ASTHENIC SYNDROME
[via Kira Muratova]
About the
snake:
the last stop
himself in the third person: he was a kind man.
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, MD US / 8-4-05 (7:39 AM)
Written during the forty minute opening black & white, film-within-a-film
segment of Kira Muratova’s triumphal cinematic return to the Odessa Studio
in the late eighties. Despite the more relaxed atmosphere which allowed
for the rediscovery of her films banned twenty years earlier, “The Asthenic
Syndrome” was immediately controversial and became known as "the only film
banned under Gorbachev”. I’m not certain whether the disjointed
relationship amongst the episodes which followed the opening segment ended
my writing or whether I had been spoiled by the immediate availability of
the voice of a recent widow agitated by her husband’s death amidst a larger
social dissolution. Although I often misremember the film’s title as “The
Aesthetic Syndrome”, it apparently refers to a condition of “weakness”
which can take the shape of either aggressiveness or passivity.
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