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Dead Man's Letters

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Dead Man's Letters
Письма мёртвого человека
Film poster
Directed byKonstantin Lopushansky
Written byKonstantin Lopushansky
Vyacheslav Rybakov
Boris Strugatsky
StarringRolan Bykov
Vatslav Dvorzhetsky
CinematographyNikolai Pokoptse
Music byAleksandr Zhurbin
Production
company
Distributed byLenfilm
Release date
  • 16 September 1987 (1987-09-16) (Toronto Film Festival)
Running time
88 minutes
CountrySoviet Union
LanguageRussian

Dead Man's Letters (Template:Lang-ru), also known as Letters from a Dead Man, is a 1986 Soviet science fiction art film, feature film directorial debut by Konstantin Lopushansky after working as a production assistant for Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker[2]

It was screened at the International Critics' Week section of the Cannes Film Festival in 1987.[3]

The film received the FIPRESCI prize at the 35th International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg.[4]

Plot

The plot is set in a town after a nuclear war, the town is destroyed and polluted with radioactive elements. Police curfew is established in the immediate vicinity and only healthy people are selected for admittance to the underground bunkers. The main character, played by Rolan Bykov, is a Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, who tries to survive and helps a small group of children and adults survive by staying with them in the basement of the former museum of history. He survives by writing letters in his mind to his son Eric, though it is obvious that they will never be read. He escapes the safe bunker by climbing a wall made from the results of the attack to reach the mainland. The scene transitions to a medical facility as a pastor and Larsen are brought in the lab to prey and check for radiation poisoning on the remaining twelve orphans of a shelter that had been struck. During the check-up, the scientist is resistant to continue check-ups and forces the children to stay in a cellar and to soon be killed by army officials due to their critical condition. Eventually, Larsen goes back to the bunker to take care of his dying wife, Eventually, he dies as well. The film ends with children wandering through the uninhabited landscape, their future uncertain.

File:Deadmans-1200-1200-675-675-crop-000000.jpg
Deadmans-1200-1200-675-675-crop-000000

Cast

Themes

Due to the heated climate between North America and Russia during the events of The Cold War, many critics believe that Dead Man’s Letters is a response to American films like War Games and The Day After discussing their perspective on the dangers of nuclear power, TBS (American TV channel) purchased the rights to show Dead Man’s Letters, deciding to air it alongside Amerika (TV miniseries), a twelve-hour CBS miniseries about what the United States would be like as a Soviet satellite state. The heavy reliance on themes like warfare, uncertainty, and grief as well as Americans involved in the war are interwoven through the production design from Yelena Amshinskaya and Viktor Ivanov. The use of Soviet civil defense equipment in the film, including gas masks and shelter equipment, makes its portrayal of Western civil defense an eerie mirror image of the Soviet program[5]

Production

Before the film started production, it was common knowledge that Russia had a strict censorship policy following the death of Stalin, resulting in a three year waiting period for Lopushansky and the crew consisting of various re-rewrites, possibly most likely due to Vyacheslav Rybakov's involvement with anti-Soviet literature and run-ins with the KGB. [6]. However, censorship started to loosen around the mid to late 80s towards discussing sensitive topics regarding current or previous events in Russia's history, which caused producers and film studios to become a lot more lenient with what was shown in cinemas. Gorbachev established a policy of allowing more open discussion of previously sensitive political issues making it possible for well connected civil defense skeptics to popularize their views. The patronage of Anatolii Gromyko-historian, member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and son of Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko enabled the production by Lenfilm in 1986 of the first portrayal of the aftermath of nuclear war in Soviet cinema[7]. Tarkovsky's teachings played a huge influence on Lopushansky's directing style as well as many aspects of the film from the set design, cinematography, and signature slow yet otherworldly pacing. In a 2017 interview with Indie Cinema, Lopunshansky states "I noticed that his lectures, in fact, are not about certain professional skills, but are more philosophical, about understanding the essence of art, its essence."[8] This can be seen by the use of monochrome coloring on the film stock giving a resemblance to the greenish tint seen in various scenes in Stalker, in order to give the film a more ethereal effect.

File:Interview picture of Konstantin Lopushansky.jpg
pic of Konstantin Lopushansky

Reception

In 1989, the New York Times published a somewhat positive review of the film. Praising the film for its brutal realism and stunning set design, but found that the film was somewhat dismissed by it’s meandering in certain scenes stating "despite its technical virtues, seems just a bit too contrived to truly convince, much less to deeply move. Yet, in stripping the ideological gloss from the vision of ultimate calamity, Mr. Lopushinsky does succeed in creating a cultural artifact that makes the specter of the most dreadful possible event common to both sides of the superpower divide”.[9]

References in Other Media

  • According to WhoSampled, there are two songs to have confirmed dialogue samples from the film.Theses include Self-Annihilation by DenDerty and Letters from a Dead Man by Pudra.[10]
  • In 2017, the band Cold Womb Descent released a cover of the score from the films main title and finale sequence to their Bandcamp page, accompanied by a still of the movie as the single cover[11]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Dead Man's Letters". IMDB.
  2. ^ "Stalker". IMDB.
  3. ^ "26e SELECTION DE LA SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE - 1987". International Critics' Week.
  4. ^ "35th International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg, Germany (October 6 - October 11, 1986)". International Critics' Week.
  5. ^ Geist, Edward. Armageddon Insurance, Civil Defense in the United States and the Soviet Union, 1945–1991. : University of North Carolina Press.
  6. ^ Kozovoi, Andrei (May 16, 2018). "'More Powerful Than The Day After': The Cold War and the Making of Dead Man's Letters". Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.
  7. ^ Geist, Edward (December 7, 2018). Armageddon Insurance, Civil Defense in the United States and the Soviet Union, 1945–1991. University of North Carolina Press. p. 230.
  8. ^ Ringo, Elena. "Interview with director Konstantin Lopushansky". Indie Cinema.
  9. ^ Bernstein, Richard (January 27, 1989). "Soviet Eye Examines Atom War". New York Times.
  10. ^ "Dead Man's Letters (1986)". WhoSampled.
  11. ^ "Letters from a Dead Man". Bandcamp. Cold Womb Descent.


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