Coxe, Brinton - An Imprint of The Times July Rain

An Imprint of the Times: Marlen Khutsiev's "July Rain" and the End of the Thaw
Author(s): Brinton Tench Coxe

Source: Ulbandus Review, Vol. 9, The 60s (2005/6), pp. 30-47
Published by: Columbia University Slavic Department
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25748152
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An Imprint of the Times
Nlarlen Khutsiev9s July Rain
and the End of the Thaw
Brinton Tench Coxe
Criticism and controversy
With his initially banned 1962 film Ilich's Gate (Zastava Il'icha, aka M
dvadtsaf let?I am Twenty) Marlen Khutsiev created a new image of both
Soviet youth of the Thaw generation and the humanized space of u
Moscow. The fact that its initial form so upset Premier Nikita Khrushch
and other members of the Politburo casts what is otherwise a very
Soviet film in a rather subversive light. The questions the film pose
left unanswered?how does one live in the USSR? what is the real le
of the war and what will the generation that follows accomplish??
have contributed to its initial withdrawal from distribution, but they a
demonstrate the film's lasting ability to absorb the viewer into Mo
life of the early 1960s. Khutsiev, undeterred by the setbacks of Ilich, w
on to examine an increasingly complicated urban
atmosphere in his following
x o 7 jfilm, July Rain
*s \ film, (Iiul'skii
see the _ syn?psls
appendix.
do$d\ 1967).1
July Rain is a kind of cinematic Soviet Moscow in
the tradition of Im notte (TheNight, 1960) or Ueclisse (The Eclip
references not only to Michelangelo Antonioni's alienated
public spaces but also to the hedonistic Rome-Babylon of th
on the potential verge of self-induced collapse, albeit in a less p
"Soviet" way. Lev Anninskii, referring to a tentative review of
he had written in 1967, says that it was with this film in p
he sensed the approaching crackdowns of 1968 and the
stagnation: "I could neither explain to myself nor believe th
inevitability and severity that hung over the film and the art t
to me, the feeling that hung over my generation; I could not a
want to acknowledge it" (143).
As Anninskii goes onto relate, the film provoked an improm
after its premiere screening in 1967; most voiced their disappo
the film's failings, ranging from the defamiliarizing narrative
the stunted development of character psychology, and An
league, Sasha Aronov, pronounced the film "boring" (146).
Brinton Tench Coxe 31
1968 review, Neia Zorkaia also cites a few audience reactions and concludes
that for all the film's cinematic virtues, "July Rain is more of a film-essay,
a prelude to some new works" (35). Moreover, the censors only begrudg
ingly passed the film. After its release in 1967, the film was the target of
critics' further wrath in Sovetskaia kul'tura (Woll 223). As a result, fewer
than three million viewers watched the film in 1967 (Zemlianukhin 186).
Khutsiev states that leaders kept it out of wide distribution and it was
just shown in Moscow now and then for a year ("Polemical Films" 196).
Clearly, something about the film disturbed; was it simply Lena's refusal
to marry Volodia, as the History of Soviet Cinema suggests (102)? Or was
it more the film's detached, fragmented style, which, despite its "many
truths," ultimately comprised only "half-art" to critic Sasha Aronov (The
Sixties Generation 142)?
I suspect there is something more troubling at play in July Rain, espe
cially in the way Khutsiev's camera treats time and space, as an emphatic
present that has not come to terms with either the past or the future. This
Moscow and its inhabitants are quite different when compared to the city
and youth of llichs Gater, although the film retains some of the street
level familiarity of the former, it also advances a more problematic view
of life in Moscow later in the 1960s. July Ruin, a film which emphasizes
spectatorship and firmly implicates the viewer in its process, destabilizes
temporal and spatial categories in ways that suddenly cut us out of the
narrative flow; as a result, we, like the characters in the film, must contend
with an urban landscape that disappears (and is disappearing) as suddenly
as it appears; we must contend with a camera that produces unmotivated
perspectives whose point of view dominates our own; instead of being
able to direct our gaze, our gaze is somehow directed, guided in new and
challenging ways.
Yet our gaze is not directed in a typically tourist-like fashion. Mos
cow was always the Soviet show-city; entertaining 1960s films like I Walk
Around Moscow (1962) rather inocuously portray the friendly face of the
Soviet capital, welcoming both the Siberian and the international tourist
into its fold. How are we to assess Khutsiev's film, its treatment of Mos
cow and its urban intelligentsia towards the end of the decade? Writing
on Antonioni's film style, Gilles Deleuze considers that
Antonioni's art will continue to evolve in two directions: an astonishing

