DEFINICIÓN DE INTELIGENCIAS HUMANAS SEGÚN GARDNER:

The potential gains from making co-productions are many (Eleftheriotis 2001, 106). In postcommunist Russia, the equipment, facilities and working ethics were still Soviet

when the economic funding system together with the distribution system and the film theatres broke down (Beumers 1999a, Iordanova, 2002a). In such a situation, the advantages of co-production easily outweigh the negative sentiments. This was also the approach taken by the film journal Seans in 1994 when they dealt with the rise of the post-Soviet Russian co-production. Without co-productions “we would have no Window to Paris and no Castle [by Balabanov]” (Arkus 1994, 72). A similar process was seen in Eastern European cinema (Iordanova 2002a, 518). In popular European cinema this has led to a sizeable shift towards co-production, which “represents a qualitative leap, as the norm will almost certainly become (if it is not already) the transnational rather than the national production” (Eleftheriotis 2001, 48). In the view of European cinema becoming transnational, it is interesting to contemplate the position of post-Soviet Russian cinema. In European Cinema (2000), it is worth noting that Jill Forbes and Sarah Street include both Soviet and post-Soviet Russian cinema in their general narrative on European cinema, pointing for example to the Soviet involvement in the pan-European distribution network in the late 1920s (Forbes and Street 2000, 9).13 Arguably, this comes naturally as there are many artistic and stylistic affinities and influences fluctuating across the cultural divide. An example would be Nikita Mikhalkov, who, apart from Andrei Konchalovsky and Andrei Tarkovsky, was the only Soviet director with international connections (Beumers 2005, 6).14 However, where Bodrov avoids being caught up in the national discourse on Russian cinema, Mikhalkov stands in the midst of it with the result that he gets accused of catering for foreign viewers. It suffices to recall the defence Mikhalkov had to make over catering for foreign audiences: “yes, [I have catered] for foreigners. For one hundred million foreigners living in my country” 








13 _{There are two chapters on Soviet (Battleship Potemkin) and Russian (The Barber of Siberia) cinema by}

Birgit Beumers.

14 _{The French producer Michel Seydoux worked with Mikhalkov on four films, i.e. Urga (1991), Anna:} From Six Till Eighteen (1993), Burnt by the Sun (1994) and The Barber of Siberia (1998).

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(Arkus 1999, 89). Because of his informal attachment to the central (Moscow-St. Petersburg) film industry in Russia, Bodrov can float in-between Moscow and Los Angeles and avoid such accusations. Quietly and calmly Bodrov can state that, “filmmakers really wish to tell a universal story, which is of interest not only for Russian audiences,” without being called a filmmaker of kitsch (Bodrov 2007, xv). It has to be said, though, that Mikhalkov’s high visibility on the local scene makes him more prone for national scrutiny and vulnerable to critics, which constitutes a real difference between the two filmmakers and their European co-productions.

Nonetheless, the Russian-European co-production informs on how representations of Russians abroad are mediated through the native Russian filmmaker. This mediation of Russian cultural and national values is projected onto narratives that are acceptable to non-Russian producers. It is the claim of this study that Bodrov’s co-productions venture into a web of co-operational working practices where popular texts are negotiated, moderated and exchanged in the form of a trading market. In this market, compromise, goodwill and trust are the characteristics that are valued. As Tim Bergfelder says:

Once a filmic text enters the context of transnational transfer and

distribution, they become subject to significant variations, translations and cultural adaptation processes. It is at this level, not at the level of

production, that the question of intelligibility is decided (Bergfelder 2005, 326).

