Comrade, Life Does Not Have to be So Gray

The film Карнавал цветов (“Carnival of Colors”) is a technical and historical curiosity, produced in 1935 in the U.S.S.R. for the purpose of demonstrating a domestically developed color film process and promoting its use. Like a number of other experimental processes of the time, it differs from contemporary color methods because it uses only two color elements. (By contrast, more recent and familiar color film processes use three.) The color dyes selected for the Soviet system consist of a brilliant vermillion red and a turquoise green, as shown in these stills.


Being a “demo,” as it were, Карнавал цветов shoves aside narrative concerns and focuses mostly on showing the new process in a way that communicates its strengths, and minimizes its weaknesses. But it also probes the possibilities of a fresh technique within the context of Soviet film production. In exchange for our attention, we are treated to four опыты (“tests”) that include documentary footage of May 1 parades on Red Square circa 1935, a species of amateur “folk dancing” primped for the sound stage, and newsreel footage of record citrus harvests in Soviet Georgia.

The project was directed by Nikolai Ekk (né Ivakin), who four years earlier gave us Путевка в жизнь (“Road to Life”), which stands as another technical advance: It was the first Soviet talkie. This remarkable film is, by turns, a winsome and tragic drama that lays out the story of a 1930s Soviet-era social project to turn homeless teenage boys into model Soviet citizens, by means of a labor commune housed in a remote former monastery. A central character in the story is the Mari-El boy Mustafa who is plucked from the streets of Moscow, his life a series of petty thefts, mischief, and violence. He is transformed in the course of the narrative from a young street hooligan into an upstanding role model of Soviet ideals — and by the time the film ends, into a martyr to those ideals. The film neatly sidesteps its potentially stultifying ideological content by counterbalancing it with brilliant and effective characters, whose triumphs and missteps are ably and credibly portrayed by a cast of young non-professional actors, prefiguring Italian Neorealism by more than a decade. The film was widely admired, both in the U.S.S.R. and abroad.


During the course of the film, Mustafa is transformed from a dirty-faced street urchin …


… into a defender of socialist ideals.

In the west at least, the coming of synchronized sound to motion pictures in the late 1920s seemed to engender a thirst for the next “big thing” after talkies, and early experiments in color, widescreen and stereoscopy (3D) all took place in this era. Color films had been already produced in the silent era, but the advent of talkies seemed to stoke an interest in new technical approaches generally. Any effort to add vividness and “realism” to motion picture entertainment — even the impoverished realism of these often charming but primitive artifices — was probably seen as good for ticket sales. It was during this era that the French director Abel Gance made his acclaimed widescreen “polyvision” spectacular Napoléon vu par Abel Gance. More isolated examples, randomly selected, of color experimentation follow.

The 1922 film The Toll of the Sea (Chester M. Franklin) is an early example of the two-color process in the U.S., starring the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong.


In 1926, British audiences were treated to series of short travelogue films extolling the virtues of the English countryside, called The Open Road (Claude Friese-Greene), also using a two-color process.


And, during the time when he worked for a U.S. studio, Hungarian director Pál Fejős included a brief two-color musical sequence in his 1929 talkie Broadway.


Please keep in mind that color dyes are notorious for changing over time, even when movie prints are stored properly. In addition, the faithfulness of the color model in the transfer from print to video, and then to avi rip (the source of most of these images) is very much an open question. The audiences of the time would have seen images that were much sharper and clearer than these, and certainly with more pleasing color renditions.


In Карнавал цветов one role of ideology is clear enough — a practical color film process this early represents a technical advance, another paving stone on the road to advancing Russia and turning it into a modern world state. And, like nearly all Soviet film production at the time, part of its role was to flatter power. Look at these images from the May 1 celebrations in Red Square:



It’s a bit hard to see, but the horses are wearing red leggings!


Do you start to see a theme? We see that the selection of dyes was at least ideologically convenient!

Here are some more pictures. The strains of Все выше (“Ever Higher”) are heard in the soundtrack during some of this sequence of images.


Авиамарш (Авиационный марш военно-воздушных сил РККА) “Все выше!” (“Ever Higher!” March of the air forces of the Red Army). Music: Yu. Khayt. Lyrics: P. German (1926). Singer: Evgeny Kibkalo, 1958


The Soviet two-color process was capable of rendering a decent brown …


… and a pleasing green …


… and look at those skin tones!


While re-watching the film I noticed something odd. For most of this shot, the man in the lower left corner just watches the parade; I assumed he was only part of the crowd.


But then we see him turn abruptly to the cameraman and gesture with his hand, apparently to stop filming.


