordinary man is filled with fear for his fate and is terrorized by the pervasive atmosphere of repression . . . [which can lead to] the corruption of consciousness, the destruction of the human \u2018I\u2019, the transformation of an individual into a depersonalized insect.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>What is perhaps most striking, however, about Balabanov\u2019s adaptation (at least in this viewer\u2019s eyes) is the way that the film seems to avoid any allusions whatsoever to the Soviet past or Soviet totalitarianism, whether on the level of language, sound or iconography. (That Balabanov could very well conjure up that iconography would become evident in 2007, with <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Cargo 200<\/span>.) The film seems instead to subject Kafka\u2019s text to a very personal and rather carnivalesque authorial revisioning, where we attend to the circulation of objects and motifs \u2013 coats, other pieces of clothing, windows, walls, all manner of weird gadgets, the media instruments of some bygone or imagined bygone age \u2013 as much as to any \u201cexistential\u201d themes. The Kafka \u201creality\u201d created by Balabanov is very far from a Soviet one, and includes some remarkable swerves from Kafka as well (note the ending, for instance). Perhaps this is the strongest indicator of the way the filmmaker seizes Kafka for a post-Soviet world: through an assertion of autonomy vis-\u00e0-vis not only the earlier Soviet reception or non-reception of Kafka, or any supposedly \u201cKafkaesque\u201d elements of Soviet life, but also in regard to Kafka himself.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>1 March 2015<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/0-1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1779\" src=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/0-1.jpg\" alt=\"0-1\" width=\"226\" height=\"126\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>To Kafka from Russia with Love: Balabanov&#8217;s &#8220;<\/em><em>Castle&#8221;<\/em><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><em>Adaptation&#8211;Henry Sussman<\/em><\/p>\n<p>With two major adaptations of Kafka\u2019s most philosophical, least finished novel-project, the 1990\u2019s saw an unpredictable run into the virtual space of the Kafkan Imaginary. A somber made-for-TV version in B &amp; W by Michael Haneke (1997) strove for (and achieved) high fidelity to Kafka\u2019s meandering and speculative novel. The director, in anticipation of his <em>tour de force<\/em> in <em>The White Ribbon<\/em>, pressed his uncanny sense for the temperamental climate prevailing in isolated and dank villages into the service of this adaptation. K.\u2019s remorseless wanderings from one end of the Castle village to the other in a double-barreled quest for sense and affirmation are shot in absolutely level horizontal <em>verit\u00e9<\/em>. This does not begin to exhaust what is levelheaded about Haneke\u2019s adaptation. K. is a bit jaded and at the end of his tether, as we would expect a drifter in the middle of life\u2019s road to be. There is a great performance by Frieda (Susanne Lothar), K.\u2019s primary love-interest and his only living link, a sexual one, to <em>administrator absconditus<\/em>, Klamm. The film offers everything in the way of slapstick idiocy on the part of messenger Barnabas and assistants Artur and Jeremias that Kafka fans everywhere rightly demand. An impressive tribute to Kafka\u2019s most enigmatic extended work, the Haneke adaptation performs public service as well: at a consistently high level of artistic specs, it presents the novel, accurately and plausibly&#8211;to the broader public.<\/p>\n<p>Three years earlier, and in the wake of the Soviet Union\u2019s demise, Aleksei Balabanov, implanted every bit as firmly as Haneke in the Castle\u2019s virtual domain, had mounted a distinctively different adaptation strategy\u2014looser in fidelity, wilder in improvisation, and more open in its splicing in of tangential motifs. Balabanov remains bolder in setting Kafka\u2019s Castle in the Russian counterparts to its \u201cnatural\u201d and architectural settings. Indeed, Haneke curtails the \u201coutside\u201d to deliberations on K\u2019s part that are first and foremost bureaucratic and domestic. What we see mostly of the outside in Haneke\u2019s version is characters bracing themselves against onslaughts of snow. The most extended outdoors scene is in the courtyard of the <em>Herrenhof<\/em> Hotel: K. waits there in futility, hoping to snag Klamm as he hops into his sled. Haneke does not even venture an image of the Castle from afar, although Kafka\u2019s nuanced description of this pile is one of the great narrative triumphs in his <em>ouevre<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Balabanov\u2019s framing of the Castle in its natural environment is striking indeed. His shots of the surrounding countryside are exquisite. The Russian Castle village echoes Kremlin architecture, and in this sense references the Eisenstein classics, whether \u201cIvan the Terrible\u201d or \u201cAlexander Nevsky.