Old Believers

I have chosen as a final film to discuss (at least for a while) Old Believers, a lesser known documentary about a sect of religous believers. In the context of Russian Orthodox church history, the Old Believers became separated after 1666-1667 from the official Russian Orthodox Church as a protest against church reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon. Old Believers continue liturgical practices which the Russian Orthodox Church maintained before the implementation of these reforms.

What struck me most about this film was its stylistic qualities. It was as though the style represented to me more about what the filmmaker was trying to accomplish with the film than the content itself. It is all black and white, and often employs long shots or pans of the nature surrounding the village. The music is hypnotic,especially when the church bells ring. The geographical terrain presented always has white clouds or mist. There are no wide shots or "set up" shots and the foggy atmosphere creates soft but finite edges. As though the village was its own little world, that nothing existed beyond the mist.

It truly is a world that exists outside the rest of the world, the subjects of the film never mention "others." They are autonomous, they are isolated, both seemingly by terrain as the filmmaker would have you believe, but also by their beliefs. I believe the film is a juxtaposition of God and Nature... as the old anthropological dichotomy goes Culture vs Nature, even as Culture/Church "controls" nature, it is also bounded by it (literally surrounded by it). "Equilibrium comes about not mechanically and inertly, but out of, and because of, tension" (Dewey, 13). This is really the heart of the film, these Old Believers are in contension with the rest of the world, exiled because of a break with the Church. There is an unspoken sadness there, an undertone of sympathy for these believers because of their isolation. "Emotion is the conscious sign of a break, actual or impending. The discord is the ocasion that induces reflection... with the realization, material of reflection is incorporated into objects as their meaning" (Dewey 14). This sympathetic gaze is the meaning of the art "object," in this case, the otherworldly stylized film.


cheers



Dewey, John. 2005. Art as Experience. Perigee.

Old Believers (Jana Sevciková, 2001)