In this shot, he seems to issue a verbal command, with the same effect. The shot very quickly ends.


This image from a Russian biography site seems to confirm that the man in the corner of the frame is the director Nikolai Ekk himself, letting his cameraman know when to start and stop filming.


Here are some more examples to enjoy from the other “опыты”. There is a kind of joy in the nostalgia of these images, as if the world at the time was as simple as this color model. As the following images show, even if these pictures fail to give accurate color, they often succeed in producing a pleasing effect.

From the “Folk dance” section:


From “Autumn in the South”:

Across the bridge • Cruzando el puente

Survival kit

Whoever has been inspired by the previous post to set out on the trails of Bram Stoker and Dracula to Bistritz and the Borgó Pass, is in a far better situation than the unsuspecting Jonathan Harker. Not only because he already knows exactly what kind of threat he would face, but also because he can buy with a single click, collected in a single package, all that is necessary to an easy victory over that threat.


The 19th-century vampire killing sets, made for those traveling from the U.S. East Coast to the eastern curve of the Transylvanian Carpathians, are steadily to be purchased on eBay, and even at the prestigious Sotheby’s auction house, for about 10-14 thousand USD. No small amount, but a man’s life is worth any money.



The content of the sets is rich and varied, from the garlic, holy water, holy candles and crucifix expelling vampires to the wooden stake and decapitating dagger for the final showdown, and it even includes such apocryphal weapons, not mentioned in the vampire literature, as the gun with silver bullets, which initially served as a protection against werewolves. The rosary plays a particularly important role, since it was introduced into the literature by the Dracula novel itself, and its first documented use is tied to the King of Hungary Hotel in Bistritz:

Just before I was leaving, the old lady came up to my room and said in a hysterical way: “Must you go? Oh! Young Herr, must you go?” She was in such an excited state that she seemed to have lost her grip of what German she knew, and mixed it all up with some other language which I did not know at all. I was just able to follow her by asking many questions. When I told her that I must go at once, and that I was engaged on important business, she asked again: “Do you know what day it is?” I answered that it was the fourth of May. She shook her head as she said again: “Oh, yes! I know that! I know that, but do you know what day it is?” On my saying that I did not understand, she went on: “It is the eve of St. George’s Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway? Do you know where you are going, and what you are going to?”

She was in such evident distress that I tried to comfort her, but without effect. Finally, she went down on her knees and implored me not to go; at least to wait a day or two before starting. It was all very ridiculous but I did not feel comfortable. However, there was business to be done, and I could allow nothing to interfere with it. I tried to raise her up, and said, as gravely as I could, that I thanked her, but my duty was imperative, and that I must go. She then rose and dried her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me. I did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind. She saw, I suppose, the doubt in my face, for she put the rosary round my neck and said, “For your mother’s sake,” and went out of the room.


Strangely enough, they do not contain any mirror, which is the surest recognition tool of the vampires in disguise.

I only slept a few hours when I went to bed, and feeling that I could not sleep any more, got up. I had hung my shaving glass by the window, and was just beginning to shave. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard the Count’s voice saying to me, “Good morning.” I started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered the whole room behind me. In starting I had cut myself slightly, but did not notice it at the moment. Having answered the Count’s salutation, I turned to the glass again to see how I had been mistaken. This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed, but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself. This was startling, and coming on the top of so many strange things, was beginning to increase that vague feeling of uneasiness which I always have when the Count is near. But at the instant I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin. I laid down the razor, turning as I did so half round to look for some sticking plaster. When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I drew away and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there. “Take care,” he said, “take care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous that you think in this country.” Then seizing the shaving glass, he went on, “And this is the wretched thing that has done the mischief. It is a foul bauble of man’s vanity. Away with it!” And opening the window with one wrench of his terrible hand, he flung out the glass, which was shattered into a thousand pieces on the stones of the courtyard far below.


I wonder from what period these kits come. Most of them are dated to the 1840s and 1850s at eBay, but as a post of BS Historian writes, this is absolutely impossible. The MondoSkepto blog, quoted by him – and unfortunately since then disappeared – published a detailed analysis of the content of these kits, and pointed out, that many of their elements cannot be older than the turn of the century – that is, the vampire craze following the publication of the Dracula novel (1897). Of course, today a kit from those years would be considered a museum piece, too, but back then they felt like adding the extra decades necessary to its credibility.


And the vampire fever has not died ever since. In 2005 a certain Michael de Winter boasted that it was him to invent the vampire killing pseudo-kits back in the 1970s, which is just as far-fetched as the claim of their being from the 19th century, since similar ones had been openly prepared already in the 1950s. It is plausible, however, that he made the typography of that frontispiece without a book, which has since then inspired the attribution of a number of kits to the never existing Professor Ernst Blomberg. And the industry, as it is obvious or suspected from some sites, is still thriving.

