A Film About Anna Akhmatova
DIRECTED BY Helga Landauer
AND Anatoly Naiman
(Turnstyle TV, 2008)

In this context, the foreword to Akhmatova’s cycle of poems called “Requiem” contains an important clue. There is an episode in which she was standing in line in front of the prison to inquire about her son. She recalled a woman standing behind her who suddenly whispered, “Can you describe this?” — to which Akhmatova replies, “I can.” In a time of inconceivable horror and suppression, she, the poet, seemed to be the only person with the ability to offer a connection to something that may — however accidentally — look like truth.

What does it mean for you today to film in the streets of Leningrad, and not St. Petersburg, as Anatoly Naiman had mentioned when crossing the city?

It reflects my own view that the beautiful architecture of St. Petersburg seems to be disconnected from her inhabitants, like a house abandoned by its owners and appropriated by strangers. The somber ghosts of the rightful owners are always adding a hint of trespassing to all that is happening in the house, the same way that black ash was added into every color that was used to paint the facades of the city in the past. Too many murders were committed and too much was ruined during the Soviet years to make it possible to feel as one does in Paris or Venice with a sense of continuity with the past. In Leningrad, the old inhabitants were killed, the continuity was broken. I don’t know what St. Petersburg looked like. I have only images from literature. But I agree with Naiman that now we can return the city its formal name, but we cannot revive its spirit.

A Film About Anna Akhmatova is a documentary in two voices: Naiman’s, which propels the narrative, and yours that one seldomly hears (even though we see you from time to time). Such an assumed subjectivity lies at the heart of its cinematographic plan. How did this urgency impose itself during the elaboration of this project?

Anatoly Naiman and Helga Olshvang Landauer
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR/FILMMAKER

I dare to think that “a film about…” is a documentary in the voices of Anna Akhmatova reciting her poetry and memoirs; Anatoly Naiman, who remembers her and how she was telling about the events of her life; and lastly the voices of the chorus from Purcell’s recording of Dido and Aeneas.

Who are you in the film?

I see myself as an anthropologist trying to recreate a disappeared civilization from voices, accounts, poems, objects, and images.

You made an elegant choice of “evoking” throughout the entire filming process. Do you agree? How did those images of a flourishing nature, immobile statues and the long sequence of travelling avant in the park while “Poem Without A Hero” is read aloud come about?

Yes, I agree with your term “evoking” — how else can you deal with abandoned places where poetry was once conceived? You can gaze at these places, you can try to recapture a sound or the beauty which is often faded or simply demolished. For example, in the episode at the Pavlosk train station where only the dialogue of deaf girls on the platform could be filmed at the place that was once a famous concert venue for symphony orchestras. Evoking images of the Antiquity, which was an important point of reference for Akhmatova, was crucial.

Greek mythological heroes, in a last cycle of historical reoccurrences, invaded gardens and books of eighteenth century Russia on a wave of European Classicism. Akhmatova, who was born in Hersones, a peninsula of Crimea — a former Roman city and very significant archaeological site — spent her early childhood near the remains of an antique forum and fragments of statues. The same characters, envisioned by eighteenth century sculptors, surrounded Akhmatova in her youth, when her family moved once again, to Tsar’s Village near St. Petersburg. It is important to understand, when it comes to her fate and her survival as a poet, that for her, Apollo and the muses from the gardens of Pavlovsk and Petersburg had more chance to be “accidentally true” than the grim realities of the subsequent Soviet era.