CRYPTONYM

Today, film scholar Rimgaila Salys leads us through a viewing of The Radiant Path (or The Shining Path) a Soviet musical comedy from 1940 by Grigoria Aleksandrov.

Although each of the heroines of Aleksandrov's musical films—whether Aniuta, Marion Dixon, or Strelka—is in some respect a Cinderella type who escapes obscurity, poverty, or degradation to achieve fame, deserved recognition of her talent, personal happiness, and—beginning with Circus—political consciousness, this persistent paradigm emerges in its most literal form in Aleksandrov's last musical comedy, The Radiant Path. Tania Morozova, an uneducated country girl working as a servant and nanny in a provincial town, is fired by her bourgeois mistress for disparaging her employer to a handsome new arrival, engineer Lebedev. Party organizer Pronina takes Tania in hand, sends her to literacy classes, and places her in a textile factory, where Tania gradually rises through the ranks to become a skilled weaver. After reading about Stakhanov’s record, Tania devises a plan to operate a greater number of weaving machines, overcomes the factory director’s opposition, and eventually sets a Stakhanovite record herself. She is awarded the Order of Lenin in a Kremlin ceremony and afterward, looking into a magic mirror, imagines her future as a people’s deputy and Lebedev's partner.

Tania's ritual initiation into a higher world (she wears a white dress and the set is flooded with light) will both transform her into a leader who will now mentor others (the public context) and will allow her to love (the private sphere). Tania's flight to the mountains, coming as it does after the award ceremony, functions as the physical expression of transcendence, the upward vector signified by the paradigmatic "ever higher." Her travels take her from the Kremlin out over the city to distant snow-capped mountains, thereby uniting periphery and center before she returns to Moscow, the sacred omphalos, for the finale of the film. As Tania's song addressed to the country ends ("Hello, land of heroes, land of dreamers, land of scholars"), her white Kremlin dress is replaced by a dark power suit and she takes the wheel of the car, thereby actualizing her transformation from worker into leader and public figure. In the textile pavilion, Tania's suit is replaced by a less severe, but still business-like, pale dress covered by a dark duster, more appropriate to the love scenes that will conclude the film.

After her automobile flight, Tania returns to Moscow, to the Agricultural Exhibition, another symbolic space metonymic to the "fairy tale come true" of the entire land. The actual agrarian countryside is represented by the exhibition grounds as a well-manicured park. Although Tania's transformation is initially located in the future (underscored by the gilded mirror frame visible around the edges of the flying automobile scenes), as she descends to the Agricultural Exhibition, steering her car toward Mukhina's gigantic Factory Worker and Collective Farm Woman, the looking glass frame disappears, leading the audience to perceive the subsequent Agricultural Exhibition scenes as present reality. The mise-en-scene—actual exhibition grounds and fictional textile pavilion—together with Tania's metamorphosis into engineer and deputy to the Supreme Soviet, has collapsed time, staging the future in the present. The finale of The Radiant Path elevates the narrative to the symbolic register of Socialist Realist representation.—Rimgaila Salys

Your faithful publicity spy at Cryptonym will admit that she has a near obsession with depressing films, the more they rip her heart out and stomp on it (in a thought-provoking way of course), the more she adores them. Yet, sometimes the bleakness is just too much and something playful and a little absurd is in order for a change of mood. This is where the musicals of Grigorii Aleksandrov come in.

In this first part of a three part series, Cryptonym has invited noted Russian film scholar Rimgaila Salys, author of The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov to introduce us to some of the fun and provocative films that were among the most popular works of Russian cinema in the 1930s and ’40s. For today's installment, Salys looks at Circus, an eccentric work from 1936.

For Aleksandrov, the transition from the pomp, pageantry, and pathos of the Hollywood musical to the Stalinist grand style and spectacle was a natural one. The successful musical—and especially the folk musical—expresses the ritual values of a society that coincide with the ideological values of the producer, in this case the Soviet State, so that Stalinist myths and their visual elaborations enter Circus naturally as a function of the genre. Aleksandrov's musical was perhaps the first Soviet film to give full and direct expression to the core myths of high Stalinism. Like many Socialist Realist heroes, Marion Dixon undergoes a painful rite of passage as part of her path to consciousness and incorporation into Soviet society. Her arrival in the Soviet Union may be seen as separation; learning about Soviet society in Moscow under Martynov's tutelage expresses the transition. Dixon suffers initiation, regression into chaos, and symbolic death via Kneishitz's public revelations regarding her illicit past. At one point he tells Dixon, "This city has driven you mad!" Madness is not excluded from the death-experience of the initiate. Traumatized by the public exposure of her past, Dixon runs away from the circus arena and literally faints from shame and horror. By forming a proper family with Martynov, she transforms her formerly illicit and dark sexuality into a healthy, wholesome femininity, figured by the white sweater and skirt of the fizkul’turnitsa. She is resurrected into the great Soviet family in the Red Square finale of the film. Her sexual "spontaneity" is first stabilized and made passive within the family unit and then transformed into consciousness and subsumed to the state patriarchy during the second finale.