Kit de supervivencia

Quien se sienta tentado –después de leer la entrada anterior– a seguir los pasos de Bram Stoker y Drácula por Bistritz y el Paso de Borgo, se encontrará, sin duda, en una situación mucho más ventajosa que la del pobre y desprevenido Jonathan Harker. No solo porque ya conoce con exactitud el tipo de amenaza le espera, sino porque podrá ir cómodamente pertrechado, tras un simple clic de ratón, de todo lo necesario para afrontar con éxito cualquiera de aquellas vicisitudes


Los equipos decimonónicos para matar vampiros, preparados para quienes viajaran desde la Costa Este de los Estados Unidos a los Cárpatos transilvanos, se pueden comprar sin más demora en eBay, y hasta en la prestigiosa casa de subastas de Sotheby’s, por entre diez y catorce mil dólares. No es poco dinero, pero el precio de la propia vida es inestimable.



El contenido de estos equipos es complejo y variado, desde los consabidos ajos, el agua bendita, las velas consagradas y el crucifijo para ahuyentar al vampiro, hasta la estaca de madera y el puñal para la solución definitiva; y se añaden también otras armas apócrifas, no documentadas en la literatura primera sobre el tema, como pistolas con balas de plata que sabemos que originalmente se usaban contra los licántropos. El rosario desempeña un papel particularmente importante, y ya fue introducido en el arsenal antivampírico del Drácula de Stoker, donde se recomienda su uso en el Hotel Rey de Hungría de Bistritz:

   Unos instantes antes de que saliera, la anciana subió hasta mi cuarto y dijo, con voz nerviosa:
   —¿Tiene que ir? ¡Oh!, joven señor, ¿tiene que ir?
   Estaba en tal estado de excitación que pareció haber perdido la noción del poco alemán que sabía, y lo mezcló todo con otro idioma del cual yo no entendí ni una palabra. Apenas comprendí algo haciéndole numerosas preguntas. Cuando le dije que me tenía que ir inmediatamente, y que estaba comprometido en negocios importantes, preguntó otra vez:
   —¿Sabe usted qué día es hoy?
Le respondí que era el cuatro de mayo. Ella movió la cabeza y habló otra vez:
   —¡Oh, sí! Eso ya lo sé. Eso ya lo sé, pero, ¿sabe usted qué día es hoy?
Al responderle yo que no la entendía, ella continuó:
   —Es la víspera del día de San Jorge. ¿No sabe usted que hoy por la noche, cuando el reloj marque la medianoche, todas las cosas demoníacas del mundo tendrán pleno poder? ¿Sabe usted adónde va y a lo que va? 
   Estaba en tal grado de desesperación que traté de calmarla, pero sin efecto. Finalmente, cayó de rodillas y me imploró que no fuera; que por lo menos esperara uno o dos días antes de partir. Todo aquello era bastante ridículo, pero yo no me sentí tranquilo. Sin embargo, tenía un negocio que arreglar y no podía permitir que nada se interpusiera. Por lo tanto traté de levantarla, y le dije, tan seriamente como pude, que le agradecía, pero que mi deber era imperativo y yo tenía que partir. Entonces ella se levantó y secó sus ojos, y tomando un crucifijo de su cuello me lo ofreció. Yo no sabía qué hacer, pues como fiel de la Iglesia Anglicana, me he acostumbrado a ver semejantes cosas como símbolos de idolatría, y sin embargo, me pareció descortés rechazárselo a una anciana con tan buenos propósitos y en tal estado mental. Supongo que ella pudo leer la duda en mi rostro, pues me puso el rosario alrededor del cuello, y dijo: «Por amor a su madre», y luego salió del cuarto.


Es sorprendente no encontrar aquí ningún espejo, la herramienta declaradamente más segura para reconocer a un vampiro cuando adopta apariencia humana.

