Three Songs about the Motherland

Also on the DVD with Marker's documentary is a forty-minute long documentary by Marina Goldoskaya from 2008, Three Songs about the Motherland. The picture is structured around a cabaret singer's performance (highly truncated) of three songs -- each song designates a different part of the film: 1 City of Dreams, about the Siberian exile city Komsomolsk-on-Amur; 2 City of Tears about Moscow and the murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a fearless writer about the war in Chechynea; and (3) City of Hope, about a rapidly growing oil and gas boom town, Khanty-Mansijsk in eastern Siberia. The picture is very well-made and interesting. In City of Dreams, aging Stalinists eulogize the great leader, although every other interview mentions people tortured to death or peremptorily shot during purges in 1937 -- the film makes the point that youth is a time that induces nostalgia in all of us, even if our youth was spent laboring in sub-zero weather in a concentration camp. City of Tears shows the gradual political awakening of an activist journalist murdered by right-wing Russian militarists outside her home and buried with great pomp and ceremony. City of Hope is unabashedly optimistic, a civic-booster film about a Siberian city that seems to be a jostling, jogging forest of pumping oil wells. The movie clearly invokes the great Dziga Vertov and his 1934 documentary, structured the same way Three Songs of Lenin -- both pictures attempt a broad lyrical portrait of the Russian empire. The film is handsome and many of the interviews, shot in very close-up, are moving. Russians are very patriotic and the film seems pro-Imperialist in a way. The message would not be unfamiliar to Vertov or his kin: we have endured great hardship as a people but the future belongs to us.