Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Iceland, July 9, 2016. The surprising discovery of a canister —containing four reels of The Village Detective (Деревенский детектив), a 1969 Soviet film—, caught in the nets of an Icelandic trawler, is the first step in a fascinating journey through the artistic life of film and stage actor Mikhail Ivanovich Zharov (1899-1981), icon and star of an entire era of Russian cinema.
Деревенский детектив: цикл песен, 乡村侦探
Russia
Moscow International Film Festival
Netherlands
IFFR
Spain
Atlàntida Film Fest
Australia
Melbourne International Film Festival
Spain
Australia
USA
Australia
Netherlands
Russia
Spain
USA
"The quietude of eternity"
Bill Morrison investigates a film canister found on the bottom of the ocean in the hopes that he has found a rare lost treasure. When it turns out to be a fairly common comedy from the Soviet Union, he dives into a discussion of the career of the barely discussed lead actor and the place of the series the film is a part of in the history of cinema.
Morrison brings a ghostly gravitas to a commonplace film by highlighting the imperfections of the damaged celluloid and how its flaws make it a unique piece of art on its own. There's something romantic about the thought of objects lost in one time period that are brought…
Jóhann Jóhannsson, the Icelandic composer, first alerted Bill Morrison to an unusual catch brought to the surface in the nets of a lobster trawler off the Icelandic coast. Four reels of an old Soviet film semi-preserved in a metal canister had been lying on the ocean’s floor for decades only to be liberated along with tonnes of mud, fish and crustaceans. The film turned out to be part of a 1969 film titled The Village Detective, featuring the popular actor Ivanovich Zharov. Morrison did what Morrison does and set about using this improbable discovery as the jumping off point for an imaginative investigation into the career of Zharov and through him an oblique retelling of the history of Soviet cinema,…
Bill Morrison is an absolute treasure, film archaeologist and director, he does amazing work. This is equally as brilliant yet there is a disconnect here, a lack of personal investment that I couldn't get over. The footage found at the bottom on the ocean is fascinating in what it is but also by the fact it managed to survive. However it is lacking the social history element to truly captivate me. It's a hypocrisy that one of humanity's greatest art forms was discovered by ways of humanity's worse nature via way of a fishing trawler, is such death and destruction really worthy of discovering these lost artefacts? Either way Bill Morrison still manages to surprise and amaze me with his deconstructive window into the past.
Dawson City: Frozen Time remains one of my favourite films so had very high hopes for this one. It's another beautiful piece of archival exploration from Bill Morrison, but not as perfect as Dawson City. The hypnotic texture of damaged film stock is visceral, making film more tactile somehow. The physicality of film. But more than that, Morrison's work demonstrates it's persistence. Broken, beaten, scratched yet still survives. Strangely hopeful.
Much of the background stuff is a little uninteresting, the story of Soviet cinema too wide reaching so it feels underdeveloped. And some of the sequences from the broken film, as hypnotic as they are, do go on a bit. Worth it all for the climactic moment showcasing a sequence…
I’ve watched Morrison’s films for years and this is certainly a low point. Everything top to bottom seems uninspired and forced. Structurally it is an unfocused mess choosing the most uninteresting manners in which to tell the history of Zharov and philosophize about the history of film and its natural frailty. Even mixes in standard talking heads. Ones of the worst variety: boring. Little insight into Soviet cinema, culture, politics or history. Lacks formal imagination as well as contextualization of the subjects it seems to want to examine.
"...Morrison shapes his own movie as a mystery, holding back several crucial facts regarding the nature of Derevensky Detectiv, least of all, how it came to be resting on the bottom of the ocean on the Mid Atlantic Ridge. Taking its discovery as a jumping off point, Morrison weaves a tale not only of the film, but also its star and Soviet cinema itself..."
Read my review at The Geek Show
MIFF 69 Film #3
Sparked by a random deep sea discovery of abandoned film cans, Morrison’s essayist film reflects on the continually evolving dialogue between life, art and culture, through the prism of the film’s star, Mikhail Zharov, and the various Soviet political upheavals and film movements he lived through. The smattering of interesting information here — highlights of Zharov’s life, his own reflections, his career trajectory, the shifting Soviet regimes and even a peek behind the scenes of film restoration — are almost entirely delivered via text on screen between extended clips from the film, which plays with waterlogged damage (as Morrison likes it) but inexplicably slowed down, all ceaselessly scored to a melancholy accordion score that will sorely test…
Checked this out on a whim because seeing Decasia at Anthology Film Archive in 2003 was mind-blowing & while I wasn't expecting to recapture that feeling... This was underwhelming. That said, I always enjoy the accidental art to be found in decaying film, so not a total disappointment.
Neither an investigation into how the film reels came to rest at the bottom of the Atlantic off the coast of Iceland, nor an in depth biography of the star of the Village Detective, Mihail Zharov. In fact, the film isn’t lost, it’s still shown on Russian television. The film then rushes through the highlights of his filmography and attempts to find meaning tying the discovery of the reels with Soviet history and the work of the famous actor. Interesting, but does not approach Morrison’s masterpiece, Dawson City: Frozen Time.
There’s something so inexplicably beautiful about the look of decaying film. Bill Morrison understands that better than anybody.
In The Village Detective: A Song Cycle, Bill Morrison, who directed one of my favorite films of the 2010s with Dawson City: Frozen Time, takes another look at the discovery of lost films, this time of the Soviet variety. The doc contains lots of interesting and rewarding information, yet lacks the careful structuring of its predecessor. There is perhaps an overuse of clips from Soviet classics, whereas I would have preferred more contextual information.
