Yevgeniy Fiks, “Moving
Icons”
Alexander Rubchenko, “These Twenty Cans
of Chunky
Beef Soup Could Easily Pass for Advance Wages in Siberian Verkhoyansk”
Andra Ursuta-Rozin, “20 Cans of Chunky Beef
Soup”
Elena Sorokina, “Reality Passion”
Alexander Shnurov, “Suprematists”
Anna Genova, “Recipe for Happiness”
Alexander Genis, “Vasya” Russian Van Gogh
----------------------------------------------------
Andra Ursuta-Rozin
/ “20 Cans of Chunky Beef Soup”
The documentary 20 Cans of Chunky Beef Soup, co-authored by Yuriy Gavrilenko
and Slava Solganik, has been presented to the public in several stages
of completion. Initially a noncommittal, voyeuristic piece whose meandering
and repetitive structure seemed fit for the film’s protagonist, Max
Vokhmin, a Russian artist-decorator turned bum due to massive drug use,
it has undergone considerable changes both in form and in attitude towards
its subject. The newly edited version provides access into a chatty circle
of Russian artists living in New York, and in so doing, opens up a can
of conflicting notions of individual and cultural identity. The film is
part of what is increasingly being construed as a wave of film and video
work by young Russian artists living in New York which have turned themselves
into documentary subjects. It is part of a project in which a community
and a generation is publicizing its artistic voice in the context of the
media-infused American popular culture, having worked through the post-Soviet
attitudes which dominate the work of older generations of Diaspora. The
omonymously titled work of the collective Friends My Ass, of which both
Gavrilenko and Solganik are members, is an example of this new tendency.
Informed by the casual style of reality TV, it documents the life of downtown
Russian bohemians who, amid warm get-togethers and ironic interrogations,
self-consciously ponder the question of whether they have made it in America
or not.
Like Friends My Ass, 20 Cans turns to the mundane and raises it to the
level of sensational, as if by contemplating one’s life on the screen,
by exchanging one’s experience into digital currency, one would gain
a legitimacy not readily available to immigrants and other brands of outsiders.
Unlike the subjects of Friends My Ass, however, the protagonist of 20
Cans is of a variety of bohemian that has gone too far, somehow misinterpreting
the American dream. Significantly, the first question the interviewer
asks Max is “what did you dream about?”, thus assigning him
to an inferior position in which he does not even have the agency to realize
his own wishes. This condition can, of course, describe most city dwellers’
attitude towards the vagrant, and even if one does not fall into the trap
of seeing the homeless as a syndrome rather than as individuals, Max’
plight can hardly be construed as extraordinary. The interest of his story,
and of the documentary, lies not in the fact that this relatively successful
artist ended up on the street, or that he serendipitously survived the
most absurd accidents, but in the reactions he elicits from the community
which ostracized him. Former friends and acquaintances describe Vokhmin
as a diabolical impersonation of addiction, or as an agent of irrational
and destructive powers. A split vision emerges from these interviews:
on the one hand, of a mind corrupted by alcohol and drug abuse, and on
the other, of an indestructible body, adding up to the impersonation of
an archetype of evil largely indebted to a Christian dualist model who,
in the words of the artist Aleksandr Zakharov, is “constantly regenerating
without any sacrifices”.
The beginning of the piece reveals the authors’ taste for literary
strategies: drifting to music through a blurry urban landscape, the camera
eventually zooms in onto Max, peacefully asleep in Thompkins Square Park.
The metaphor of the omniscient eye singling out its subject asserts the
filmmakers’ acknowledgement of a repertoire of classical Russian
narrative strategies, both literary and cinematic. But the opening and
ending sequences also form a vignette which departs stylistically from
the objective tone to which the documentary aspires. Through the interviews,
the piece acquires a moralizing and exploitative stance. Paired with footage
of Vokhmin’s everyday activities, they sketch out a duality which
characterizes the immigrant condition with its conflicting schemas for
interpreting experience and the unavoidable parameters of success and
failure which circumscribe it.