development of the idle periods of everyday banality; then, starting with
The Eclipse, a treatment of limit-situations which pushes them to the
point of dehumanized landscapes, of emptied spaces that might be seen
32 Imprint of the Times
as having absorbed characters and actions, retaining only geophysical

description, an abstract inventory of them. (Time Image 5)
Deleuze's observation is pertinent for how we account for Khutsiev's use

of time and space in the film. In a painterly sense, Khutsiev alternates
between the portrait, or close-up, and the landscape, or long-shot. Both
kinds of take characteristically offer an imprint of the present in flux. More
important, though, is the way Khutsiev destabilizes time and invokes the
creeping stagnation of the Brezhnev era; rather than expressing progress,
the film suggests increased torpor and an ambiguous picture of the future,
from which Lena, the protagonist, escapes, or more pessimistically, into
which she is absorbed as Deleuze might say. I particularly like the idea of
film containing an "abstract inventory" of the space it considers; July Rain
stands out, along with Gennadii Shpailkov's A Long, Happy Life (Dolgaia
schastlivaia %hi%n\ 1966), as a film that attempts not to summarize, but to
grapple with and comprehend alienated urban (though not Moscow) life
at a crucial intersection in the development of the Soviet future.
The camera eye
First I will look closely at the opening sequences of the film, in which
the camera perspective is at first clearly unmotivated. This defamiliariz
ing motif develops a troubling cinematic aspect that is immediately and
especially apparent; here, a track
ing camera winds down Petrovka
Street in central Moscow before
isolating a young woman, and
then, in a manner of speaking,
stalking her. The camera, and by
extension the eye, as in Vertov's
Man With A Movie Camera, takes
a more distant, observing stance.
Moreover, like Mikhail Kaufman's camera, there is an invasive nature to
this camera-eye as well. The film's opening sequence thus equates a docu
mentary style with a more fragmented style, a position underscored by the
sound of radio stations being changed. We hear the overture to Bizet's
Carmen, a snippet of English, news broadcasts and pop music, which sug
gests a kind of cacophonic impatience as much as it invokes urban and
international polyphony. This long tracking shot along Petrovka, past the
department store TsUM (advertising the "Summer Season" of fashion)
and Kuznetskii Most Street and on toward Bolshoi Theatre Square is in

