This restoration was made
from the internegotive in 2013
by Eclair Group (image)
and L.E. Diapason (sound)
with the generous support of the CNC.
One of the challenges
posed by every restoration
is to differentiate accurately
between the imperfections
originally present on the negative
(which must remain uncorrected)
and those caused by wear and tear.
Inspired by Chris Marker's words of warning
"Do not believe more is befier"
we have left uncorrected the mishaps
of a temperamental lens,
the lens hood, and hairs in the gate.
douban id @ hujan
LETTER FROM SIBERIA
I'm writing you this letter from a distant land.
Its name is Siberia.
For most of us, that name suggests
nothing but a frozen devil's island -
and for the czarist general Andreyevich,
it was the biggest vacant lot in the world.
Fortunately, there are more things on heaven
and earth than any general...
Siberian or not, has ever dreamed of.
As I write, I let my eye stray along the edge
of a grove of birch trees,
and I remember that in Russian, their name is
a word of love: beryozca.
This might be autumn in Yorkshire
or Connecticut...
if it weren't for these telegraph workers,
booted like Mikhail Strogoff,
going through the motions of shoemakers at the
altitude of tightrope walkers.
they convince you that you're
looking at Siberia,
and it's not just the local color:
the boots, the fur caps...
and the peppermint collars
around their horses' necks.
It's the realization, for example,
that if one of these
climbing Cossacks absentmindedly
reeled in his line
he'd find himself holding a ball
of wire 4800 miles long.
This gash in the forest means the city
has gone by like a wild animal;
follow the wrong trail and you may
come to a bear or a tiger,
follow the right one and
you'll come to a city.
Angarsk, 180 miles from the railroad.
The city was planned in 1947,
but it took four years to cut a path
through the forest,
yard by yard, to reach
the Trans-Siberian.
The foundation stone was laid in 1951.
Today it has 100,000 inhabitants,
including the 35,000 children born
during construction,
natives of the city which didn't yet exist.
When you've left the last house
behind you though,
you're back in the Stone
Age forest: the taiga.
I'm writing you this letter from
the edge of the world.
According to a Siberian proverb,
the forest was made by the devil.
The devil did a good job;
his forest is as big as the United
States of America.
But maybe the devil made
the United States too.
When he's not busy making forests, or states,
the devil steals peoples' souls...
or at least that was how the Siberians regarded
death for many centuries.
In this frozen ground, corpses never rot.
In these graves, which rest on
foundations of ice,
life and death are separated by nothing
more substantial than a breath of air.
Bring back the breath and the
body is ready to live again,
to come back and share in the slow chilly
existence of the wooden villages,
rounding up stray horses,
building snowplows...
or leading herds on their pilgrimage
to milder pastures.
This morning I saw a kolkhoz of ducks.
The duck is collectivistic by nature.
There are no kulaks among ducks.
It was a cold morning, and out of
sympathy for the cameraman,
and to promote friendship
between peoples,
they gladly gave an exhibition of naval
maneuvers on the freezing water,
at the risk of being trapped in the ice.
Which was the sad fate of a bigger,
more famous...
and much rarer animal in this same
part of the world: the mammoth.
The mammoth elephants of old Siberia
Dreamt of a holiday in Iberia
Fleeing the Ukase and the Knout
Quite a few got lost en route
Thirty centuries later
we had to dig them out.
Oddly enough, the only animal which
the Siberians and the Chinese...
could conceive to be related to the
mammoth was the mole.
They were convinced that he was
one of the giant variety -
digging huge tunnels and humping
the earth with his forehead.
That imposing animal's weak spot was his
extreme sensibility to sunshine.
If he was struck by a single ray of light,
he died, instantly.
And the proof of this, said the Chinese
- who were strong on logic -
was that whenever you met a mammoth
in the open, it was dead.
Hence the Chinese word
for mammoth: chu-mou,
which means 'mother of mice'.
For Westerners the mammoth
raised other problems.
They knew what he looked like.
He'd had his portrait painted by some of the most
popular artists of prehistoric times.
His publicity agent was Father Breuil.
And anyway, mammoths had always been
on good terms with the church:
a mammoth's tooth attributed
to St. Christophorus,
was worshipped in Valencia...
and as late as 1789
a mammoth's thigh bone...
presumed to have come from
St. Vincent's own skeleton...
was still carried in the Saints
Day procession.
When the first mammoths were
discovered in the 18th century,
the effect on public opinion
was unspectacular.
It wasn't until 1900 that the mammoth
became wildly fashionable,
after hardy pioneers had made
forays into the Siberian wasteland...
and brought back quick-frozen
mammoths in the flesh.
Men of science in that
rugged clime
Had to be sturdy and
still in their prime
They had to speak Yakut
loud and clear
They had to banish all
doubt and fear
In order to bring back
a mammoth by the ear.
Mammoths generally appeared
after a landslide.
By the time an expedition got there,
it might have sunk back
into the ground again.
Or been eaten by wild animals.
Several skeletons were found however,
and even some well preserved meat.
Between 1707 and 1908...
