Sun 18 Mar
★★★★☆
words NOEL GARDNER
The 11th instalment of the annual Wales One World Film Festival, cutely referred to as WOW by those on its ground level, begins pretty boldly. As much as ‘world cinema’ might be home to those sorts who loudly denounce Hollywood and ‘the mainstream’, and wear obscurity like a badge, they’d be hard pushed to consider this a soft launch. A screening of Turksib, a Russian silent movie from 1929 about the construction of a trans-national railway, is accompanied by live music from Bronnt Industries Kapital, an avant-gardeish duo from Bristol who have been releasing music for a decade now.
Turksib has not generally been widely circulated – a few months ago it was released on DVD, packaged with the 1936 British film Night Mail which the former picture was said to have influenced. However, it made a significant impact on release over 80 years ago, ushering in a documentary style that tugged at one’s emotions while also being didactic; Turksib came to the UK as part of a small wave of Soviet propaganda movies. To the modern viewer, some elements may appear a parody of booming Russian sloganeering, but if anything were probably an influence. The Turk-Sib railway takes its name from Turkestan, where cotton grew, and Siberia, which harboured grain. “COTTON FOR ALL RUSSIA” promises a caption. Later on, when construction is well under way thanks to the finest technology available, we’re informed this is “WAR” – in lettering the height of the screen – “ON THE PRIMITIVE”.
The natural landscape which the railway cuts a swathe through is given great cinematic attention. Given the film is under 80 minutes long, it’s noteworthy that it takes around half an hour to introduce scenes of the track being built; prior to this, director Victor Turin places emphasis on panoramic shots of the Kazakh mountains and the sandstorm-struck desert. Objects of purported significance – a rail worker’s gnarled face, say, or for 30 proto-arty seconds, a wriggling snake – are awarded lingering time on camera. Although Turin’s decade of work and education in the US prior to making Turksib no doubt helped, this is pretty clearly a seminal work for its time, both within Soviet film and on a global scale.
The score provided by Bronnt Industries Kapital made a big difference, too. Placed just to the screen’s left, with a keyboard each plus a mixed bag of occasionally-deployed instruments (guitar, flute, clarinet and what I think was a balalaika), the duo are sensitive to the film’s rapidly altering moods. Mainly electronic and partly reliant on pre-recorded parts, they also play up their folk elements, and telegraph uneasy drama with an ethnomusical drone style. They feature at two WOW Festival screenings of Turksib next week – Clwyd Theatr Cymru in Mold on Wed 28 and Aberystwyth Arts Centre the following day – so if you happen to be near either, your patronage will be rewarded.