terspersed with quattrocento and renaissance portraits. In fact, the shot
implicitly recalls a similar camera position in Man with a Movie Camera.
As in Ilich's Gate, then, we immediately get a sense of Walter Benjamin's
notion of a Moscow present in flux, a remaking {remoni) of the present
(seichas). Neia Zorkaia aptly writes that "Moscow has found its poet in
Marlen Khutsiev" (32). The cutting moves us randomly among the streets
as Carmen plays uninterrupted, thus destabilizing any notion of fixed time
and space or perspective: we have to ask ourselves where these portraits
have come from.
Eventually, the camera singles out for contemplation Lena, a young
woman, dressed first in a striped ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^m
dress, a solid one, who ^^^BBHI^^^^^^^^^^^H
rushes through the streets. She H^B3m^||^^BH^^^^^^^|
glances back toward the camera H^HfaSHHHH^^^^H)^|
and the viewer with irritation a U^9^^^^^^^^^^^^|9HH
few times. The scene recalls the ^^^^B^^^^^^^^^^Hjj^^H
way Sergei followed Ania through l^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H
the streets in llich, though here,
the camera is an alien presence that seemingly selects individuals (and
landscapes) for scrutiny at random, as it will do at throughout the film.
Moreover, as in the opening sequence of llich, the Red Guards patrolling
Moscow also look into the camera eye, thus directly implicating the viewer.
Further, the change in Lena's costume suggests that this stalking occurs
on more than one occasion.
Incidentally, Lena is not the only one to react in this way. One woman
is hostile to the idea of being filmed and hurries out of the camera's
intrusive gaze. Perhaps more curi
ously, there is a young man in dark
glasses who conceals himself behind
a streetlamp, deliberately avoiding
the camera. In another take in this
sequence, though, we see what could
be his double, standing openly on
the pavement, looking towards the
camera. The concealing dark glasses
may indicate a turning away from the openness of the Thaw era or an
increasing alienation; the glasses nevertheless again invoke the presence
of the camera eye. Another shadow of this figure appears later in the film
as well. At a party we see him in medium long shot, seated alone, and he
makes no contact with anyone. Like the camera, then, he may serve as a
kind of recording presence whose real purpose may be to scrutinize, with
all the darker connotations this action held in Soviet society. Or perhaps
he is merely one more image of the aloof intelligent, no longer an engaged
participant in the debates over "the physicists and lyricists" [fiîki i liriki),
but, rather, given to swapping banal repartee, as Woll suggests (222).
Nevertheless, this figure is a presence in the film, which in turn em
phasizes the very camera's presence. Like Lena, the figure emerges into
the text, only to disappear, perhaps suggesting the fleeting, transitory
nature of the Thaw. By acknowledging the camera's presence by staring
or hiding, this figure acquires a new function in the mise-en-scene as a
kind of shadow imitating how the camera mmmmmmmmmmmmmm?
and Lena will meet, interact and part. To ^HB^^HpP^BBJWiBI
remind us further of the camera's pres- ^V^^9^||BSfi9HB
ence in the diegesis, Lena too will again mm ^VHV^^BHyJj^R
look directly into the camera-eye. Her Hp fHS^^HHl^H
direct gaze into the camera occurs in a ? nH^HlHÎ
medium long shot of Lena at work; we
cannot hear her conversation with a colleague, but she looks up, mockingly
reproaches the lens, then resumes working. Lena, then, remains aware
that she has been singled out for scrutiny; perhaps the camera's presence
prompts her to re-examine her life and relationship with her boyfriend
Volodia. Her final eye-to-eye engagement with the camera lens occurs soon
after this shot at work; this time, Lena wryly smiles, accustomed now to
the camera's presence, seemingly welcoming us to watch her, but also to
remind us of the cinematic construct in process.
Cinerna, city
Yet the film makes even this suggestion ambiguous. This camera seems
less likely to call out to and respond to its heroes and its urban landscape,
as it does in llich s Gate and I Walk Around Moscow. We see fewer overhead
shots of the Moscow skyline; rather, this is the Moscow of winding streets;
the dvor, or courtyard, no longer appears as a place of communal connec
tion, the big village in microcosm; we are relegated instead to interiors of
hommunalki, or communal apartments. Very few landmark sites appear, as
they did in llich. Yet all of this takes place in a Moscow that assumes its
place alongside Jean-Luc Godard's Paris (Jean Seberg's direct gaze at the
camera in A bout de souffle, and the "Madison" dance of Bande dparte), as
well as Antonioni's Rome (the detached camera and depopulated streets of

Ueclisse), as well as his Milan (the parties of the elite in La notte, though not
as self-indulgendy excessive). I single out these directors not only for the
references Khutsiev makes to their films; July Rain asserts a new kind of
city text that responds to other cinematic city texts, one that functions in
dialogue with others, rather than as Soviet Moscow for the Soviet viewer.
We might suggest that Khutsiev posits, in Vladimir Papernyi's terms, a
horizontal urban space extending to and being counted among the cin
ematic cities of 1960s Europe. And this is precisely in opposition to the
reemerging vertical tendencies of the Brezhnev era, possibly seen in the
identical flatblocks of El'dar Riazanov's 1975 Irony of Fate\ as a cinematic
construct, July Rain certainly contains an "abstract inventory" of urban
Soviet culture at the end of the Thaw.
Time and place

The eye-to-eye contact between the camera and L
kind of visual dialogue between
them, a kind of connection, and
the camera captures an internal r;-^f
connection in the film's second if %
sequence. In it, Lena meets Zhe
nia, a stranger who disappears
from the narrative at first, but
later with whom she will have
many telephone conversations.
These conversations serve as a leitmotif on the nature of
shown here as conduct typical of relaxed, urban Mosc
(whom the camera has already picked out as filmic ob
(anonymous till he speaks) in a crowd in a medium long
in a tableau with an advertisement for watches above their
The watches immediately suggest the important the