   Dormí sólo unas cuantas horas al ir a la cama, y sintiendo que no podía dormir más, me levanté. Colgué mi espejo de afeitar en la ventana y apenas estaba comenzando a afeitarme. De pronto, sentí una mano sobre mi hombro, y escuché la voz del conde diciéndome: «Buenos días.» Me sobresaltó, pues me maravilló que no lo hubiera visto, ya que la imagen del espejo cubría la totalidad del cuarto detrás de mí. Debido al sobresalto me corté ligeramente, pero de momento no lo noté. Habiendo contestado al saludo del conde, me volví al espejo para ver cómo me había equivocado. Esta vez no podía haber ningún error, pues el hombre estaba cerca de mí y yo podía verlo por sobre mi hombro ¡pero no había ninguna imagen de él en el espejo! Todo el cuarto detrás de mí estaba reflejado, pero no había en él señal de ningún hombre, a excepción de mí mismo. Esto era sorprendente, y, sumado a la gran cantidad de cosas raras que ya habían sucedido, comenzó a incrementar ese vago sentimiento de inquietud que siempre tengo cuando el conde está cerca. Pero en ese instante vi que la herida había sangrado ligeramente y que un hilillo de sangre bajaba por mi mentón. Deposité la navaja de afeitar, y al hacerlo me di media vuelta buscando un emplasto adhesivo. Cuando el conde vio mi cara, sus ojos relumbraron con una especie de furia demoníaca, y repentinamente se lanzó sobre mi garganta. Yo retrocedí y su mano tocó la cadena del rosario que sostenía el crucifijo. Hizo un cambio instantáneo en él, pues la furia le pasó tan rápidamente que apenas podía yo creer que jamás la hubiera sentido.
   —Tenga cuidado —dijo él—, tenga cuidado de no cortarse. Es más peligroso de lo que usted cree en este país —añadió, tomando el espejo de afeitar—. Y esta maldita cosa es la que ha hecho el follón. Es una burbuja podrida de la vanidad del hombre. ¡Lejos con ella! Al decir esto abrió la pesada ventana y con un tirón de su horrible mano lanzó por ella el espejo, que se hizo añicos en las piedras del patio interior situado en el fondo.


Nos preguntamos de qué período son estos kits. La mayoría están fechados entre 1840 y 1850 en eBay, pero una entrada de BS Historian explica que esto es absolutamente imposible. El blog MondoSkepto citado por BS Historian –y por desgracia desaparecido– publicó un análisis detallado del contenido y destacó que muchos de sus componentes no podían ser anteriores al inicio del s. XX; es decir, consecuencia de la locura desatada por la publicación de la novela de Bram Stoker (1897). Por supuesto, cualquiera de estos maletines es hoy una verdadera pieza de coleccionista, pero cuando se crearon fue necesario añadirles unas cuantas décadas de antigüedad para que fueran más verosímiles.


Y la vampiromanía, obviamente, no ha muerto. En 2005 un tal Michael de Winter se enorgullecía de haber sido él el primero, en 1970, en preparar equipos tales, cosa que acabamos de ver que no es cierta y que, aún peor, es desmentida por la existencia de otros kits preparados en los años 50. Es plausible, eso sí, que de Winter haya preparado el frontispicio de un libro inexistente con el que, desde entonces, se atribuye a las instrucciones del imaginario profesor Ernst Blomberg, su supuesto autor, la fabricación de un buen número de kits presentes en el mercado. Y la industria, como se puede comprobar en unos casos y sospechar en otros, sigue siendo bien lucrativa.

Dracula

It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is a very interesting old place. Being practically on the frontier – for the Borgo Pass leads from it into Bukovina – it has had a very stormy existence, and it certainly shows marks of it.

Bram Stoker: Dracula. A Mystery Story

Today I completed the translation of Umberto Eco’s History of fabulous lands and places, which was my companion during the past six months in Subotica and Tokaj, Lwów and Odessa, Czernowitz and Kamenets-Podolsk, Berlin and Mallorca, at the source of the Tisa in Subcarpathia and the Hasidic pilgrim places in Podolia, in the wooden churches of Maramureș and the painted monasteries of Bukovina, when climbing up from the Radna mountains to the Nyíres Pass, and descending from the Borgó Pass to Bistritz/Beszterce/Bistrița. The sites he writes about are related with a particular syncopation to the sites where I translated it, the wanderings of Ulysses to the Cheremosh Valley, and the lost continent of Atlantis to Czernowitz, offering such unexpected readings of the books, which I am really sorry to be unable to share with the readers in the form of a continuous translator’s footnote.

The book, which Bompiani will publish in October in several languages at the same time (even after many years of translator’s experience, I read in an amazement the dates from the future in the colophon of a publisher’s pdf), is not just about legendary places in general, about which voluminous encyclopedias have been written, but specifically about imaginary places which were considered existing ones by the readers, who then tried to find them, even for centuries, from Atlantis to the Paradise on Earth, and from the hiding place of the Holy Grail to the unknown Southern Continent, with a special emphasis on twentieth-century mystification, from the Nazi occultism’s Thule and Hpyerborea, through the teachings of the eternal ice and hollow earth, to the stolen rubbish of Dan Brown. And in the last chapter Eco also expounds that existing places have also become the subject of successful novels, and hereby of a veritable cult. He offers a long list of examples, from Robinson’s island through Arsène Lupin’s rock and the prison of the Count of Monte Cristo to Sherlock Holmes’ house at Baker Street and Nero Wolfe’s one in New York, but – as we have already told in the posts on Eratosthenes’ well and the lion’s tail –, he would not be Eco, had he not let a juggler’s ball fall:

“A real person was also the 15th-century voivode Vlad Țepeș, now better known as Dracula after his father’s name, who of course was not a vampire, but became famous by indiscriminately impaling his enemies.”


