Kira Muratova - Astenicheskiy sindrom

Kira Muratova - Astenicheskiy sindrom AKA Asthenic Syndrome (1989)



http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096841




Language Russian

Subtitles included: English



http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/4580/asthenic7yk.jpg




Here is another film by Kira Muratova. Make sure to grab her other films if this one suits your fancy, she's a director well deserving far wider recognition.



Breaking all the usual rules of storytelling, The Asthenic Syndrome identifies two debilitating forms of behavior in the world today--extreme aggressiveness and extreme passivity. Written and directed by the most celebrated living Russian woman filmmaker, it was the only Russian film to have been banned by the Soviet government during Perestroika.

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With a comic vigor that gets impetus from sadness and rage, Muratova depicts urban life under glasnost as a succession of crises, jolts, and disruptions. The official ideology that was supposed to organize all this has been abandoned to parody, and the only options left to the individual, other than brutality, are escalated aggressiveness or withdrawal. The greatness of the film lies in Muratova’s determined embrace of the fragmentary. The Asthenic Syndrome is a universe of compact microcosms that ignore one another: the school storage room, filled with busts of Lenin, where Nikolai goes to commune with his muse; an apartment where a man tends caged birds while his daughter dances alone to a David Byrne record; a fish seller’s stand besieged by a clamoring, pushing crowd.

From Chris Fujiwara's review



The film abounds in playful confusions. Nikolai, who teaches English, has two devoted students who sit together in class and are both named Masha (Natalya Busko and Galina Sachurdaewa); both come to visit him when he winds up in a madhouse. Doubtless there are other details referring specifically to aspects of everyday postcommunist Russian life that are too local to register with much clarity to outsiders like me. Truthfully, I found the movie a lot easier to follow when I saw it a second time and knew not to look for too much plot continuity, though I can't claim there weren't parts that still baffled me. The movie's a treasure chest, and if we get to see it more, more will surely become clear.



Nevertheless, the fundamental aspects of the asthenic syndrome come across loud and clear--and you certainly don't have to be Russian or postcommunist to recognize them as central philosophical as well as behavioral strains in our public life.

From the excellent review by Jonathan Rosenbaum for Chicago Reader



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The subs for the film were "mastered by sobsob from a transcript by trep" according to the info in the .srt file and are mostly quite good. I had to go through some pain resynching the subs for the second CD - a few scenes were apparently omitted from the Italian TV-rip; one scene didn't have any subtitles so I had to add them. I also made a dozen or so fairly minor corrections where I noticed significant discrepancies between the russian dialog and the translation.



One comment somewhat relevant to the subtitles: the film was presumably banned by the soviet authorities in the large part due to the highly obscene language used by a middle-aged woman riding a bus towards the end of the film. The English translation of the obscenities is rather uninspired - so just use your imagination :wink:

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This is a russian TV-rip of somewhat better quality than the italian one; its main advantage over the italian rip is the absence of burned-in subs and TV-logo (which was pretty skillfully removed - you can see where it was if you really look for it) and a few short scenes missing from the RAI version. On the other hand, the image is cropped noticeably at the botton and slightly on the left.



http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e299/jack_ert1/asthenic/asten1.png




http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e299/jack_ert1/asthenic/asten7.png




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http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e299/jack_ert1/asthenic/asten8.png




http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e299/jack_ert1/asthenic/asten13.png




----not my rip---

---uploaded by igorert on KG---

I only joined and unpacked the files



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