Agony [USSR 1975]

Агония
Director: E. Klimov
Cinematographer: L. Kalashnikov

Completed in 1975 but not shown publicly until 1981, this film chronicles the last days of the court of the tsar, revolving around Rasputin. Presumably the reason it was not released at first is the same reason why it is such a brilliant film. That is, it gives a complex and subtle treatment to the pre-revolutionary era and the psychology of the ruling class, in that sense distantly echoing The Silly Age. The rich symbolism of this might have been misunderstood by those who decided not to distribute it. It is, however, an engrossing and sophisticated treatment of an emotionally charged subject.

While the film revolves around the ruling clique, Klimov uses an interesting technique to continually remind us of the significance of this. The acted, colour shots are interspersed occasionally with black and white montage of historical footage, showing what was happening in the country at the same time as the various court intrigues--soldiers dying in the war, hungry peasants and workers. We are told by a narrator about the history of the Romanov family and their long rule; and shortly after, we are told about the massacres and deaths in wars for which this tsar was responsible. All this sets the backdrop for the story itself, which very much changes the tone.

The main symbolic and narrative gist of the story seems to be that the empire is falling apart and the ruling class are completely out of touch with it, and are therefore paralysed, unable to do anything but watch their power decline and be destroyed. This is driven home in a number of ways. First, in the character of the tsar. He is clearly an isolated and increasingly sad and gaunt man, all of whose advisers are simply playing power games rather than telling him the truth. He tries several times in a rather pathetic way to get his own people to tell him the truth; asking a soldier how he is, looking pleadingly into the eyes of a butler; but they are all trained sycophants, as they have been conditioned to be by his rule, and the result, as he is perfectly well aware, is that no one will be honest with him. As a consequence the tsar is clearly the most powerless character in the film. It is almost possible to see the weight of the centuries on his shoulders, as he ponders being the one of his line to lose Russia. He manages to rule in an arbitrary absurd way, but unlike the tsar of Lieutenant Kizhe, it is not him, but those around him at the helm. Certainly, none of this excuses him; he is perfectly willing to go along with what he is told in executing and persecuting people, and it is he who takes the advice of Rasputin and others. Nevertheless, one must take a certain pity on him, and perhaps this is one of the reasons the film was initially disliked.

While the tsar and his family mistakenly put all their faith in Rasputin and his mysticism, others plot against Rasputin, blaming him for the failure of the system and the impending revolution. The aristocrats who eventually kill Rasputin hate him not just for his tyrannical, licentious rule over those around him, but also because they think he has led to the downfall of the country. But the film shows that just as the tsar's family have put faith wrongly in Rasputin, his enemies have wrongly blamed him for a much bigger problem, and therefore wrongly concluded that getting rid of him will solve it. For on the one hand, he is merely a conduit between the tsar and the real manipulators, the capitalists, who use him to induce the tsar to take decisions favourable to them. And on the other hand, the failures of tsarism and the coming of the revolution are clearly not the doing of Rasputin; nor can they be detained by killing him, as the end of the film clearly concludes.

This sense of everyone wrongly holding up Rasputin's importance is deeply symbolic. For the tsarina, Rasputin is the people; in the great tradition of the Russian aristocracy romanticising simple peasants, Rasputin for her is the ultimate, mythic Russian peasant: dirty, savage, simple-minded, yet mystical, wise, and profound. Because she equates Rasputin with the people, she thinks that he can give good and trustworthy advice. But the irony is that Rasputin is not at all representative of the people; his own peasant brethren loathe and reject him as a thief and a liar. What is more, the ruling clique treat the real people with complete contempt. The point here is that Rasputin stands for their willingness to worship a myth of the people, a myth of Russia in which the concept of tsarism is sacred, while trampling on and destroying the real Russian people, in part because they do not match the myth.

Similarly Rasputin's enemies and his closest admirers are clearly imputing far too much importance to him. He has created a kind of cult, and it appears to be a cult of the damned; people lay all blame or hope on him perhaps because they know there is no hope for them. Theirs is a sinking ship, but they are unable or unwilling to face up to the reasons for it. It could not possibly be because of their brutal treatment of their own people; it must be something mystical, or some conspiracy.

The film is extremely effective in conveying how deeply out of touch the ruling clique were with their people and their country; and toward the end of the film a powerful line sums it up well, when the tsarina turns to the tsar and says 'I hate this country'. Coupled with what we know from the beginning of the film about the Romanov dynasty's foreign origins, this makes the message of the film complete. The Romanovs and their aristocratic class were an alien group ruling Russia with no idea what Russia was or who its people were. They saw themselves as epitomising Russia; but their idea of Russia was mythologised and false. And neither was this fact the fault of Nicholas II or others of that generation; they were born into it, and more or less powerless to change it.

The result of the focus on the last days of the tsar and its interspersion with shots of the revolution is a final crescendo ending with a caption declaring the occurrence of the revolution itself. This is all the more powerful for its invisibility. What is more, as a reminder of why the revolution was necessary, this film is all the more powerful for not being simplistic and propagandistic. If it were to paint the tsar as a monster, or even if it were to more simplistically paint Rasputin as a cold manipulator rather than a slightly insane half-manipulator, half-believer, then this film would not feel authentic. But because it is honest, because it is more subtle, a sense of the necessity of the revolution comes through clearly. Finally, after the end of the film, the Russian people throw off this alien group who barely even speak their language. Finally the mad arbitrariness of it is at an end. Thus the rhythm of the film is highly effective.

Cinematographically, it is also interesting. The black and white sequences combine documentary footage, fictional shots (some I think from Eisenstein, maybe from Strike), and abstract industrial shots that convey tension and conflict. The colour scenes have a lush feeling about them, with red hues coming out strongly and somehow conveying a sense of doomed licentiousness--everything from Rasputin's demonic-looking lips to the scenes of debauchery of the ruling class. Visually, we are left ourselves wondering whether to believe Rasputin might actually be partly a demon; it also has to be said that the character himself is acted in a strikingly powerful way.

Finally one might take one last thought from this film. That is that the revolution in Russia might have had, for many, a kind of religious significance. Everything from Rasputin's famous supposed anticipation of his own killing and the revolution, to the destruction of the figure of the tsar, who had once been almost deified, to the Armageddon-like years of the civil war that followed, must indeed have created this sense for some people. Anna Akhmatova said in 1917,

Now no one will listen to songs,
The prophesied days have begun.

Of course, there has always been plenty of speculation about transference of religious fervour from religion onto Bolshevism and Communism, and eventually onto Stalin. That may or may not be right, but certainly the Bolsheviks must have seemed like Antichrists to their enemies. Rasputin in this film is the hope of the aristocracy for a link to God, in their fight to not be overcome; but if he is anything spiritual, he is their link to Hell, for he symbolises their debauchery, their baseness, and their evil.

In sum, this film creates a complex and subtle portrait of a watershed moment in Russian and world history. It creates a sense of how social developments around the revolution were more than just social developments, and seem to have also had something to do with a conflict within the idea of Russian society itself; or more precisely, a conflict between two ideas about what Russia itself was.