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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.