plays in the film, while simultaneously asking the viewe
tention to the details of the mise-en-scene and the rhythm
- Lena's father (whom we never see) dies, for example; p
Moscow streets; Lena and her mother hurry each othe
it is July from the film's tide, and a banner at TsUM r
Season" confirms the time of year and prefigures the pa
a recurring device in Khutsiev's films. This then is Mos
as Benjamin notes, seichas, implying both now and the future. Yet here, at
the beginning time is frozen, as the crowd stands and waits for the rain
to stop.
The sequence also emphasizes space. To Lena's first words in the
film ("Damn, this is inconvenient
[Chert, kak ne kstati]."), Zhenia
counters: "We're cut off. Our con
nection to the outside world is sev
ered [My otreâny. Svia^ s vneshnim
miromprervana\r The film, then,
orients the viewer in time and
space (Moscow, 1966) as much as
it emphasizes devices that allow
people to connect across Soviet time and space. One sixth of the world
depends, as Emma Widdis has written, on "Moscow time" to stress the
preeminence of the center (164).
Moreover, Lena works at a print
ing press; the paintings of Leon
ardo and Raphael, reproduced in
books and calendars and edited
into the diegesis as medium-close
F: * " 1
up shots, connect the present-day
Muscovite (and by extension the present-day viewer) with quattrocento
Italy; this kind of movement across time is reemphasized in Khutsiev's
editing, which transports the viewer into multiple spaces outside of time,
similar to the era of the portraits. These sequences are thus presented as
a visual and aural collage of Lena's life. The city, though, retains some of
comforting aspects of the Thaw: two strangers meet by chance on the
streets, one lends the other his jacket so that she may run to a meeting
with her boyfriend, Volodia. Lena and Zhenia will converse intimately
throughout the rest of the film, but we never see Zhenia again. As if to
stress the changes that have taken place within Lena, Khutsiev poses the
final shot of Lena and Volodia together, standing side by side in a manner
reminiscent of this opening sequence, but the diffident body language
speaks of the gap that has grown between them.
If the city can generate connection, it also represents spaces that be
long beyond the grasp of the ordinary citizens; contact can also be denied.
After showing Lena and Volodia together in his flat, Khutsiev cuts to a
long sequence that shows cars pulling up to a foreign embassy; we hear the
names of foreign ambassadors, see foreign faces, and we are equated with
the Muscovites who stand and gape at the spectacle, which is registered
in a long shot. Moreover, a disembodied voice announces arrivals and de
partures. As Woll notes, there is a great disparity between those watching
and those being watched (222), but the same internationalism informs the
characters' work. Volodia is a statistician, considered a "modern" science
by his friends, and translates documents from English. Moreover, Lena
and her friends dress like Weserners and listen to Western music. In fact,
Khutsiev often uses a sonic montage of overlapping foreign songs, voices
and melodies as he did in I Itch, as a way of emphasizing the intimacy and
complexity of Moscow in the 1960s.
Landscape, portrait, still-life
The film also emphasizes a kind of mass-production aesthetic in which

an original has lost its "aura," as Benjamin might put it. Lena's job at the
polygraph involves reproducing
thousands of like reproductions
of one unique image. The film,
on the other hand, searches the
crowds to discover one unique
individual in the many groups of
individuals that it encounters. In
deed the randomness of isolating
Lena (she could be anyone) at the
film's opening also concludes the
film, as the camera simply some
how abandons Lena at the Bolshoi
Theatre and moves among the
faces of the veterans and youth
gathered there. Again, this motif
occurs in the opening sequence,
which intercuts Da Vinci faces
and Muscovites. Later we see a similar poster hanging on Lena's wall in
her room. Some locate in this mass-reproduction a loss of the ideals of
the early 1960s:
The ideals in Rain begin to suffer defeat and become devalued, and for
that reason, the episode of the typographical reproduction of Kramskoi's
"The Unknown Woman" could serve as the film's principle symbol. In
the same way that Kramskoi's painting loses its "aura" in this mechanical
process, the ideals get lost, disappear and lose the aura of the "busde"
of the modern city, in its conformist-consumer style of life of the "new
intelligentsia" and bureaucracy, which definitively gets established in our
society in the 1970s. (Semerchuk 135)
Indeed, Lena is a kind of "un

known" whose face comes to
dominate the film. In this way,
her "aura" operates as a sur
rogate or stand-in for Moscow.
By intercutting Lena's face with
portraits from the past, Khutsiev
reinforces her and Moscow's loca
tion in time and space, as I have suggested above. Benjamin writes that
"[e]ven the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one
element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place
where it happens to be" ("Mechanical Reproduction" 733). The film's
operating present overturns expectations and shows us a dual-heroine that
is in between the past and the future and somehow unable to reconcile
herself with either one. And Lena exists in a Moscow-Big Village that,
while affirming its own dynamic present and presence, cannot account
for what will follow. Moscow is a city in flux, and as in Antonioni's films,
on the verge of the unknown.
Moreover, film posters, with graphic reproductions of film stills?
some of which are completely fictional
(Shepotinnik 56)?adorn the walls of
building sites. This crucial shot occurs
as Lena goes to register voters in a
central district during the construc
tion of the New Arbat Street, which
brings together living and changing
Moscow with the aged inhabitants
of the remaining communal flats.
As Alessandra Latour writes of the
immense flatblocks built at this time
along Kalininsky Prospekt Avenue,
"There is an interesting architectural
decision taken on the north side of the
street: a row of buildings, of new and

