A
few days ago there was a picket outside the Russian Filmmakers Union HQ building
— people came together to defend the The
Museum was created on the initiative of the USSR Filmmakers Union and existed
as its component for a long time. It was a dream come true for all Soviet cinephiles who had the opportunity to watch Luis Bunuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Kira Muratova, Alexander Sokurov, Werner Herzog and other cult figures of
intellectual cinema, who were banned in the Soviet times for ideological
motives and were forced from the screens in the new-bourgeois times. For
over 15 years, the Museum raised and formed a new audience — a whole
generation of young cinephiles, students or simply
youngsters whose cultural needs were not satisfied
with the standard multiplex repertoire — from The Lord of the Rings to
Company 9. The Museum's head, the well-known Eisenstein expert Naum Kleiman, who personally
presents almost all the films to audiences, became a real guru for this new
generation of demanding spectators. It's also important to note that the
ticket prices for the Museum differ dramatically from those of the modern
multiplexes. Therefore
the And
then the Museum became a hostage of a property struggle between the
Filmmakers Union, Russia, and JSC «Kinocentr» which
lasted, under some specious pretext, for the last few years. This struggle of
FU with constantly changing owners of the «Kinocentr»
building-based entertainment center had a lot of dramatic twists and turns –
the seizure of the «Kinocenter» building by special
police forces and the electricity cut off. One
of the key moments of the whole story was the Museum's transition from FU's
department status to state culture institution status. It seemed to be a
guarantee of the Museum's autonomy and safety. The inadequacy of this
guarantee became clear when the FU sold part of its stocks to «Kinocentr» and the new sovereign owner of the building
lawfully demanded that the Museum leave or lease its premises at inaccessible
commercial prices. The deadline is December, 2005. The
Museum also became a hostage of numerous reforms of state culture departments
in post-Soviet So
that's how it happened that only young punks supported the Museum. Only them
and world famous cinema masters like Tarantino, Bertolucci
and the Cannes laureate brothers Dardenne, who
write letters of protest together with FIPRESCI. Yes, on the request of the
Museum's German friends, former state chancellor Gerhard Schroeder mentioned
the problem during his meeting with Vladimir Putin
— and what happened? Of course nobody up there is against the Museum —
everybody supports it heartily — but nobody wants to do anything to solve a
problem. And
here’s the result: I
recall my impressions of an evening more than a year ago. This was the
evening of the meeting in defense of the Museum, but Naum
Kleiman and I were not there — we were moderators
in a discussion entitled «The Grammar of Time» with Alexander Kluge, one of
the fathers of the New German cinema. He seriously proposed changing the end
of Anna Karenina, talked about Chernobyl, the Russian politician Alexander Lebed, the future of the Crimea and a Wagner concert in
Leningrad during Second World War. My fears that he wouldn't find matching
conversationalists were unfounded. The
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