Odessa’s Uncompromising Eccentric: The Films of Kira Muratova

April 1–May 14, 2023

We are honored to collaborate with Ukraine’s Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center on this series celebrating “Odessa’s uncompromising eccentric” (Jane Taubman), with guest curator Stanislav Menzelevskyi introducing three screenings.

Read full description

Brief Encounters
The Long Farewell
The Asthenic Syndrome
The Tuner
The Sentimental Policeman
Eternal Homecoming

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

Brief Encounters
Kira Muratova
USSR [Ukraine], 1967
Saturday, April 1 7 PM
A love triangle of sorts forms between a harried city functionary, her maid, and an absent, wandering husband (seen only in flashbacks) in Kira Muratova’s impressionist new-wave work, banned for twenty years. Russian folk singer/cult hero Vladimir Vysotsky costars.
View Details
The Long Farewell
Kira Muratova
USSR [Ukraine], 1971
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick
The Long Farewell also screens Saturday, May 13 with Stanislav Menzelevskyi introducing.
Sunday, April 9 7 PM
The relationship between mother and son forms the crux of Kira Muratova’s ephemeral second feature, banned for nearly two decades. “Rendered with a borderline avant-garde sense of aesthetic freedom and formal experimentation” (NYFF)
View Details
The Asthenic Syndrome
Kira Muratova
USSR [Ukraine], 1989
Friday, April 28 7 PM
Legendary director Kira Muratova’s demented chronicle of the absurdities and insults of post-glasnost Soviet life takes its title and cues from a psychological condition in which the sufferer alternates between maniacal aggression and apathetic inaction. “A movie that breaks all the rules” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).
View Details
The Tuner
Kira Muratova
Ukraine, Russia, 2004
Thursday, May 4 7 PM
Swindlers and eccentric faded aristocrats populate the crumbling Odessa of Kira Muratova’s berserk satire on Russia’s old and nouveau riche. A screwball 1930s comedy filtered through an almost assaultive theatrical style. “Like being trapped in an elevator with a psychotic” (Village Voice).
View Details
The Sentimental Policeman
Kira Muratova
Ukraine, France, 1992
Thursday, May 11 7 PM
Introduced by Stanislav Menzelevskyi
A kindly policeman throws his life into chaos after finding an abandoned baby in Kira Muratova’s combination of Chaplinesque comedy, Kafkaesque satire, and bureaucratic nightmare.
View Details
The Long Farewell
Kira Muratova
USSR [Ukraine], 1971
The Long Farewell also screened Sunday, April 9 without an introduction by Stanislav Menzelevskyi.
Saturday, May 13 7 PM
Introduced by Stanislav Menzelevsky
The relationship between mother and son forms the crux of Kira Muratova’s ephemeral second feature, banned for nearly two decades. “Rendered with a borderline avant-garde sense of aesthetic freedom and formal experimentation” (NYFF).
View Details
Eternal Homecoming
Kira Muratova
Ukraine, Russia, 2012
Sunday, May 14 5 PM
Introduced by Stanislav Menzelevskyi
A who’s who of Russian stage and screen greats appears in Kira Muratova’s final film, a wittily staged examination of performance and storytelling where the same scene is repeated over and over again, with different actors, intonations, and settings.
View Details

Odessa’s Uncompromising Eccentric: The Films of Kira Muratova

April 1–May 14, 2023

“I always knew that my films would some day see the light of day. I just didn’t believe that I’d live to see it,” wrote Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova (1934–2018) of her films, once banned for nearly two decades. Her first two solo films, Brief Encounters (1967) and The Long Farewell (1971), are seemingly unlikely candidates for censorship; quiet, contemplative, elliptically poetic works featuring independent, successful heroines, they raised suspicion by focusing on individuals concerned not with the good of the state, but with how to live, and love, in this new socialist world. (Their reasons for being banned, in fact, would read now as praise: “a joining of the humdrum and the poetic” or “absorption with formal experiments”). As critic Andrei Plakhov wrote, she “contrived to make the first non-Soviet—not to be confused with anti-Soviet—films in our history.”

Born in Moldova in 1934 to a Romanian mother...

Born in Moldova in 1934 to a Romanian mother and a Russian father later executed by the Nazis, Muratova studied at Moscow’s VGIK film school, but she lived and made the majority of her films in and around Odessa, Ukraine. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, with perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union, her banned work was finally released and celebrated, leading to a new outpouring of acidic, utterly fearless, almost assaultive works like The Asthenic Syndrome (1989), Chekhov’s Motifs (2002), and The Tuner (2004). Reminiscent of some unholy combination of Federico Fellini, Nikolai Gogol, even Charlie Chaplin and Fyodor Dostoevsky, they feature absurdist storylines, aggressively theatricalized acting, a fixation with insanity and “improper” conduct, and other transgressive challenges to not just the money-obsessed “New Russia” of their time, but also audiences as a whole. “My country had reached bankruptcy and there was nowhere else for it to go,” Muratova wrote. “Everything had to burst.”

—Jason Sanders, Film Notes Writer

Less

Guest curated by Stanislav Menzelevskyi, head of the Research and Programming Department at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center (the Ukrainian state film archive), and coordinated at BAMPFA by Kathy Geritz. With thanks to Aliona Penzii, Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center; Evegeniev Gregory, Buduschee; Oled Kohan, Sota Cinema Group; and Brian Belovarac, Ben Crossley-Marra, Janus Films.

Odessa’s Uncompromising Eccentric: The Films of Kira Muratova

April 1–May 14, 2023

Past Films

Brief Encounters

The Long Farewell

The Asthenic Syndrome

The Tuner

The Sentimental Policeman

The Long Farewell

Eternal Homecoming