rational forms, starkly makes its mark
thanks to the contrast to the Church of Simon the Sybarite which stands
next to a 24-storey building" (301). Latour's comment underscores the
dense temporal layers that coexist in Moscow's space.
Just as the posters advertise the individual stories of their characters
and plots, Lena learns about the lives of the individuals in the various apart
ments she canvasses, apartments that may be destined for the wrecking ball.
We see again a microcosm of the intimate Big Village/Moscow mentality,
with Lena, a total stranger, being both invited to table to celebrate, as well
as asked on a date by a young man who already has another young woman
in his room. The rooms serve as a sort of continual frame through which
she moves, and one can sense a kind of wind-down emerging: Lena has
begun slowing down, stopping, listening. It is Volodia who rushes her
along, as he is eager to spend time with her. She, on the other hand, lis
tens patiently, like the viewer in the audience. By turning inward to reflect,
Lena, initially a representative of the dynamism of Thaw culture, begins
to consider a way out. Or does the camera simply forget her?
Adotion and stasis
We can locate the start of this winding-down after Lena's father dies.
As in I/ich, we have another death of a father?a visually absent father who
nonetheless was of the generation that probably fought in and survived
the war. Likewise, as in I/ich, there is more animating of the dead: the
polygraph where Lena works is designed for reproducing like images, but
the camera, or cinematograph, which applies movement to images, distances
itself from that collective idea of mass consumption, by moving from
filmic subject to filmic subject without any predictable narrative pattern.
The camera focuses instead on the small groups and individuals who do,
however, participate in Soviet life by commenting on new trends, rather
than actively pursuing its goals. Lena also demonstrates an urge to move
towards her own understanding of her life, beyond the predicted and
predictable path towards communism. These reproductions also animate
the dead of the quattrocento portraits, which parallels the way the camera
animates the living dead, who are embodied in the veterans that gather
at the Bolshoi Theatre to celebrate Victory Day and both to meet their
living comrades and commemorate their fallen ones. The film remains
precariously balanced between action and installation:
If in llichs Gate the ideals are triumphant, and in July Rain they begin
to give up and get forced out of life, then they are packed off to a
museum in Larisa Shepitko's tragic and inconclusive film Wings. For

it is there that the photographs of the former pilot Petrukhina hang.
(Semerchuk 135)
In Ilich, it is the portrait of Sergei's father, which, hanging like an icon on

the wall, effectively comes to life in Sergei's imagined recollection of the
war. Here, though, we do not see the heroes of the war (whether cinematic
or otherwise) as they were, but as they are now. Moreover, we are offered
no close-up of a photo of Lena's father. Khutsiev uses cinema to portray
not a cemetery but a kind of living memorial. It is perhaps somehow fit
tingly ironic that not long before the release of July Rain, llichs Gate was
itself also resurrected from obscurity and put into limited release.
As if to underscore this association further, we pass at the film's
conclusion the Bolshoi's classical statues, an image that alerts us to the
difference between the frozen and fixed forms of idealized figures and
the living, at that time, and possibly still. Moreover, Khutsiev again uses
sound to evoke not only the era of the war, but to express the force of
memory of a time that perhaps many listeners/viewers never directly
experienced. The actor and jazz singer Leonid Utesov's voice in the song
"Road to Berlin" accompanies
these sequences. But the song
has other implications for the
film. First, it is as if the streets
of Moscow lead the Soviet army
westward towards Berlin: "Brest
street leads us west, that's the way
we go." The Brestkaia Streets do
in fact lead to the Belorussian rail
way station, titular metaphor for the
war and its generation, as in Andrei
Smirnov's 1970 film, The Belorussian
Station (Belorusskii vokâl). Second,
they are in the same neighborhood
as Lena's apartment, given in the
script as 11, 33 Second Tverskaia
iamskaia Street (116). The song thus effectively equates the veterans with
Lena, who moves among them during the preparations for an 08 May
Victory Day parade, again blurring time and memorializing not only the
fallen soldiers of the Great Patriotic War, but Moscow space itself.
What is more, the contemporary soundtrack again, which mixes Bizet's
Carmen with Piaf's "La Vie en Rose" draws our attention to the film as
an aural construct, the sonic montage of which echoes the visual one.
Moreover, Khutsiev emphasizes music in the dances and songs of party
scene. The film questions, but does not answer, whether a carnivalesque
spontaneity rules, or whether these dancing partygoers are simply imita
tors, but, clearly emphasizes originality in the songs that the bard Iurii
Vizbor sings. Indeed, a guest raises the question of authorship when he
asks whose songs they are; the singer, Alik (Vizbor), answers that they
are his friend, Vadim Brusnikin's, though the tides have told us that they
are actually Vizbor's and the bard Bulat Okudzhava's, considered a shaper
of the image of an intimate and new Moscow (Genis and Vail 83). Inci
dentally, in this sequence Okudzhava sits unrecognized as he smokes on
a sofa in the corner.
The end of time

