A Russian documentarian whose eyes find beauty evenin the darkest places, Medvedev builds his films out of visual and auralcontrast. In Vacation in November,the blinding white snow of northern Russia alternates with scenes inthe Stygian blackness of the region’s mines, fitfully glanced by the spotlightsof the helmeted miners. At first appearance, the countryside is pristine andthe mining town run-down, the reindeer herders are children of nature and theminers locked in the dungeon of the world. Gradually, Medvedev reveals agrayer, more complicated reality. The herders are actually miners on furlough.At the end of the roundup they attack the reindeer with clubs as the frightenedbeasts heave anxiously against the heavy gate of their corral. The settingbecomes an outdoor slaughterhouse with carcasses skinned for fur and meat. Theminers have been driven to this because their mine, a secure source of incomeduring the Soviet years, has cut their wages. They can no longer live on theirsalaries.
In what may be an unconscious echo of the region’sancient shamanism, Yuri the narrator begs forgiveness from the reindeer beforekilling them. He despises the mine, which stole the health of his father, butunlike his dad, who moved to the warm south of Russia on his pension, he lacks themoney to escape. In only 20 minutes, Medvedev unwraps a world seldom glimpsedby outsiders, a remote place of decay and despair made memorable through anartful construction of reality. Every person, animal and object is framed insharp relief.
In another of the program’s selections, Wedding of Silence, Medvedev finds contrast in noise and silence.Filmed in sepia-toned black-and-white among a community of the deaf, the filmallows viewers to slowly discover that the men happen to work in thehigh-decibel environs of a foundry, which is casting a magnificent bell to markthe 300th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg. Medvedev presents the hearty clinking ofglasses around a dinner table as deaf families animatedly converse in signlanguage before cutting to silence, back to sound and to silence again. Wedding of Silence follows the communitythrough the rhythm of their lives, from the roaring floor of their Soviet-erafactory to the hush of an Eastern Orthodox liturgy, where someone signs thewords sung by the priest. In the end, the crane lifts up the giant bell beforethe proud faces of the workers as they gaze in wonder at a bell whose tollingthey will never hear