Odessa’s Uncompromising Eccentric: The Films of Kira Muratova

Born in Moldova in 1934 to a Romanian mother and a Russian father later executed by the Nazis, Muratova studied at Moscow's VGIK film school, but she lived and made the majority of her films in and around Odessa, Ukraine. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, with perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union, her banned work was finally released and celebrated, leading to a new outpouring of acidic, utterly fearless, almost assaultive works like The Asthenic Syndrome (1989), Chekhov's Motifs (2002), and The Tuner (2004). Reminiscent of some unholy combination of Federico Fellini, Nikolai Gogol, even Charlie Chaplin and Fyodor Dostoevsky, they feature absurdist storylines, aggressively theatricalized acting, a fixation with insanity and "improper" conduct, and other transgressive challenges to not just the money-obsessed "New Russia" of their time, but also audiences as a whole. "My country had reached bankruptcy and there was nowhere else for it to go," Muratova wrote. "Everything had to burst." - Jason Sanders, Film Notes Writer