Like their subject, the authors, most of the people interviewed in the
film, and immigrants in general, inhabit a displaced cultural space which
is not always entirely accommodated by the local culture. In the documentary,
this becomes apparent in the disjunct use of language; since the necessity
to communicate in a tongue other than one’s own leads to the emergence
of imperfect, hybrid vehicles of expression. Words like “responsibility”,
“headquarters”, or “ community”, crop up in conversations
conducted in Russian, along a number of English words for drugs, and here
and there, for a sexual position. Involuntarily, the foreign language
condenses around “dirty” concepts, recalling the purist rhetoric
according to which the so-called “Slavic soul” is incapable
of profanity. [This notion lead, among other things, to the linguistic
theory according to which all dirty words in Russian are not of Slavic
origin, but were brought along by Asiatic invaders.] Ironically, in the
documentary, it is a non-Russian, the Orthodox priest Hegumen Christopher,
whose understanding of Russia comes largely from literary sources, that
voices the ultimate cliché about “the classic paradox; the
classic Russian soul that has the ability to reach to very high heights
[…] or to fall completely into the depths of misery.” If the
“spiritualist” views which transpire from some of the interviews
attest to the existence of a Russian-American universe of ideas, then
Max Vokhmin is its (East) Village Idiot, the Americanized cousin of the
dostoevskian innocent populating classical Russian literature.
The compulsion to excel governs much of the logic of immigration. Many
immigrants are subject to the notion that one has to be very good at something
in order to be welcomed into a new homeland, and in the case of artists,
who have the option of obtaining legal status based on their special talent,
this is even more evident. Theoretically, Diaspora is a community of creative
individuals who succeeded in acclimatizing their ideas to a new cultural
landscape. For such an audience, Max is the familiar “other”,
the black sheep brought along from home; like an indispensable furnishing
of Russian mentality. Or in Hegumen Christopher’s interpretation,
“in any of the classic Russian literature, in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy,
Lermontov, […] in Bulgakov, you’re going to find some Maxim.”
But for larger audiences Vokhmin is one of those guys hanging around Thompkins
Square Park wearing too many layers of clothing and occasionally trying
to sell you a stolen bicycle. He loves to talk about his adventures in
jail, his accidents, his drug use, his fondness for porn. An addictive
personality, he mechanically pleasures himself by the mere utterance and
repetition of these stories, verbally performing what the camera does,
namely, lay open his life. As the filmmakers follow him around, one is
led to the question whether it is possible to intrude upon a person already
living on the street, for whom the roofs of apartment buildings function
as storage space and occasional bedroom, and stores are places to get
things for free. But one also gets the uneasy feeling that Vokhmin is
not simply going about his daily business, but self-consciously enacting
his own life as a bum for the camera’s sake. Acknowledging the vulnerable
nature of a vagrant existence, the documentary’s complicated take
on exploitation runs deeper than the author-subject dichotomy, being further
fueled by the alleged rumor that Vokhmin himself organized so-called “tours”
of his “headquarters”. Whether one chooses to read Vokhmin’s
self-exploitation as a function of the desperate condition into which
he was driven by circumstances, or as a trait of his character, what the
documentary makes clear is that the condition of being homeless implies
an economy of relations (toward society as well as toward oneself) unknown
to the integrated members of society. There are no boundaries one can
invoke here, no possessions to be claimed, even over one’s own body,
as it is expressed in the climactic moment when Max sneaks in for a bath
at the Chelsea hotel. A personal and at the same time objectifying vision
of Vokhmin sitting naked in the bathtub, showing off his multiple scars,
emptying his bag full of useless things, leafing through a porn magazine
and popping weight loss pills, while the doctor’s account of Max’
coma, during which his organs were already appraised for donation plays
in voice-over. The vagabond exists in a reality from which it is impossible
to extract meaning, since the rational cause-and-effect models which govern
the world have been consciously or unconsciously rejected. Hence while
Max’ miraculous brushes of the shoulder with death are certainly
fascinating, there is no meaning, no conclusion to be extracted from them;
they do not yield the equation through which this isolated and self-destructive
yet somehow ineffaceable existence can be forced to make sense.