As to ho how the existing person is mingled with the existing places as a cuckoo’s egg, is just the smaller issue. The bigger issue is that the example is completely wrong: the person is famous for being not linked to any actual place, or perhaps rather to too many places. Eco stuck his hand into a wasps’ nest. In fact, for Vlad Țepeș, Vlad the Impaler, prince of Wallachia, just like for Homerus, seven locations compete. The best known is the impressive fortress of Törcsvár/Bran, where the young Vlad is said to have been imprisoned for a short time, and which since 1920 has been propagated by the Romanian tourist office as Dracula’s castle. This claim was challenged after 1990 by Schäßburg/Segesvár/Sighișoara, in whose fortress Vlad was born in 1431 – his father having fled to Hungary before his pro-Ottoman rivals, and having been admitted in this year to the Order of the Knigths of the Dragon (in Romanian Dracul) founded by Emperor Sigismund –, so that even a decade ago the Mayor of Sighișoara urged the building of a huge Dracula entertainment park around the city, until Prince Charles of England, who after 1990 purchased and started to develop large former Saxon lands in the neighborhood, threatened him to withdraw from the region after such a tastelessness. The third place is the former princely center in Târgoviște, where a plaque and several horrific souvenirs recall his reign. The fourth is Istanbul, where the film Drakula İstanbul’da, “Dracula in Istanbul”, inspired by Stoker’s novel, was shot in 1953, recalling the years spent here by the young Vlad as an Ottoman hostage, and where the characters of Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 bestseller The Historian research the traces of Dracula. The fifth is the fortress of Poienari in the southern Carpathians, which he caused to build by the forced labor of the boyars conspiring against him. The sixth Pécs in southern Hungary, where they recently excavated the palace donated him by King Matthias. And the seventh is of course the Borgó Pass, where the count’s castle stood in Stoker’s novel, and where today the reader crossing the pass will find a Hotel Dracula’s Castle: of course not where the castle stood according to the novel, for it was out of sight, over a few marsh-fires and a wolfs’ adventure, but at the crossroads, where Jonathan Harker, amongst the passengers’ universal crossing of themselves, changes from the Beszterce-Bukovina stagecoach to the cart sent for him by Count Dracula.

Soon we were hemmed in with trees, which in places arched right over the roadway till we passed as through a tunnel. And again great frowning rocks guarded us boldly on either side. Though we were in shelter, we could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled through the rocks, and the branches of the trees crashed together as we swept along. It grew colder and colder still, and fine, powdery snow began to fall, so that soon we and all around us were covered with a white blanket. The keen wind still carried the howling of the dogs, though this grew fainter as we went on our way. The baying of the wolves sounded nearer and nearer, as though they were closing round on us from every side. I grew dreadfully afraid, and the horses shared my fear. The driver, however, was not in the least disturbed. He kept turning his head to left and right, but I could not see anything through the darkness.

Locations of the Dracula novel from the blog of Gashicsavargó (it is also worth to read his English-language post)

Although if Eco – or rather his editors and students, who deliver an increasingly important part of his ideas and materials – had dug a bit into the Stoker literature, he could have easily found a cult place to Dracula as well. After 1990 the Saxons disappeared from Bistritz, but the Hungarians and Romanians remaining there have made great efforts to preserve and present the past of the city, including the only authentic place in Bram Stoker’s Dracula story.

Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Goldene Krone Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country. I was evidently expected, for when I got near the door I faced a cheery-looking elderly woman in the usual peasant dress--white undergarment with a long double apron, front, and back, of coloured stuff fitting almost too tight for modesty. When I came close she bowed and said, “The Herr Englishman?” – “Yes”, I said, “Jonathan Harker.” She smiled, and gave some message to an elderly man in white shirtsleeves, who had followed her to the door. He went, but immediately returned with a letter:

My friend. – Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well tonight. At three tomorrow the diligence will start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land. – Your friend,

Dracula

Place of the former King of Hungary Hotel on the late 18th-century map of Bistritz

The former King of Hungary – between the two world wars Paulini – Hotel today