From Russia with love: Gorbachev documentary to be a top attraction at Cork Film Festival
Werner Herzog’s quirky take on Mikhail Gorbachev promises to be one of the best documentaries at Cork Film Festival, writes
MIKHAIL Gorbachev, who was born in 1931, dragged himself up from the bootstraps. The village he grew up in, as Werner Herzog narrates in the documentary Meeting Gorbachev, was “a godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere”, deep in the southwestern provinces of the former Soviet Union. Two uncles and an aunt of his died from starvation when he was a child. He remembers sleeping in the stables alongside a newborn calf for warmth.
From these humble beginnings, he managed to get a place studying law at Moscow State University, the country’s most prestigious third-level institution. It was one of a handful of breaks that helped turn him into one of the giants of twentieth-century political life.
Herzog’s documentary is co-directed by his long-time artistic collaborator, British filmmaker Andre Singer, and will show at Cork Film Festival.
It is loosely structured on three “summit” meetings between Herzog and Gorbachev, and is not a straightforward biographical film. It couldn’t be with one of Herzog’s hands on the tiller.
As Gorbachev found his feet at university in the early 1950s — where he met his wife, Raisa Titarenko — he got to indulge in fun socialist style. There is a scene, which the documentary makers dug up from the bowels of Russia’s film archives, of Gorbachev’s fellow university students doing a satire of American decadence, dancing to boogie-woogie music — “the dance of the class enemy, America”.
It is vintage Herzog, and one of several unexpected, offbeat scenes that elevate the documentary beyond a by-the-numbers portrayal of the Soviet Union’s last leader.
“This is where the strength of Werner Herzog comes across,” says Singer. “We had the interviews in the can. We looked at the most interesting things in the interviews that Gorbachev was discussing and then we were able to go back into the archives to find things that made sense around that.
Where the quirkiness of Werner’s mind comes into play was, for example, when we were talking about the end of the Iron Curtain between Hungary and Austria [in 1989] and the Hungarian prime minister at the time, Miklós Németh, said, ‘Oh, we had to rebuild the border fence in order to get this photo shoot on both sides of the Austrian-Hungarian border’.
“Werner said: ‘You know, I remember that day and it was on the TV news in Austria. I don’t think it was the lead story. Why don’t you dig into the archives and see what you can find?’ We then dug back into the Austrian archives on that day the Iron Curtain was cut and found Werner was right. The first story on the news that day was a story about slugs in the garden. Werner immediately said, ‘Look, we’ve got to have that piece of archive in. You put it in and we can narrate around it’. We found odd bits of archive that added a level of humour that wouldn’t have been thought of otherwise.”
The Gorbachev that emerges from the documentary is a sympathetic character. The deep love he felt for his wife, Raisa, who died from leukaemia in 1999, seeps through, and shines a light on Gorbachev’s own personality. She was a soul mate and visibly by his side throughout his political life unlike the wives of his seven predecessors at the helm of the Soviet Union.
“It’s a funny thing to say about someone who dominated world politics but I think he was a nice man,” says Singer. “It’s really why we put the relationship with his wife in the film.
“We knew there was nothing faked about it — that he was in love with her. He was genuinely moved by his relationship to her. I don’t think he was able to bluff that — or bluff his whole career, as if he was a Vladimir Putin-like figure. He wasn’t.”
The abiding sensation from the film is one of poignancy. Gorbachev, who was pushed from power in 1991, is a lonely man and despised by his people.
“He is a rather tragic figure,” says Singer. “He’s alone. He’s very stubborn. He won’t leave Moscow because he says, ‘I’m Russian. Why should I have to leave my country?’ Yet the Russians hate him. He’s surrounded by his own population who think he gave the empire away, which is not true.
“He was the one who wanted to keep it together, but because of his reforms, the freedom he gave the republics under the USSR, the whole edifice collapsed.
“Today, he’s a forgotten figure who was so influential in all of our lives up until [1991], one of those figures who genuinely did change the world, and was instrumental in ending the Cold War, but he couldn’t keep it altogether.”
- Meeting Gorbachev will be screened as part of the Cork Film Festival, Gate Multiplex, Sunday, November 11
Real life: Other documentaries at Cork Film Festival
To celebrate Ingmar Bergman’s centenary, Swedish filmmaker Jane Magnusson has chosen 1957 to capture elements of his personality and career. He turned 39 years old that year, one in which he released two of his landmark films, Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal as and worked on numerous other film, television, radio and stage projects as well as enduring momentous upheavals in his troubled personal live.
This is one of the festival’s charming documentaries. It focuses on a custom-made guitar shop in Greenwich Village where the owner, Rick Kelly, makes guitars out of salvaged wood culled from historic New York sites and buildings. The shop’s clientele include the likes of Jim Jarmusch and Wilco’s Nels Cline.
Enjoyable documentary on the life and rollicking times of Joan Jett, pictured above, friend of Nirvana, a founding member of the 1970s all-girl glam band, The Runaways and singer of an anthem for a generation in ‘I Love Rock and Roll’. The documentary-makers roll out all the greats of her age to pay homage, including Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry, as well as weaving in interview footage with the queen herself.
A long-awaited documentary chronicling the history of New York’s epitome of cool – the jazz label Blue Note Records, which helped spring the likes of Herbie Hancock, Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk into our cultural orbit since its foundation back in 1939.
Flashback country for those around in the 1980s and 1990s who remember the globular head of Frank Sidebottom, the inspiration for the wonderful 2014 Lenny Abrahamson film, Frank. In this documentary, we get a peak inside the life of Chris Sievey, the real-life man within the paper-mâché head who lived with his mother in a town outside Manchester.
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