The success of the show "Flight to the Stratosphere" (the Soviet cannon is mounted on a car—much more modern) parallels the now successful love of the couple, whose cultural values—domestic and foreign, capitalist and communist—have been reconciled. The sexual transcendence of flight is now melded with national transcendence, just as Martynov's cupid wings have been replaced by the wings of Icarus. Dixon and Martynov make their entrance as equals, dressed in unisex aviators' jumpsuits, capes and Flash Gordon helmets, and descend the grand staircase to the rhythm of "Song of the Motherland." Symbols of Soviet air power abound, from propellers on the showgirls' tank tops to their imitation of whirring blades in front of a triangular bank of propellers to the stratospheric rocket itself. The glorification of military might is paradigmatic for the folk musical, as in Busby Berkeley's synchronized marching and flag waving in Footlight Parade (1933) and the battleship number of Born to Dance (1936). In the Soviet instance, feats of aviation, such as the rescue of the Cheliuskin crew, also signify communication and unity between the center and the marginal areas of the Motherland.—Rimgaila Salys

Congratulations to Seagull author Hans Magnus Enzensberger, winner of the Sonning Prize for "commendable work for the benefit of European culture."

Whether you plan to celebrate Valentine's Day on a grand or small scale or disdain it as a greeting card company creation, there is no reason why you can't enjoy a little chocolate. From Sarah Moss and Alexander Badenoch's global history of Chocolate in the Reaktion books Edible series, Cryptonym is excited to share with you a decadent recipe for Chocolate and Lavender Cream. It's sure to be delicious whether you are celebrating new love or Googling your exes.

Chocolate and Lavender Cream
Serves 8

Ingredients
8 oz granulated sugar
8 oz white wine
juice from half a lemon
1 pint of heavy cream
1 or 2 lavender stems with flowers
5.5 oz high quality chocolate, grated

Mix the sugar, wine, and lemon juice in a heavy-based pan. Heat gently until the sugar dissolves, stirring occasionally. Stir in the cream and cook over a gentle heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens. Add the lavender and the grated chocolate, and stir until the chocolate dissolves. Bring to the boil and then simmer the mixture for twenty minutes, or until dark and thick. Remove the lavender stems. Cool, then pour into eight or more ramekins or small glasses. Cover the top with cling film and refrigerate (they keep well for 3-4 days). Decorate with a sprig of lavender. Voila!

Chicago
CONTEMPORARY CATALAN LITERATURE: JAUME CABRE'S WINTER JOURNEY

Instituto Cervantes Auditorium
February 17, 6 PM
Free admission

Jaume Cabre is a novelist, essayist, screenwriter, playwright, and philologist. Among his works are the novels La teranyina, Fra Junoy o l'agonia dels sons, Senyoria, L'ombra de l'eunuc, and Les veus del Pamano.

In his highly original collection of short stories, Catalonian writer Jaume Cabre takes his place among the masters of the form. In Winter Journey, the reader encounters disparate and often desperate characters—pianist, cuckold, whore, organ builder, rabbi, priest, scholar, thief, hitman, madman, Holocaust survivor, oligarch, failed artist—who challenge notions about will, morality, and the riddle of existence. This is not a selection of individual stories, but a singularly brilliant and enigmatic narrative, novelistic in its approach, with mysterious connections linking characters, objects, and ideas across time and place. The text takes the form of a Schubertian musical progression in prose, a philosophical mystery moving freely through a labyrinth of centuries and cities, historical and contemporary.

Richly allusive with its themes and motifs of music and art, Winter Journey will continue to provoke questions long after the reader has closed the book. This edition represents the first translation of Cabre's work into English.

Instituto Cervantes
31 W. Ohio
Chicago, IL 60660
312-335-1996 xt 4112
http://chicago.cervantes.es

New York
Jaume Cabre Launch Party
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February 23, 2010, 7:00 PM
Idlewild Books, 12 W. 19th St., New York, NY

An evening with the Catalan author of Winter Journey. With live performances of Schubert and a discussion of the relationship between the music and prose.