But there is no "mass" com
munication, nor is there any mass
spectacle in Kracauer's terms:
there are no parades, no mass
group events, until the end of
the film, in which preparations
are being made for Victory Day.
We do not see spontaneity during
the May-Day parade, as we did in
llich. In this Moscow, then, in the
streets of the Big Village, it seems
something is amiss. Generations
are seen as separated, as the final
montage sequence of a series of
medium long shots of war veter
ans and youth suggests. They co
exist in an urban space despite be
ing somehow alienated from each
other. The youth especially regard
the presence of the camera warily,
and each group communicates
freely only among themselves.
Above I have discussed degrees
of stasis and motion, and here, the veterans communicate physically and
dynamically, while the youth stand mosdy motionless. Khutsiev, then,
seems to anticipate the standing still of the approaching %astoi, the era of
stagnation, which he emphasizes by showing their still, wary body language.
The film opens near here, on Petrovka, just around the corner, near the
shopping center TsUM. In fact, the film's final shot is a freeze-frame of a
young boy's face in the crowd; his expression is ambiguous.
A freeze-frame in film acts as a photograph does in life: it preserves
one moment in time as taken by the camera, a "clock for seeing" (Barthes
15). Now, we have to ask ourselves if this is the next hero that the camera
will follow; after all, Lena, too, eyed the camera warily before allowing it
to accompany her. Yet in these final sequences, many youths do just that,
and just as defiandy. Moreover, this final figure of a much younger boy,
who emerges from behind the coats of adults in a medium-long shot, may
stand for the hero of a film we will never get to see. The veterans are liv
ing, animated; this youth is mummified in a physical sense and preserved
in a cinematographic sense. The dynamism of the 1960s generation has
begun, as Lena has, winding down and searching for answers beyond the
perceived frames of Soviet life.
Inside out
As a final note on July Rain, I will consider the role of the telep
and the role of interiors in the film. First, the metrage breakdown for
film indicates a greater number allotted to interiors (1400) than exterio
of Moscow (about 1260), with an additional 1000 meters for the p
outside of Moscow {Directors Script 7). If we consider how much Kh
allotted for the Moscow of llich (1823), we can see how his perspec
has shifted toward an investigation of the private and intimate wit
semi-public space. Lena and her mother live in a communal flat, and th
share a telephone with their neighbors.
The film offers the viewer an entire sequence of conversations betw
Lena and Zhenia, taken at different times of year in a montage sequ
that collapses the passage of time. The telephone, then, plays a role
like the polygraph and the camera, connecting time and space, and i
ing individuals in public spaces where their privacy will be. For Lena it
her apartment. For Zhenia, it is the payphones in the streets from w
he calls. Moreover, the film implicates the viewer as an eavesdropper
operator often interrupts the two, and sometimes Lena's neighbors
out from behind their closed doors. These calls are vital for both, but the
telephone is not a device of desire, nor is there any demonstrable fear of
the State, as in Solzhenitsyn's First Circle, but more a fear of the unknown,
which, like the camera, has begun stalking the streets of Moscow.
The are two sequences that underscore this almost ghosdy presence.
The first sequence is made up of a number of unmotivated shots of
rainy, foggy streets and public spaces that imply the arrival of autumn.
Like alienated ghosts, and almost as if the spirits in Ilich have descended
to Moscow (as the angels do in Wim Wenders's 1986 Wings of Desire and
1992 Far away. So Close;2 the shadows of people mOVe 2 See Buckland's essay
silendy alone or in groups; the camera records them for more on ^ topic
in a long panning shot until they disappear into the
murky distance. This sequence occurs in Khutsiev's "mini-city-symphony"
that leads to Lena and her friends' drive outside Moscow for a picnic. The
camera records about three entire minutes of Moscow and her bustling
streets, with no reference to Lena
and without any anticipated narra
tive development. This picnic, in
which Lena witnesses the hypoc
risy of her boyfriend, Volodya, the
hypocrisy of her generation and its
loss of ideals, culminates in Lena's
brief disappearance, thus anticipat
ing the concluding sequence of the
film.
The second sequence occurs af
ter the picnic. We see birch trees cut
between two scenes of Lena in her
room, after she has retuned home.
The shot belongs to no one's point
of view, and is completely unmo
tivated, unless it is Lena's memory
of the picnic. If so, it offers a stark
contrast to the crowded parties and
restaurants of the first half of the film. All of this suggests that Lena is
retreating, and in fact, she tells Volodia not to call her after the picnic.
What is more, the shot prefigures the film's concluding sequences in which
she wanders alone after breaking up with Volodia; it is as if the birches
and nature cannot comfort her, but the streets of Moscow can, especially
when she is alone in the crowd. In the mini "city-symphony" that pre
cedes the picnic, the camera eye follows a truck carryiing horses, and the
truck seems to be leading the friends to their picnic in a kind of inverse
dvoika-troika, which recalls the three horses drawing Chichikov into the
future at the end of Dead Souls. Rather than embody Rus' -"whither fliest
thou?"- they are carted along. Again, this may be another conflation of
the old and new alongside one another. Horses surely seem out of place
in an urban environment, but somehow appropriate in Moscow, just as
Lena, too, feels out of place, possibly dragged along to a picnic in which
she would rather not take part.
I see in July Rain the creeping fear of the end of the 1960s. The pres
ent is still being invented, but the implications of the weight of memory
and the inertia to initiate change for the generation of the 1960s lead us
to contend with a moment that has somehow lost its dynamic momentum
and simply awaits stasis. The freeze frame and the succession of frozen
portraits?either printed or filmed?offer no conclusion, no succor to
the viewer in search of easy answers. Lena's disappearance from the film
prefigures that of the camera, which abandons the viewer at the threshold
of comprehension. Genis and Veil write that, in the visual arts at least,
such "abstraction" was seen as a gesture against Soviet reality and the
Soviet people (191). The difficulties of July Rain both troubled and reso
nated within the younger Anninskii in 1967, yet he also ultimately reads
the film as a visual document in dialogue with the present in which he
was writing during the period of glasnosf in the 1980s, twenty years after
the release of July Rain:
I suddenly understood at whom she (i.e., Lena) was looking, to whom

