Thursday, January 30, 2014

A Moving Image That Captures A Defining Moment Lost In Time


I’m nostalgic for movies like The Mummy. Not the 1999 box office blockbuster starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. And not the seminal 1932 horror film starring Boris Karloff that did well in British theaters. I enjoy CGI when done well and especially on the big screen, and Karloff’s portrayal of an ancient Egyptian priest called Imhotep remains forever iconic. But it’s the 1959 version of The Mummy, co-starring Peter Cushing as an archaeologist and Christopher Lee as Kharis, that I saw first and stands as one of the seminal films of my early childhood. 

My father introduced me to the occult (via books on amulets and talisman and not some ritual practice) as well as the early gods of horror like Bela Lugosi, Karloff, Lee and Cushing. We didn’t have cable TV growing up and my childhood friends weren’t (yet) into B horror, so I’d sneak what I could on PBS, which aired British horror films by Hammer Film Productions. I remember sitting cross-legged on the carpet with my nose close to the TV so I could hear with minimal volume and my right hand on the dial ready to switch it off if I was caught.

I imagined myself as Cushing’s John Banning, searching for the tomb of Princess Ananka, the high priestess of the god Karnak. My father also sparked my youthful obsession with all things ancient Egypt. Meantime, I was attending Russian Orthodox liturgies, not only on Sundays, but also on various holy days, with my mother and her parents, who frequently hosted hierarchs and other priests at my childhood homes. To me the two worlds clashed and co-existed, what with all the imagery and relics, though I understood that in the eyes of the church these two worlds were at odds – one pure, one cursed. It made perfect sense to me that Egypt’s Coptic Christians venerated the same icons and used the same calendar as the Russian Orthodox. As a child I was fascinated by the pagan roots of both cultures and how they were intertwined and intrinsically linked to the myths and legends that inspired the stories in the Hammer movies. 

My mother's first movie memory, the one “that stuck with me more than anything,” she says, depicted the coronation of a tsar filmed during the liturgy on the feast day of The Elevation of the Venerable and Life-Creating Cross of the Lord. 
 
This was the second of two films she saw during her early childhood at Lyssenko Displaced Persons Camp in Hanover, Germany, which she describes at the best time of her life. “The only place I remember going was to church, and to a carnival and twice to a movie.” It’s important to note my mother has seen no more than a dozen films in a movie theater during her lifetime, save for free days at the local theater when my sister and I were children. I remember we went to the mall to see the original Arthur, featuring Dudley Moore as a dopey drunkard, because it was free. I was about 10 at the time, and my sister about 6. Our father took my sister and I to see Ghostbusters at the theater when it came out, paying full price. That was a major event for us, but just a typical weekend activity for most of our peers. The few movies I saw in first release before age 13 were mostly at birthday party celebrations or treats from friends’ parents.

The first film my mother saw was Kamennyy Tsvetok (Stone Flower), which was a seminal new release at the time. The 1946 Soviet fantasy film was directed by the pioneering Aleksandr Ptushko, regarded by some as the Soviet Walt Disney, and compared to other legends including Italy’s legendary Mario Bava. The color film, shot on Agfacolor negative film in the Soviet Union, was seized in Germany and entered into the 1946 Cannes Film Festival.

My mother’s viewing of this Stone Flower as a child is a historic event, by all accounts except her own. “I don't remember anything about that movie,” she quips. It was based on a fairy tale by Pavel Bazhov, which also inspired Prokofiev’s ballet The Tale of the Stone Flower. Bazhov’s widely read and influential The Malachite Casket collection of stories told to a young boy by a watchman, who lived in the Ural Mountains, was so popular it was translated into English in 1944. The dark tales of struggle and social relations echo many of my mother’s pains, if not from a very different perspective. She claims to have never read them.

That my mother was able to erase from her memory this groundbreaking film, the first one she saw, seems impossible to my western born psyche.

Her emotional needs drew her to the film about a tsar’s coronation, which she recalls as “the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.” A passion for faith that transcends any other life experience was born from this childhood viewing and has cemented itself in her mind as the ultimate ideal. 

There exists rare vintage film footage of the Coronation of Tsar Nicholas II from 1896, the first film ever made in Russia and directed by Camille Cerf, who worked with the Lumière brothers of France, the world’s first filmmakers. But my mother insists what she saw was the coronation of either Alexander I or II, though I find no record of any such film. My mother says she is certain that the coronation was filmed on Sept. 26 by the Julian Calendar, during the liturgy one the eve of celebrating The Elevation of the Venerable and Life-Creating Cross of the Lord. She says she saw tis film a second time, at Holy Trinity Monastery in rural upstate New York, where her parents and my father are buried. She recalls (and repeats) with a fervor reserved exclusively for the Russian Orthodox liturgy how the choir sings as the cross is elevated. This singular memory trumps any and all other remembrances.

“It was during the big holy day which is celebrated on September 27th, so I guess it was on the eve of it. Because I remember the service, how it was, the church it was decorated and it was so beautiful, and because it was the bishop and the service was very, very wonderful. The only time I had been (to the service) was two or three times in Jordanville, New York.”

Extolling the beauty of liturgy in that film, my mother notes, “I didn’t know anything about any tsars at that time, because we weren’t taught that.”

The hunger for a solid ethnic identity is clearly a result of being born on a disputed borderland and being herded as a very young girl from Belarus to Poland to Germany as a prisoner, watching relatives and friends die along the way. This film was her first glimpse into what defines her Russianness: Orthodoxy.

The other early memories from Lyssenko are happy ones, again this was the “happiest time of my life,” she says, though none rival her emotional bond with the liturgy.

Her memory of carnival is marred by an injury that has stuck with her.

“I was in a merry-go-round I guess, and I didn’t get off of it on time and it started to go and I fell and I still have some pebbles in my right knee. I had a lot of them but most of them disappeared. It was all bloody and everything, but I went with some teenagers who told me not to tell my mother because they would be in trouble because they were supposed to be looking after me. And I got caught, and the only thing I remember going on there was the merry-go-round. And I think there was some kind of thing that we could win something, but I don’t remember if I did win anything, I don’t remember. I didn’t have money at that time, and I think those older boys and girls probably paid for me,” she says, laughter emerging.

Compared with the first four or so years spent dodging bullets and land mines and being taken prisoner by numerous forces, my mother’s time at Lyssenko was relatively normal.

“My father was the plumber for the building that we were in, and I guess for other buildings at the camp. I don’t think my mother had a job. I'm not sure. And my father also was at that time going to mechanic school, and I went to the Ukrainian school, and I think life was just good at that time. Very good.”

While memories of Stone Flower and other non-religious experiences are essentially lost, my mother does recall some logistic details of the building at Lyssenko with the same precision, if not passion, of that liturgy.

“It was tall and big and just like a big box. Our block was number four. And we were in number 4A. …. And my friend, Olga, who lives in Connecticut now, lived on the same floor as we did, but a few rooms away.”

To this day, every life experience is held to the standard of my mother’s first memories at Lyssenko. Nothing can compare with those first tastes that bit into a forced starvation – an early childhood life previously devoid of any spiritual, cultural or social exposure. To this day, she rarely is satisfied by any restaurant or secular activity, and generally shuns them. Essentially why bother? It can only lead to disappointment.

“Hanover looked nice as far as I remember, I didn’t go to too many places,” my mother says. “I went to a restaurant once.”

“Oh, the fish was delicious in there. I had fish, and I had German potato salad and beets and that was delicious. That was the only time I'd eaten in a restaurant.”

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