Kira Muratova and markers of national identity

If one were to try to describe her work and life in one word, "incongruity" would be the best. Kira Muratova and her works did not fit into the political, social, or cultural contexts of the time back in Soviet times. It seems that she really tried to fit into time and space only once - in Odesa in the late 1980s and 1990s. This incongruity also gives rise to Muratova's ambiguity as a person.

Romanian by birth and citizenship until the 1980s, Kira Muratova studied at the film department in Moscow, which is perhaps the only thing that fits the attribute of a Russian filmmaker. Immediately after graduation, she moved to Odesa by assignment. It was there that she lived until her death in 2018, and it was there that she shot most of her films.

One of her first films, made in 1964 at the Odesa Film Studio with her then-husband Oleksandr Muratov, is Our Honest Bread. She romanticises the ordinary Ukrainian village of that time and at the same time observes it dispassionately. Her next independent films (the same ones that were screened in the United States in 2023 after restorations), Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell, immediately faced harsh Soviet criticism. According to the authorities, the film Brief Encounters was intended to be a story about the life of a geologist and a district council employee. The result was an arthouse drama about a love triangle, where the characters are not so much engaged in labour feats as in metaphorical dialogues. Muratova herself played the main character. The story of The Long Farewell is more tragic. This film was on the shelf for 16 years. It was shown only in 1987. The reason was that the director refused to make changes at the request of the then management of the Odesa Film Studio, so she was moved to the position of a librarian and banned from filming.

Muratova's films were also condemned by the Soviet authorities for the noticeable presence of the influence of her idols from the world's "bourgeois" cinema, in particular, Michelangelo Antonioni. In general, all her films of the Soviet period were "not communist enough" - the director carried her own philosophy, forgetting about the need to put ideological views into cinema as the "most important of the arts". At the same time, it seems that she was not too afraid of being condemned by the authorities. Muratova seemed to know in advance that her films would be shelved - not because of their "anti-Sovietness", but rather because of their "Sovietness".

The 1990s gave the director more freedom. Her films became even stranger for the average viewer and even more pessimistic in the opinion of critics - but they still resonated and found their audience. This is what happened with her most famous film, The Asthenic Syndrome (1989), which won a special jury prize at the Berlin Film Festival. This is perhaps the only Muratova film in which the characters do not exist separately from their time, but fit into its context, namely the years of Perestroika. The lives of grey people, living through grey times and small personal tragedies, are shown against the backdrop of post-Soviet Russia in a viscous three-hour film.

All of her subsequent works, shot in independent Ukraine at the Odesa Film Studio and in Odesa itself, can easily be placed in some other historical context and time. The filmmaker continues to eliminate from her films the parts of everyday life or politics that she is not interested in. She tells the story of people's inner world, separating it from the outside world. For example, the girls in Passions (1994) could have chosen their lovers among jockeys in the nineteenth century, and Offa in Three Stories (1997) could have strangled her mother, who abandoned her baby, in 2020. However, Odesa itself is an important part of her films.

During the noughties, Muratova made several films that premiered at high-profile European festivals, from Venice to Rotterdam. Her last film, Eternal Return (2012), was called a "hypnotic vortex" at the Rome Film Festival. After its premiere, the director announced that she was ending her film career due to poor health and old age. She lived in Odesa until her death in 2018.

Muratova made films primarily for herself, as a personal manifesto of her own incongruity. She wanted to stay outside any borders and could not fit into any social or historical context. She lived in the Soviet Union for most of her life, but she can hardly be called a Soviet filmmaker whose films were repeatedly banned due to censorship. Nor is it possible to talk about the Russianness of a director from Odesa.

Alyona Penziy, a film expert at the Dovzhenko Centre, comments:

- "In 2014, when she supported the Revolution of Dignity, Kira Muratova very clearly stated which country she had always been with. Therefore, I would shift the focus a little bit from the director's nationality to her films. Are her films Ukrainian? Absolutely! She shot almost all of her films, I think, except for Getting to Know the Big Wide World, at the Odesa Film Studio with a team consisting of Ukrainian professionals. 

The regular characters in her films were Ukrainian actors and just interesting, extraordinary Odessans. And the location shootings that probably predominate in her films are Odesa landscapes, which are quite recognisable.

 Moreover, Muratova is the artist who shapes the image of the city for many people, with its small courtyards and suburbs where dramas and crime stories take place, with cemeteries and street restaurants. And, of course, the sea. Its presence is felt even when it is not in the frame, although the sea is often in the frame. In other words, the Ukrainian south and the city of Odesa are an important and very expressive character in most of her films.

It is difficult to attach familiar and simplistic markers of the national to Muratova's work. Because urban stories, which are mostly her films, are a priori more international - wherever they are filmed. Accordingly, the labels of "Soviet" or "Russian" disappear as soon as you watch her films carefully.

However, because Muratova filmed in Russian, Russians have always tried to appropriate her films. But it is worth noting here that Muratova destroys the language through constant repetition, the meaninglessness of her monologues and the fact that her characters cannot understand each other through language. It is true that some of the images in Muratova's films are related to Russian culture. But she combines them with such a context and presents them in such a way that they are destroyed and/or take on a different meaning. 

In Muratova's films, one should look for much deeper points of affinity with Ukrainian culture. For example, the film The Long Farewell, made in 1971, was banned for ignoring the party's principles of socialist realism. At the same time, Kyiv began to ban Ukrainian poetic cinema, which also did not fit into the canons of socialist realism.

Muratova is an anti-systemic and critically engaged filmmaker like no other, and I think this is one of the most progressive features of Ukrainian culture.