One Man Dies a Million Times

[osprey_archer]

I first read about the Vavilov seed bank about three years ago, in the book Never Out of Season: during the siege of Leningrad during World War II, the scientists of the seed bank moved into the building to protect their seeds, in some cases literally starving to death surrounded by bags of barley and wheat in order to protect that genetic diversity to feed future generations.

Even at the time, I thought that sounded like an amazing story. Evidently director Jessica Oreck had the same thought, because now there’s a film centered around the incident: One Man Dies a Million Times.

Or at least, kind of centered around the incident. The film is in black and white, and it has a voiceover drawn from the words of people who suffered in Leningrad during the siege (Anna Akhmatova, among others), and the characters have bread ration cards that look exactly like the World War II era ration cards reproduced in Anya von Bremzen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking...

But, the introductory text at the beginning of the film informs us, the film is not actually set in Leningrad during the siege. It’s set in the near future, during a hypothetical war that will lead to a siege of St. Petersburg that is exactly the same as the siege of Leningrad, right down to the design of the bread ration cards. There are a few incursions of post-World-War II technology into the film (a young man has what appears to be a Walkman; there’s a digital clock on a nightstand) but the overall impression is that it’s maybe 1980, not the future. There are, for instance, no computers.

I find this framing decision baffling, and I’d be really curious to know at what point in the filming process the idea was introduced. Was it before or after they filmed an entire movie where no one has a cell phone? (I can buy that the cell phones might stop working during World War III, but I can’t buy that they’re just not there in the first place.) Did they realize that if they set the film during World War II they were going to have to paste up Stalin posters everywhere, and they just couldn’t face it?

The issue is distracting enough to weaken the movie. Perhaps it was an experiment that went wrong. There are a few other stylized elements here, like the aforementioned voiceovers, and the fact that two scenes in the otherwise black-and-white movie are in color - the two scenes where the characters are directly confronted with the violence of war, the red falling sparks from an explosion and a neighbor who has been injured by shrapnel, and gushes red blood. Maybe the supposed near-future setting was also a stylistic element, only that time it just didn’t come off.

Comments

[sovay]

I find this framing decision baffling, and I’d be really curious to know at what point in the filming process the idea was introduced.

It seems to have been present from the start; the director claims it made the material more immediate, timeless, and real. It sounds distracting and distancing to me. [edit] The cellphones are supposed to be the first thing that went in the war. I think I totally disagree with the director's philosophy.

[osprey_archer]

Even if not only the cell phones but all the 21st-century technology went out, there should still be the hulks of dead computers sitting around in the background taking up space!

By which I mean, yes, I am also team "this is distracting and distancing." I think it was a mistake to tie the story so closely to the Leningrad siege but also try to make it not about the Leningrad siege, and more generally I think it's a mistake to try to make something feel timeless and universal by stripping the specificity out of it: we all experience our lives in a specific time and place, so a story that doesn't have a specific time and place doesn't feel universal, it feels faintly unreal.

[sovay]

I think it's a mistake to try to make something feel timeless and universal by stripping the specificity out of it: we all experience our lives in a specific time and place, so a story that doesn't have a specific time and place doesn't feel universal, it feels faintly unreal.

+1.

If I manage to collect my health enough to write about another movie ever again, several of the movies I want to write about, I want to write about because of their specificity, not because they were unmoored in time.

I am also reminded of Sheryl Jordan's The Raging Quiet (1999), which I still think needed to choose a side between historical fiction and high fantasy.

[osprey_archer]

What's particularly galling in this case is that there's so much specificity in the movie - it's drawing SO heavily on the siege of Leningrad - that the moviemakers had to actually, purposefully undercut it in order to achieve the effect that they wanted. Although they didn't actually achieve that either, given that the effect they wanted to achieve was a sense of timeless reality, and the effect they actually achieved was throwing the viewer out of the movie repeatedly and make it all seem less real.

[sovay]

Although they didn't actually achieve that either, given that the effect they wanted to achieve was a sense of timeless reality, and the effect they actually achieved was throwing the viewer out of the movie repeatedly and make it all seem less real.

They landed in the uncanny valley instead.