Amaranth's #1 Film Selection for EdgarShockingly released a few months before the Chernobyl incident, and in the middle of a decade that released several cinematic anti-nuclear manifestos around the world, Andrei Tarkovsky's protégé directs and produces what is potentially the best contemplative, post-apocalyptic, thought-provoking masterpiece that deals directly with the meaning of being human through the exposure of our nature and weaknesses.Proportionally to the unprecedented poetically powerful visions of suffering featured in Begotten (1990) are the visions of destruction and isolation portrayed in Konstantin Lopushansky's ode to humanity. Beneath the desolate wastelands and piles of bodies, beyond the extremely dangerous death conditions in the exterior, beyond the images of explosions, bullets and flames engulfing all forms of life and the viewer's senses, lies an invaluable humanitarian message of impossible calculation:"There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest!"-B. Russell, A. Einstein, F. Joliot-CurieAmong the hundreds of adjectives that can describe this film, "honorable" can be found. It has an impeccable hope towards humanity. "Because as long as a human being walks on, he has hope." The film wasn't intended to function as a condemnation against humanity, but as a reproval of our current direction and a simultaneous exaltation of the universal aspects of humanity. We witness intellectual discussions attempting to either explain the aftermath or to live inside psychological defense mechanisms of hope, fantasies and denial to keep the human spirit alive:- The moral side states that if the moral values had to die was because they were baseless.- The existentialist side states that the face of death is not scary anymore given that everything has perished.- The humanitarian side states that hope can still be found in youth as the only remaining symbol of innocence, and that it is impossible to imagine that humanity will be wiped out permanently from the face of the earth.- The scientific side states hypothesis, but is not sure about a single one, and proving them takes too much time... Ironic...- The astrological (and determinist) side states that a "war" was just a curtain. Everything had been prophesied by the stars, and therefore we were irremediably predetermined.- The Nietzchian side states that God is dead, not in the sense of inexistence, but from the perspective of God looking down at us as repugnant, hopeless beings.- The religious side states that God has a plan.You may disagree with one or more of these sides, but these differing perspectives are what keeps us away from a homogenous, dystopian Aldous Huxley society divided into classes and separated by status. In the face of tragedies of incommensurable proportions, the basest instincts rise to the surface and pervade: letters to a dead son, camaraderie, brotherhood, faith, fortitude, suicide attempts, hopelessness, pessimism, but all summed up by a common denominator: love. Be it divine, allegorical, human, erotic or family-related, love is what keeps us standing and gives us a purpose to live.It is not so late yet to reconstruct our society, but a fact remains a fact, and the facts today are:* We had never had so little time to start anew than the time we had to day, and each second we have less time.** Death has victory so assured that it gave us a life as an only advantage. Use it wisely.99/100
“Mankind was a tragic species, doomed perhaps from the very beginning.”Following his work as assistant to Tarkovsky on Stalker, Lopushansky eventually went on to make his own Strugatsky backed sci-fi masterpiece. While similar to Tarkovsky’s Stalker aesthetically, Dead Man’s Letters is an entirely original film. A post-apocalyptic document of decay and uncertainty, one that will forever haunt me. “And love created art, an art which reflects our unbearable yearning for perfection, our immense despair, our endless cry of terror...”
I don't have the whole historical perspective yet. I'm still studying, but what I know is that socialism, real socialism, is rooted in a scientific approach, one that continually tries to improve upon itself, rooted in dialectical materialism and a strong understanding of economics, politics, and history. There was a reverence in the Soviet Union for science even before it was born in the fires of revolution. The conditions that brought them to the development of nuclear weapons was the same as any other communist country's military developments: in defense against the unending capitalist greed of imperialism and its direct attempts to destroy... anything and everything, really. "Mutually assured destruction" is a defensive strategy that continues to be horrifying as the desperate justification of the unthinkable that grew in response to the palpable threat posed by the world's deadliest, most cruel nation (the United States, in case you weren't following along) developing an unimaginable arsenal of atomic power.By the mid-1980s so much had changed in the Soviet Union, but the lust for wanton destruction embraced by the American military had not abated. Conflicts continued as imperialism turned its eye toward new targets, seeking new resources to drain, seeking new people to kill, seeking new governments to destroy, seeking new cultures to obliterate. In its waning years, the Soviet Union still stood up against American imperial power, but decades of fear were weighing down on the proletariat of all nations. The narrative of nuclear holocaust began not long after the first display of such power, and it only became more desperate, more bleak, more complex. Dead Man's Letters was born from that history. Rooted in a belief in science and an elegy at its failure to preserve, it is rooted in a an ideal. The atmosphere of paranoia, terror, despair is rooted in that ideal. The ruthless pragmatism in the name of survival is not an alien idea, not unthinkable, only illustrative of the thinking required in the face of complete destruction. Would you turn the children away? You bombed them in the first place. What length wouldn't you go to? The scientist's humane attempt to save them, his naive belief in the safeguards of science, his desperate clinging to his dying wife, all of these are a reflection of an idealism and compassion any human is capable of, but the devastation and violence that he lived in were a reflection of the fear and callousness any human is capable of. Through a tinted sheen of fallout fog and blue memory, we watch fires, smoke, poison, and human desperation crawl through the apocalypse. A bleak and lonely narration is laced with small victories, great achievements, naive denials, prophetic musings, and unstated defeatism. The story that unfolds is not quiet but empty, devoid of energy save for the stress of Armageddon. There are two people in this with hope: the letter-writer and the man in white who comes in to enforce the rules. The latter is clinging to structure and a system, acting as if there is a world left. The former is acting as if the world's rules still applied. The film falls with the children, their scavenged rituals and stoic acceptance of a life we cannot fathom having no room for hope, only existence.