these melancholy glances from the screen were addressed. To us. To us,
the people of the 1980s, to the people of the era of glasnost'?these
wordless glances from the screen, so that we could understand their
true story, their silence. (146)
Yet July Rain continues to speak to audiences beyond the era of glasnosf.
Certainly, Khutsiev's film plays the role of a lasting visual testament to the
impending demise of Thaw idealism in the mid-1960s, to Moscow and her
urban culture of the time, but his film is no mere monument or tombstone
to the end of those times. By both perpetuating the film's diegetic present
while invoking the viewer of the future, Khutsiev presciently transcends
frozen time and makes each present screening another decisive moment
in the history of the film.
Appendix: a summary of July Rain
A roaming camera takes the viewer on a brief tour along Petrovka

Street in central Moscow before singling out a woman in a striped dress.
She gets caught in a July thunderstorm and a stranger, Zhenia, lends Lena
his coat so that she can keep dry as she runs off. We next see her in her
boyfriend Volodia's room, typing as he reads from a translation he has
made. They decide to go to a party, stopping along the way to watch a
series of cars dropping off ambassadors. At the party the couple converse
with friends, dance, gossip. They retire to a friend's flat to end the night,
and an early morning cityscape of trolleybuses setting off on their morn
ing routes concludes the sequence. Next we see Lena struggling with an
alarm clock that has broken her brief sleep; she chats and dresses with
her mother before heading to work at the printing press. We then see
her and her mother remodelling their rooms in the communal flat. Next,
Lena and Volodia are having dinner with friends at a restaurant; a nega
tive aspect of Volodia's character is revealed when he fails to recognize
a former co-worker. Lena tries to persuade Volodia to leave the crowd;
they disperse. Lena's father dies. At the wake, Lena and her mother are
joined by friends and relatives. Volodia is present, but leaves earlier than
the others. A sequence of phone conversations between Lena and Zhenia
follows. Afterwards, that autumn, Lena, Volodia and their friends have
a picnic just outside Moscow; Lena grows bored and appeals to the oth
ers to leave. She asks Volodia not to call her for a while. At home Lena
prepares for an exam; her mother asks about Volodia and Lena responds
indifferendy. As Lena canvases for votes, Volodia joins her and exhorts
her to go on a holiday by the Black Sea. She agrees, but when we see the
two of them on the beach, Lena is bored and tells Volodia she wants to
return to Moscow. Once they return, she tells him that she won't marry
him. We next see her wandering the streets of Moscow near Red Square
and the Bolshoi Theatre. The camera leaves her, choosing to focus on
the faces of veterans first, and then youth. A freeze-frame of a boy's face
ends the film.
Works Cited
Anninskii, Lev. Shestidesiatniki i my. Kinematograf, stavshii i ne stavshi

