Kino klub 9: Okraina (1998)

Over the years, Atlas Shrugged has attracted an energetic and committed fan base. Each year the Ayn Rand Institute donates 400,000 copies of works by Ayn Rand, including Atlas Shrugged, to high school students.^[9] According to a 1991 survey done for the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, Atlas Shrugged was situated between the Bible and M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled as the book that made the most difference in the lives of 5,000 Book-of-the-Month club members surveyed, with a "large gap existing between the #1 book and the rest of the list".^[56] Modern Library's 1998 nonscientific online poll of the 100 best novels of the 20th century^[57][58] found Atlas rated #1 although it was not included on the list chosen by the Modern Library board of authors and scholars.^[59]

Radagast wrote:

William Murderface wrote:

Nisam znao za ovo.

A ne slažem se ni da je Okraina svoju priču ispričaka bolje. Jednostavno je priča mnogo, mnogo, prostija. Seljaci idu od jednog do drugog krivca za rasprodaju njuhove zemlje. Na kraju stižu do glavnog krivca. ubijaju ga. Vraćaju zemlju.

Jeste prostija. Takodje je u svom zanru (nadrealno-bajkovitom) uverljivija.

To understand how Alissa Rosenbaum created Ayn Rand, we need to trace her itinerary not to pre-revolutionary Russia, which is the mistaken conceit of these biographies, but to her destination upon leaving Soviet Russia in 1926: Hollywood. For where else but in the dream factory could Rand have learned how to make dreams—about America, about capitalism and about herself?
Even before she was in Hollywood, Rand was of Hollywood. In 1925 alone, she saw 117 movies. It was in movies, Burns says, that Rand "glimpsed America"—and, we might add, developed her enduring sense of narrative form. Once there, she became the subject of her very own Hollywood story. She was discovered by Cecil B. DeMille, who saw her mooning about his studio looking for work. Intrigued by her intense gaze, he gave her a ride in his car and a job as an extra, which she quickly turned into a screenwriting gig. Within a few years her scripts were attracting attention from major players, prompting one newspaper to run a story with the headline Russian Girl Finds End of Rainbow in Hollywood.

-Zašto mislite da ono što se ljudima sviđalo u 1936. godini, može da se sviđa i sad:

Lucik: Zato što se ništa nije promenilo. To mi kažemo da vreme prolazi. Hasidi kažu drugačije: Mi prolazimo, a vreme stoji u mestu. Ja tako osećam. Ništa se ne dešava. Sve je u redu. Ženama se sviđao nakit pre hiljadu godina, a muškarcima vlast. Tako je i sad.

- Nisam verovao što vaš film može da potrese bilo koga, a onda sam lično video čoveka koga je vaš film uplašio.

Lucik: Okraina je nežan, poetičan film. Kako on može bilo koga da uplaši?

- Vama je nežnost to što vaši heroji dave svoje neprijatelje u ledenoj vodi, lome im rebra motkama i grizu ih zubima?

Lucik: Oni moraju tako, jer su im sve oteli...

It's October Once More: Russian History Comes Full Circle
 

The Outskirts, directed by Petr Lutsik, is a movie of heroic angles, solemn performances, and declamatory dialogue—as well as a sensational pastiche of early Soviet talkies. The title is cribbed from a 1933 Boris Barnet feature made to celebrate agricultural collectivization, although the mood is more Dovzhenko. Somewhere beyond the Urals, a hardy band of peasants venture out into the wide world. Who sold the farm? How, these long-suffering muzhiks want to know, did they lose "the collective called Homeland"?
Roaming the steppe, camping in a tent made from their greatcoats, dispensing all manner of earthy peasant bromides, the dogged vigilantes search for the villains who betrayed them. The mode is straight-faced and absurd. The men drag their former chairman from his cabin and—in a spectacle of dispassionate vengeance—dunk him in the icy lake until he joins their band and identifies the "enterpriser" to whom he assigned the collective. This post-Soviet sharpie is packing up his car and family to make his escape when the glum avengers arrive at his doorstep, torturing him while holding his children hostage. Ultimately, Mrs. Enterpriser grabs a gun and shoots one. Increasingly violent (although always distanced), The Outskirts is at once appalling and bleakly humorous.
Snow is gently falling when the muzhiks arrive in the city, looking for the apparatchik who approved the enterpriser's deal. Suddenly African tribesmen rise out of the grass. It's an old-fashioned montage joke—the peasants are shown impassively watching a motion picture screen—that signals a shift in the movie's temporal references. A slow-moving motorcycle carries the band back into prehistory. "It's like an Egyptian pyramid," they declare of one venerable Moscow skyscraper before building themselves a campfire outside. In some uncanny and ridiculous fashion, the muzhiks are re-embodying the shadows of their forgotten ancestors, just like the movie.
Snow is gently falling when the muzhiks arrive in the city, looking for the apparatchik who approved the enterpriser's deal. Suddenly African tribesmen rise out of the grass. It's an old-fashioned montage joke—the peasants are shown impassively watching a motion picture screen—that signals a shift in the movie's temporal references. A slow-moving motorcycle carries the band back into prehistory. "It's like an Egyptian pyramid," they declare of one venerable Moscow skyscraper before building themselves a campfire outside. In some uncanny and ridiculous fashion, the muzhiks are re-embodying the shadows of their forgotten ancestors, just like the movie.


Lutsik's first feature is astonishingly precise in its effects and performances. The black-and-white film stock was specially produced to evoke the movies of the '30s; much of the musical score was swiped from Chapayev (1934). As a pastiche artist, Lutsik recalls Guy Maddin, but his jokes are even drier. Nostalgia cuts two ways. "Now in Russia, every television channel shows the old Soviet movies," the filmmaker told a Western interviewer. "There was a time in my life when you could not see them at all. Today young people, old people, everybody wants to watch them because the emotion is so intense and much more interesting than the new Russian cinema."
Not surprisingly perhaps, The Outskirts has never been shown on Russian TV; according to the movie's Russian distributor, "they say that it will cause a revolution." Indeed, once the peasants penetrate the corridors of power and come face to face with their gloating new master, the movie takes Russian history full circle. It's October once more, even if the concluding Stalinist cliché of tractors across the land suggests one more unpleasant turn of the dialectic.