\u201d At transitional moments in the film, Balabanov foregrounds the Castle in long shots of volatile water whose current is no more liquid than it is solid. In their indeterminate turmoil, the menacing swells echo K.\u2019s predicament.<\/p>\n<p>The first chapter of <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Das Schlo\u03b2<\/span> specifies that in age, K. has reached the plateau of \u201cthirty-something.\u201d In contrast to Haneke\u2019s K., the masterful Ulrich M\u00fche, Nikolai Stotsky, Balabanov\u2019s protagonist, is as youthful an actor as could possibly be imagined for this role. Under Balabanov\u2019s direction, K., and the novel he dominates, work in the interest of an implied youth movement, perhaps the generation being called upon to galvanize and redirect Russia in its post-Soviet phase. The expectation of Balabanov\u2019s K. from the get-go\u2014that he is, authoritatively, to employ and direct Barnabas and the assistants in their tasks&#8211;takes on a theater of the absurd cast.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the most substantial difference in the approaches to adaptation taken by Haneke and Balabanov is that the latter\u2019s \u201cThe Castle\u201d filters back to us through the active mediation of Walter Benjamin\u2014and not only the Benjamin of the groundbreaking 1934 retrospective on Franz Kafka. The most remarkable torque that Balabanov applies to Kafka\u2019s plot may well be that the master-craftsmen with whom K. interacts, Barnabas\u2019s aging and discredited father and <em>his<\/em> former assistant, Brunswick, are no longer master cobblers but manufacturers of music cylinders (as in player pianos and similar devices). This single plot-twist opens the film to a wild and proliferating showcase of outmoded mechanical technologies of reproduction\u2014in the visual as well as audio sphere. In its artistic design and d\u00e9cor, the film becomes a Benjaminian phantasmagoria (and \u201cAntique Road Show\u201d) of way stations on the road to advanced tele-technic verisimilitude. If endless waiting and hovering indecision form the \u201csteady state\u201d of K.\u2019s existential predicament, this open-ended deferral becomes an occasion for meditating on the crisis of mediation, <em>its<\/em> endless quest for \u201cpurer\u201d and more advanced forms, for \u201chigher fidelity\u201d realism. It is in this way that Balabanov\u2019s <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Castle<\/span> adaptation becomes a carnivalesque and parodic quest for the <em>ultimate<\/em> modality of \u201ctechnological reproducibility.\u201d It is a master-stroke as well that Balabanov names K.\u2019s love interest who replaces Frieda amid the steady fast-forward that the novel prescribes for all human interactions (this in opposition to bureaucratic procedures) \u201cMilena\u201d instead of \u201cPepi.\u201d This act of renaming enables Balabanov, improbably, to loop Franz Kafka\u2019s life-story into his adaptation. In Kafka\u2019s later years, a liaison largely by correspondence with Milena Jesenska supplanted his tortuous his on-again off-again engagement to Felice Bauer.<\/p>\n<p>In a way that would be much appreciated by Mikhail Bakhtine, Balabanov transforms Kafka\u2019s <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Schlo\u03b2<\/span> from existential travesty precisely into carnival\u2014without departing from the virtual and aesthetic landscapes established by the Castle and its domains. In this dimension of the iteration, implausibly, Federico Fellini joins the cast of the film\u2019s cinematic forbears. Resolute in his quest, K. is almost never afforded the luxury of being alone with his thoughts. K.