The Moscow Times.
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End of the Show
Despite vocal protests from around the world, the Cinema Museum has lost its
home after a long battle.
By Tom Birchenough
Published: December 2, 2005
For quite some time now, they've been packing up the boxes at Moscow's
Cinema Museum, or Muzei Kino. On Thursday, the institution -- which has
gathered a more than loyal following over the 16 years of its existence --
finally closed its doors.
This came despite a string of street protests, covered regularly in the
media, by the museum's support organization, the Friends of Muzei Kino.
Consisting of viewers from the venue, the group earned a high profile during
both the 2004 and 2005 Moscow International Film Festivals.
Its last demonstration, held in early November outside Dom Kino, the
headquarters of the Russian Filmmakers' Union, came to look more like a swan
song as it became clear that little short of a miracle would save the museum
from being evicted. And that miracle hasn't happened. A final open letter
addressed to major government figures, from President Vladimir Putin on
down, also brought depressingly little response.
International support over the years has been no less vocal, coming from
both institutions -- most significantly, the international film critics'
association FIPRESCI -- and from individuals, such as director Quentin
Tarantino. The "Pulp Fiction" director made a special visit to the museum in
June 2004 when he was in the Russian capital for the Moscow International
Film Festival. Written support from cinema notables all over the world
continued to follow.
On that front, it seems a bitter irony that the museum's founding director,
film scholar Naum Kleiman, was invited to receive the honorary Order of the
Rising Sun at the Japanese Embassy on Thursday -- the day after the museum
held a final, 24-hour round of screenings to mark the closure of its four
exhibition halls. Similarly, the wide array of international film festival
projects that have run at the venue over the years attest to its worldwide
prominence.
"Just recently, in Paris, an excellent new film museum opened, attached to
France's cinematheque," Kleiman said in a radio interview at the end of
November. "Film museums are being built in all the world's developed
countries. Are we really such a backward country, of such little
significance in cinema, that we can't resolve this question?"
The conflict behind the museum's closure dates back more than a decade, and
has been debated in various Moscow courts on innumerable occasions. The
Kinocenter building near Barrikadnaya metro station, in which Muzei Kino was
located until this week, was a joint project completed in the late 1980s by
the official Filmmakers' Unions of all 15 Soviet republics. Part of the
reason for its construction was to house the museum; the space containing
the museum was specially designed for that purpose.
Mike Solovyanov / MT
Muzei Kino's collection of memorabilia, now moving to Mosfilm for storage,
has hundreds of thousands of items. Here, a school group learns about
animation on a visit to the museum in 2004.
Political developments in the 1990s led to acrimonious disputes on all
fronts, including one between Nikita Mikhalkov, who heads the Russian
Filmmakers' Union, and his frequent screenwriting collaborator, Rustam
Ibragimbekov, who leads the Confederation of Filmmakers' Unions of the CIS
and Baltic States.
But it was on the property front that the issue became -- literally --
bloody. As the rest of the Kinocenter building gradually passed into private
hands, its spaces were adapted to commercial use. Today, in addition to a
movie theater, it houses a plethora of other entertainment options, from
restaurants and nightclubs to striptease joints. In an interview several
years ago, Kleiman recalled that as many as nine murders had taken place in
connection with turf wars over the property -- and that he didn't want to
become the 10th victim.
Ultimately, the museum found itself facing rents that threatened to rule it
out of existence, despite Kleiman's assertion that it was occupying the
space specifically designated for it when the building was constructed.
Access conditions changed as well, with entry to the premises limited to one
barely visible side door and a single, slow and not always functioning
elevator.
Speaking at a meeting in the museum last summer, Kleiman described the whole
history as "one mistake after another" on the part of the Russian
Filmmakers' Union, adding that many of the promises made to him over the
years had been broken. One such promise came in 2000, when Muzei Kino was
given the formal status of a federal museum, a step which might have given
it some guarantee of survival but, in practice, brought no results.
Ironically, in retrospect, had it been taken under the aegis of the Moscow
city government rather than federal agencies, it might have fared better.
The final step came when the Russian Filmmakers' Union sold its share of the
building to the Kinocenter company, whose board of directors is headed by
Mikhalkov. The terms of the sale essentially forced Muzei Kino to vacate its
premises.
FIPRESCI's then-president, Klaus Eder, was forthright on possible motives
behind the deal. "We have now to touch the domain where cultural and
commercial interests overlap and contradict each other," he wrote in an open
letter to Mikhalkov. Sources in the Russian film world have suggested that
many of the parties involved in the Kinocenter deal have vested financial
interests in its outcome.
Just over a decade ago, in 1994, Mikhalkov presented the first press
screening of his subsequent Oscar-winner, "Burnt by the Sun," in one of the
museum's halls -- but he seems to have long since forgotten the importance
of the location.
Others, however, have not. One of the first comments from director Andrei
Zvyagintsev after he received his Golden Lion award at the 2003 Venice Film
Festival for "The Return" was to recognize Muzei Kino as a venue that had
allowed him to educate himself in the history of world cinema. Other members
of Russia's new generation of directors have expressed similar feelings.
In addition to its varied retrospectives, the museum also brought
contemporary art-house films to viewers for a democratic price. According to
Sam Klebanov, head of art-house distribution company Kino Bez Granits, it
was a venue that might not have led on box office income but dominated in
terms of the refined taste and critical sensibility of its audiences.
At least one of the museum's offerings appears to be safe. The museum's
permanent collection, consisting of hundreds of thousands of items collected
in the years since it opened in 1989, has been guaranteed a home by the
Mosfilm movie studio. As Soviet-era institutions threw away their archives,
Muzei Kino managed to collect what it could, aided by private donations.
These items include sketches for Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film "Solaris" and
personal mementos from the director's apartment, such as his record
collection. Outside Kleiman's office long stood a bulky wooden table and set
of chairs crafted by classic Soviet director Mikhail Romm, taken from the
director's dacha. A certificate signed by Romm's former pupils from the VGIK
film institute, who spent many days there, attested to its provenance.
Though the collection isn't being broken up, access to it will certainly be
limited, as will the potential to mount any kind of rotating exhibition. But
it's the loss of the screening rooms, named in honor of, among others,
Sergei Eisenstein, Marlene Dietrich and Charlie Chaplin -- whose "The Great
Dictator" was the first film to be shown at the venue -- that is being most
protested. Likewise, the fate of the museum's collection of original film
prints, donated by the likes of classic Indian director Satyajit Ray, after
whom another hall was named, remains uncertain.
Limited and occasional screenings in a number of other Moscow venues may
become possible, but on nothing like the scale of previous activities.
Kleiman emphasized an optimistic aspect -- the possibility of working in
Russia's regions, with interest ranging from the Caucasus to the Urals.
His hope remains that construction of a new, dedicated facility, with
screening rooms and exhibition space in one location, might be included on
the list of federal cultural projects for the period of 2006 to 2010, and
such a project could be realized as early as 2008 -- the year that will mark
the centennial of film in Russia. "The investment would be a very small
percentage of the sums being spent on high-profile projects like the
reconstruction of the Bolshoi and Mariinsky theaters," Kleiman said.
If it continues to be backed by real public support, such plans may one day
reach reality, though official support has so far been conspicuous by its
absence. For now, the museum is packing up some of its unique projection
equipment -- including Moscow's first Dolby sound system, donated by French
director Jean-Luc Godard -- in the hope that eventually the institution will
have a new home in which to install them.
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