Moscow: Kinotsentr, 1991.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Ijicidar. Reflections on Photography. Trans.
Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Benjamin, Walter. "Moscow." Selected Writings Volume 2: 1927-1934
Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard
and Gary Smith. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999. 22-46.
?. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
Theory and Criticsm. 5th ed. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Leo Braudy
Marshall Cohen. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 731-51.
Buckland, Warren. "Narration and Focalisation in Wings of Des
CineAction 56 (2001): 27-33.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: the Movement Image. Trans. Hugh Tom
and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 19
?. Cinema 2: the Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinsom and Barb
berjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
Istoriia sovetskogo kino. Ed. Kh. Abul-Kasymova and others. Vol. 4.
Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1969-1978.
Izvolova, Irina. "Drugoe pros trans tvo." Kinematograf ottepeli. Boo
Vitalii Troianovskii. Moscow: Materik, 1996. 77-99.
?. "Dialog s reaTnost'iu." Kinematograf ottepeli. Book 2. Ed. Vita
Troianovskii. Moscow: Materik, 2002. 160-211.
Khutsiev, Marlen. Zastava Il'icha. Moscow: Gorky Film Studio, 1
1964; 1988.
?. liulskii do%hd\ Moscow: Mosfil'm, 1966.
?. "Ia nikogda ne delal polemichnykh fil'mov." Kinematograf ottepeli.
Book 1. Ed. Vitalii Troianovskii. Moscow: Materik, 1996. 190-6.
? and Anatolii Grebnev. "Iiul'skii dozhd\ Tsenarii." Iskusstvo kino 3
(1966): 103-152.
Latour, Alessandra. Moskva, 1890-1991. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1997.
Papernyi, Vladimir. KuFtura dva. Moscow: NLO, 1996.
?. Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two. Trans. John Hill and
Roann Barris in collaboration with the author. Cambridge: Cam
bridge UP, 2002.
Semerchuk, V. "Slova velikie i prostye." Kinematograf ottepeli. Book 2. Ed.
?. "Smena vekh' na iskhode ottepeli." Kinematograf ottepeli. Book 2. Ed.
Shepotdnnik, Petr. "Iiul'skii do^hd'?Bol'shaia Moskva." Iskusstvo kino 8

(1997): 55-57.
Veil Petr and Aleksandr Genis. Shestidesiatye: mir sovetskogo cheloveka. Mos
cow: NLO, 1998.
Widdis, Emma. Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the
Second World War. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.
Woll, Josephine. Reel Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw. London: LB.
Tauris, 2000.
Zemlianukhin, Sergei and Miroslava Segida. Domashniaia sinematika:
otechestvennoe kino 1918-1996. Moscow: Dubl'-D, 1996.
Zorkaia, Neia. "Vokrug kartiny liulskii do%hd\" Iskusstvo kino 10 (1968):
27-35.

Coxe, Brinton - An Imprint of The Times July Rain

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An Imprint of the Times: Marlen Khutsiev's "July Rain" and the End of the Thaw

Author(s): Brinton Tench Coxe

Criticism and controversy

Antonioni's art will continue to evolve in two directions: an astonishing

as having absorbed characters and actions, retaining only geophysical

Deleuze's observation is pertinent for how we account for Khutsiev's use

The camera eye

and Kuznetskii Most Street and on toward Bolshoi Theatre Square is in

well as Antonioni's Rome (the detached camera and depopulated streets of

Time and place

The watches immediately suggest the important the

Landscape, portrait, still-life

The film also emphasizes a kind of mass-production aesthetic in which

Indeed, Lena is a kind of "un

street: a row of buildings, of new and

Adotion and stasis

museum in Larisa Shepitko's tragic and inconclusive film Wings. For

In Ilich, it is the portrait of Sergei's father, which, hanging like an icon on

The end of time

I suddenly understood at whom she (i.e., Lena) was looking, to whom

Appendix: a summary of July Rain

A roaming camera takes the viewer on a brief tour along Petrovka

Anninskii, Lev. Shestidesiatniki i my. Kinematograf, stavshii i ne stavshi

Shepotdnnik, Petr. "Iiul'skii do^hd'?Bol'shaia Moskva." Iskusstvo kino 8

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