At the Berlin film festival in February 1990, the winner of the Silver Bear – the special jury prize – was The Asthenic Syndrome, an extraordinarily original film from the Soviet Union, directed by Kira Muratova, who has died aged 83. The period of perestroika (reconstruction) from 1985 onwards allowed Muratova to emerge from the shadows and make her absurdist masterpiece unencumbered by the draconian strictures of socialist realism. Nevertheless, because of “obscenity” – there was both male and female full-frontal nudity – it was the only film to be banned in the Soviet Union during perestroika, though that ban was lifted soon after the Berlin award.

Right from the start of Muratova’s career as a director in 1961, she was an irritant to the regime. Her first solo directed feature, Brief Encounters (1967), was shelved until the advent of perestroika. A ménage à trois, played by the popular singer-actor Vladimir Vysotsky, Nina Ruslanova and Muratova herself, and influenced by the French new wave, Brief Encounters disturbed the Communist party’s arbiters of taste because of the fragmented structure (characteristic of Muratova) and its nihilism, as much as by the sex and adultery. But this was considered tame compared with The Asthenic Syndrome.

The latter is divided into two obliquely related parts. The first section, in black and white, a potent portrayal of mourning, follows an inconsolable doctor (Olga Antonova) who has just buried her Stalin-lookalike husband. The sequence ends suddenly when it is revealed that we were witnessing an “art film” being played before an unenthusiastic audience. The second, longer part, in colour, deals with an unfulfilled schoolteacher (Sergei Popov) who keeps dozing off because he suffers from the sleeping sickness of the title. One thing that is clear from the episodic and enigmatic narrative is that Muratova saw Russia as a madhouse in which there was little to distinguish the sane from the certified insane. “My country had reached bankruptcy and there was nowhere else for it to go. Everything had to burst,” she claimed.

Born in Soroca – then in Romania and now in Moldova – Kira Korotkova was the daughter of a Jewish gynaecologist mother and a Russian father, both active members of the Communist party. Her father, who participated in the anti-fascist guerrilla movement in the second world war, was arrested by Romanian forces and shot after interrogation.

In 1959, Kira graduated from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, having specialised in directing. She then moved to the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, where she made most of her films.

Her first two films were co-directed with Aleksandr Muratov, whom she married in 1961. Although they were soon to divorce, she retained her married name, going on to direct Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell (1971), a “provincial melodrama” about an over-possessive mother of a teenage boy in search of his father. Like the former film, it was shelved for some years because of its “elitist” French new wave style – jump cuts, direct sound, natural locations. After many attempts to get projects started, Muratova made Among Grey Stones (1983), only to see it disembowelled by the censors. She therefore disowned the film by using the pseudonym Ivan Sidorov (the Russian equivalent of Alan Smithee).

Change of Fate (1987), adapted from the same Somerset Maugham play as The Letter (1940), a Bette Davis melodrama, was Muratova’s first film made under perestroika. In it, she displayed her indifference to traditional narrative by making a whodunit without a denouement, and repeating certain sequences.

After the impact of The Asthenic Syndrome, still considered her most successful and personal film, Muratova continued to be her own person, all of her films carrying the authoritative stamp of a true auteur. The Sentimental Policeman (1992), about a cop who tries to adopt a baby he has found in a cabbage patch, was a comedy with serious undertones, as was Passions (1994), a plotless but eventful story of people around horses.

Three Stories (1997) had Muratova following the scent of crime tales in which there are no logical motives, while Chekhov’s Motifs (2002) updates and subverts a play and a short story by the great Russian writer.

The Tuner (2004), Two in One (2007), Melody for a Street Organ (2009) and Eternal Homecoming (2012) all contain the hallmarks of her style: characters behaving in inexplicable ways, storylines moving in bizarre unpredictable directions, ellipses, a sense of bitter humour reflecting a violent, loveless, morally empty society. Though much darker, Muratova’s films belong beside the blackly humorous oeuvres of Otar Iosseliani and Roy Andersson in the cinema of the absurd. Though her films are less well known outside Russia and Ukraine, there have been retrospectives in New York (2005) and at the enterprising Rotterdam film festival (2013).

She is survived by her second husband, the painter and production designer Evgeny Golubenko.

Ronald BERGAN
first published in:
www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jun/21/kira-muratova-obituary