Pushkin festival

The eighth independent Russian documentary film festival, which took place on October 9-11, 2015 in New York, concluded its work with a screening of the film about Pushkin “Pushkin is Our Everything.”
Oleg Sulkin from the jury team presented director Michael Beckelhimer with a special prize. Representatives of the Pushkin Society of America also awarded the author a medal and diploma, confirming the immortal thesis of Apollo Grigoriev “Pushkin is our everything.”
The film touched upon the pain nerve of the problem associated with the myth of the great poet and how he works in the current situation.
The director intuitively defined for himself the role of a peculiar mediator between academic and mass Pushkin studies, which he occasionally confronts in an interview, but receives a fabric with a single content.
Particularly successful were the fragmentary “delusional plots” of animation used in the advertising business of modern Russia, exploiting the image of the poet for commercial purposes with ruthless sarcasm. However, the topic of “classical Pushkin” is not removed, but is claimed to be auxiliary material for training courses in Slavic departments, which is valuable in itself. The author's voice sounds in English, while the polyphony of the admirers is present on the screen in Russian.
Separating the Pushkin myth from a real person and the difference in his perception in history is not an easy task. It rests on the issues of mentality, self-identification, ethnic consciousness, etc. And they, in turn, affect the archaic, which seems capable of reviving and reconstructing the history of culture, melting it into new forms.
Myth is the quintessence of national ideas, its symbol, behind which there is a metaphysical meaning. Michael Beckelheimer is trying to lift the veil of this phenomenon. He leads us to the idea that the uniqueness of Pushkin’s myth is that its bearers often do not realize that they are in its field. By exposing outdated ideas, new ones are born. So the priest speaks about the inconsistency of the “Soviet atheistic Pushkin,” and from his monologue a different “respectable, Orthodox poet” emerges. Is this the old or the new orthodoxy? A successful find is the story about Buryatia, where a bicultural personality through Pushkin can easily “switch to Russianness.” While visiting Katya Asmus in her St. Petersburg apartment, her worldview sounds poetic: “in fact, nothing changes, there is the same lingonberry jam on the table,” and then comes her own interpretation of the legendary biography...
The special attitude towards Pushkin that the American director demonstrates still exists. A genius with an exotic appearance is a symbol of Russian culture, but with universal worship it is “read” very differently. The same ideas can be experienced and interpreted differently, and, therefore, exist in different value systems. An illustrative example is the diametrically opposed attitude towards racial problems in Russia.
The conditional shortcomings can be attributed to a certain length of time, the time spent on roads and trains was used excessively, although this was an opportunity to show the vast expanses of the country. There was no roll with Pushkin abroad, although this is another independent and very productive vector of research. But the wishes of the audience’s character had nothing to do with it, because the task of the painting was solved.
The film showed us the image of the poet as a sociocultural phenomenon; it is the demonstration that is important here, and not the theoretical side. You can write about this in analytical articles as much as you like, but still fail to convey the main conclusions to a wide audience. M. Beckelheimer's film speaks simply about the complex. Firstly, “Pushkin” is a cultural code with the help of which one comprehends one’s own personality. Secondly, through this code, creative activity is formed, creating the text of an artistic creation. The question of why such a mission went to Alexander Sergeevich remains open.