This sets the working practice of co-production apart from the transnational auteur filmmaker. While the auteur filmmaker reigns supreme over the foreign and the

foreigner’s investment placed in the name and the aesthetics of the filmmaker, 15 in postcommunist transnational cinema the trust is placed in the professionalism of the filmmaker and the possibility of influencing the text in order to please local, national viewers and make a profit. Dina Iordanova says that the commercialisation of the European co-production resulted “in an emerging class of European ‘auteurs’ – established filmmakers who benefit from their existing international standing” (Iordanova 2002a, 519), which is most definitely a class that Bodrov belongs to. As suggested by Iordanova’s inverted commas, these filmmakers are not quite auteurs in the Cahiers du Cinéma sense of the word. In the view of this study, the auteur co- production is less negotiable than a film that through co-production aims to make the maximum profit for its investors. In this sense the four Bodrov films are made in co- operation with European partners and have therefore been scrutinised through a transnational process of ‘give and take’. Bodrov’s cinematic craftsmanship, his

scriptwriting abilities and his ability to compromise set him apart from the Soviet auteur filmmakers and establish him as a transnational filmmaker who can cross national boundaries and break into foreign markets with storytelling that is likely to appeal to popular audiences outside the art-house audiences.

This is underlined by the fact that Sergei Bodrov has managed to cross over into Hollywood cinema production with Running Free, which was entirely produced in the US and scripted by people other than Bodrov. This points to a different kind of

transnationality than the one which was seen above with European co-productions. When Hollywood is mentioned in connection with issues of transnationality, it is chiefly 








15 _{An interesting case here would be Andrei Tarkovsky and his co-operation with foreign producers,}

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linked to the absorption of actors or national filmmakers into the American film industry (Phillips and Vincendeau 2006). While the shaping of, or failure to shape, the national edges of filmmakers into a Hollywood mould is part of narrating Hollywood cinema as hegemonic and dominant in global cinema (a loss of national traits), this hides the fact that American cinema is far more diverse and engaged in cross-cultural co-production than is acknowledged. Contrary to those European co-productions, which are deemed impure, American co-productions gloss over such a notion by passing as universal. However, the absorption discourse is the prevailing approach in accounting for Hollywood’s transnational filmmaking, which is also a practice that best suits filmmakers of Bodrov’s status. Again the incorporation of the auteur, the art creator, into Hollywood’s working practice is painfully full of sacrifices and loss of artistic control, which on the other hand makes the cross-over of the craftsman or the storyteller easier, as the willingness to compromise is greater. Very few Russian filmmakers have made it into Hollywood in recent times. Andrei Konchalovsky was a case in point. He emigrated from the Soviet Union in the early 1980s and made a string of US-produced films, only to return after 1991 to restart his career in Russian cinema (Jäckel 1997, 112). That said, Konchalovsky’s filmmaking career points to a more traditional sense of migrant cinema, which can be seen in the fact that his chief producer in the US was Menahem Golan, who together with Yoram Globus formed the production company Cannon Group, which was very influential in the 1980s.16 Golan is an Israeli of Polish decent, which points to a shared communist diasporic experience. This sets Bodrov apart from Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, because, as it has been mentioned, he floats freely from abroad to home. It is Bodrov who chooses, not his migratory condition.

Although the four films, and in particular the three examined here, have been produced exclusively with European countries, it is important to underline Bodrov’s

(transnational) American connections. Living in the United States since 1992, married to an American and having a close working relationship with the Hollywood film industry influenced the development and practise of the filmmaker Bodrov. As he tells Pritulenko,

When I went to America, I did not plan to live there. I just began to work in scriptwriting, for which I receive quite a lot of money … In America

everybody wants to make cinema. It is a Mecca for filmmaking! And I am a passionate man. From my Tartar ancestors I have two passions: horses and the game of chance [passionate games]. It is likewise a passion to make cinema in America. In a manner of speech, I am a dog that lifts its leg and makes a pee-pee. As if imprinting, I was here (Pritulenko 1996, 13).

Here the cinema of Hollywood is, from the perspective of the Russian critical discourse, the fortress that few manage to get into, and hence references are made to Milos

Forman, Roman Polanski and others who made the transnational jump into the hostile competitive world of the US film industry. Likewise, there are implicit connotations of the loss of a national filmmaker that criticise the transnational filmmaker and mock the outcome of the films which are made abroad. It is these two viabilities that Bodrov and his films are judged by in the US transnational discourse.