\u2019s struggle not only to reach and confront Klamm but with the unavoidable crowds into which he is constantly thrust comprises a central element in the film\u2019s social satire. Periodically, the \u201cmadding crowd\u201d that K. has been forced to join forms a chorus&#8211;breaking out into song and dance routines whose preeminent quality is their mechanical stutter-step. (An appropriately eerie and marvelously variegated soundtrack by Sergey Kuryokhin accompanies the visuals.) \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Along with the film\u2019s showcase of outmoded mechanical technologies, the film\u2019s musical \u201cnumbers,\u201d especially when performed by its chorus of children, reference an early nineteenth-century aesthetic, the mechanical possession periodically overwhelming E. T. A. Hoffmann\u2019s major characters. If the trappings surrounding K.\u2019s personal predicament and existential quest derive from an aesthetic of the Romantic grotesque, the costumes designed for the film, perhaps in keeping with its architecture, tend to hover in the late Middle Ages, on the cusp of Modernity. This menacing, strictly black attire recalls an age of social anomie and violence constantly on the verge of reemergence.<\/p>\n<p>Balabanov\u2019s \u201cThe Castle\u201d evolves into a romp from one rural medieval outpost <em>\u00e0 la Russe<\/em>, from one Kafkan love-impasse, and from one technology of \u201cmechanical reproducibility\u201d to the next. It is, in the world of film adaptations, as loose and fanciful as Haneke\u2019s is faithful and <em>de rigeur<\/em>. Balabanov\u2019s \u201cThe Castle\u201d is not afraid to run away where Kafka contented himself with spare one-liners. As Frieda clears the taproom where she works as barmaid so that she may deepen her intimate ties to K., the narrator compares her to Circe. In Balabanov\u2019s version, a flock of very tangible swine unpredictably romps through cine-space at all the wrong moments. Balabanov unlocks <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Das Schlo\u03b2<\/span>; he springs the novel\u2019s embedded absurdities, even while maintaining his version of tight fidelity to plot, theme, and mood.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the ultimate coup that Balabanov pulls off in his \u201cloose-construction\u201d adaptation of the Kafka classic is inserting, toward the end of K.\u2019s drama in the village, a Faustian pact by which Brunswick, the music cylinder master, assumes the interloper\u2019s identity in exchange for his wife. (She is the unusually dainty \u201cgirl from the Castle\u201d that K. spots early on in his village rounds. Balabanov has set K.\u2019s infatuation for her in his film somewhat higher than it plays out in the novel.) Through this added role-reversal, the tangential novelistic character, Brunswick, reaps all the recognition and reward ultimately accruing to K.&#8211;though only in Balabanov\u2019s retelling. This definitive \u201cso near but so far\u201d final plot-twist only reinforces the futility of K.\u2019s position. His fate remains very much the one that Kafka had programmed for him: a slacker with much to commend him in his common sense and basic instinct for justice\u2014doomed, however, to being thwarted by the inevitable blind-spots and <em>m\u00e9connaissance<\/em> in his vision.<\/p>\n<p>This film employs color and set-design to great effect. It evokes notable performances, above all by Svetlana Pismichenko (Frieda), Igor Shibanov (Brunswick), Andrei Smirnov (Teacher), Vladislav Demchenko (Barnabas), Bolot Bejshenaliev (Mayor), Vladimir Kuznetsov (Hans Brunswick), Svetlana Sviroko (Olga) and Svetlana Serval\u2019 (Amalia). Kafka himself could only marvel at how far his striking images have travelled; how well his scenarios of systematic insult, bureaucratic deferral, and instinctual thwarting fare in a radically distant socio-cultural \u201cframe\u201d; how much his inaugural fictive forays into media and technology ended up suggesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Castle (Zamok, 1994) Cast Nikolai Stotsky \u2013 K., the surveyor Svetlana Pismichenko \u2013 Frieda (dubbed by Anzhelika Nevolina) Viktor Sukhorukov \u2013 Surveyor\u2019s assistant Anvar Libabov \u2013 Surveyor\u2019s assistant Igor Shibanov &#8211; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":1778,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,15,49],"tags":[46],"class_list":["post-1773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-film","category-media","tag-k-arrives-in-town-imdb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1773"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1781,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1773\/revisions\/1781"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}