Since the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the break up of the Soviet Empire in 1991, the discourse on respective cinema industries has

concentrated on exactly that – respective cinema industries. In other words, writing has often been at pains to describe the peculiar cinematic characteristics of each nation rather than looking at common shared values and/or transnational co-operations. The

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reason for this is perhaps an explicit desire to do away with any overarching ideology determining the region’s political, cultural and national identity, but more recent

developments have seen a reversal of this tendency. For example in Traditions in World Cinema, Christina Stojanova describes the Eastern European region as a whole,

examining the rise of the melodrama, the Mafiosi thriller and the national epic as common throughout the region after the fall of communism (Stojanova 2006, 95-117; see also Iordanova 2003 and Jäckel 1997, 116). However, there are concerns in this approach as it condenses the region’s predicament into a neat sameness of female falling from grace, male anxieties and xenophobia without taking into account the political and cultural power structures of the region. In other words, the condition of the postcommunist reality becomes the shared feature, and the differences, the local cuisine. Adhering to the trend of probing into a common postcommunist condition, it is vital that the investigation approach the region’s cinematic production as a political and cultural process where co-operation emerges on the back of cultural affinities and historical bonds. Sameness, of course, plays a role in cultural exchange, but rather than gloss over national significance, the study suggests an approach to the region’s cinematic

production where transnational co-operations are expressions of re-establishing former ties, which were formed during Soviet hegemony. Films that have been deemed national epic and monolithic cultural expressions of a particular national idea will reveal new aspects, through postcommunist co-operation, of cinema production in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Take the example of Ivan Passer whom Bodrov replaced as the director of Nomad purporting a shared affinity between the Czechs and the Kazakhs:

In Kazakhstan, there was something familiar to me. The Czechs and the Kazakhs had the same experiences [in the Soviet era]. But the landscape

looks as if nobody ever lived there. It’s raw, it’s wild, very rugged – they still hunt with wild birds (Macnab 2006).

This points to historical and cultural affinities without losing the differences,17 although, since Passer left the project because of the involvement of a cheaper Russian crew (Macnab 2006), there also lingers an uneven balance of power when post-Soviet Russianness is perceived to assume the position of former Soviet hegemony. That said, when Bodrov took over from Passer, Bodrov was not seen in this way. As Ivan Passer comments: “I’m glad Bodrov did it. He’s a very good director and he did a good job” (Macnab 2006). Bodrov is the lesser of two evils in postcommunist co-productions – neither the indifferent foreigner nor the nationalistic Russian.

It is easy to detect Passer’s perception of the Russians as former colonisers and therefore unsuitable for co-operation. The shared similarity is extended to national identities that have suffered during Soviet hegemony. Paradoxically, in this postcolonial spectrum Bodrov is not the coloniser, but a filmmaker who has cast off the Russian imperialistic helmet. In this light, Bodrov is also the former colonised who from his workings abroad has formed a cosmopolitan indifference to national belonging, and, in particular, transnational disinterest in Russian national cinema’s project of boosting national sentiments in its audiences. However, just as for Balabanov and Mikhalkov, two filmmakers who are very much preoccupied with narrating a Russian national idea, Bodrov can be accounted for as a postcolonial from the postcommunist condition. The disinterest in the national is as indicative of a postcolonial position as the obsession with resistance through nationalism.

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2 Russians Abroad in the Films of Sergei Bodrov

Instead of dealing with the four identified films in their chronological order, the investigation will start with the way the ‘abroad’ is narrated in Prisoner of the

Mountains, which is the film set nearest to the Russian national border. Then, moving further afield by pooling together two films centering on Russians in European spaces, i.e. White King, Red Queen and Bear’s Kiss. And finally, the analysis crosses over to the United States with the European production of The Quickie, examining how the Russian gangster stereotype is modified through the workings of Sergei Bodrov.