18 mammoths and 6 frozen rhinoceroses
were found.
It was in the faint hope of bringing back
at least an incisor...
that we made the trek to the
nearest diggings,
on the banks of the great Siberian
river: the Lena.
L(i)ena, S(i)ena:
five times as long as the Seine,
and fifty times as wide...
the Lena, in Russian, is kind enough
to rhyme with our French river in Latin.
So just picture to yourselves
a huge lazy Seine,
like an assembly line running
backwards,
gradually coming to pieces at each
new dollhouse settlement,
until it reaches its destination
somewhere up north,
broken down into its component parts...
and spread out over an
estuary 120 miles wide.
It's the only highway in this
land without highways,
it's Main Street in the
Siberian village,
it's the road everybody uses.
And by the side of the road,
asleep under tarpaulins,
waiting for transportation,
there are city buses, bulldozers,
farm machinery,
statues of Lenin for culture parks,
rocket mock-ups for planetariums,
imitation jeeps, and genuine Pobiedas.
Not to mention the crates of furs
from various animals,
such as the sable, a nasty little
beast that will make you like furs,
or the arctic fox, a sweet little thing
that would make you prefer nylon.
I'm writing you this letter from
the land of childhood;
between the ages of five and ten
this is where we were chased by wolves,
blinded by Tartars,
and carried away on the Trans-Siberian Express
with our pistols and our jewelry.
The Trans-Siberian is the longest
railway in the world.
It has carried away Anton Chekhov,
Cendrars, and Gatti .
I felt obliged to gather them
all together here,
like sacred cows under a
canopy of wild ducks,
to watch romanticism plus
electrification go by.
It's 7 a.m. in Irkutsk, midnight in
London and 7 p.m. in New York.
You're asleep or having dinner,
I'm looking at the Irkutsk dam,
sitting on its own reflection like
a station in outer space.
The morning shift goes
to work on the dam...
when the evening shift is
coming off at Root's.
And the night shift is going
on at Bethlehem Steel.
Big pressure cookers made out of Erector
Sets loom through the fog...
not yet moving.
Here, across the river Angara,
on the very spot where Mikhail Strogoff
was surrounded by fire,
they're building the biggest power
plant in Southern Siberia.
While Angara fishermen are already
catching their first fish,
Seine fishermen have already caught
ten in their dreams.
And now here's the shot
I've been waiting for,
the shot you've all been waiting for,
the shot no worthwhile film about a country
in the process of transformation...
could possibly leave out:
The contrast between the
old and the new.
On my right: the heavy duty
truck: 40 tons.
On my left: the telega,
240 pounds.
The past and the future,
tradition and progress,
the Tiber and the Orontes,
Philomena and Chloe,
take a good look because I won't
show them to you again.
It's one minute past seven.
A truck from Irkutsk makes the pontoons
bob under the floating bridge,
and at the same instant a
lorry honking its horn...
rouses 411 people out of
a sound sleep in Liverpool.
Four turbines are already functioning.
But the problem is not just
to light Irkutsk;
the problem is to electrify
a whole district,
which will constitute the base of operations
for the conquest of those frozen wastes.
This is where everything begins:
the soil reclamation program,
the increase in natural resources,
and the resulting rise in the
standard of living -
but also the spiritual acquisitions that
come after material transformations,
the way nuts come after bolts:
curiosity, contemplation, extended
horizons, and culture.
It's two minutes past seven.
The pressure cookers start to move.
They're real monsters, 100 feet tall.
And naturally there's a girl to go
with each monster.
She orders him around in
monster language,
and the monster obeys.
It's easy to imagine a romance
between the girl on the ground...
and the man in the crane.
It would be nice to be a
crane driver in Irkutsk,
to give your girlfriend a box of
birthday chocolates,
as high as a house on the
end of your hook.
Now the dam site comes to life.
Cars wend their way
between the cranes...
like cats playing hide and seek
in a railway depot.
Overhead the cranes stand aloof -
alternately courteous and curious
with one another,
like a herd of dinosaurs.
And the whole dam becomes
a spectacular display,
combining a Ferris wheel and
a naval battle,
and the Ville d'Este, and a pinball machine.
Back to the taiga.
The rationalistic aspect of Siberia,
is that a hiker walking in
a straight line...
is always sure to get
lost in the forest.
If he walks north long enough,
his reward will be 2 million 250 thousand
square miles of tundra and ice floe...
that have to be conquered
and transformed.
But first they have to be studied.
That's the job of Vladmir Malenkov...
head of the Low Temperature
Institute at Yakutskt.
In this climate, winter temperatures
can drop to 30 below zero.
But it's not for sentimental reasons that Vladimir
has an electric fan on his desk;
in summer they climb to 110.
In Siberia the weather jolts you...
- so do the roads,
but cars are insanity when you've
got a handy conveyance...
that suits the terrain to perfection:
the reindeer.
The entire economy of the Arctic peoples
is based upon the reindeer.
It serves as wheat, flax, rowboat,
Christmas tree, medicine chest,
and sacristan,
all rolled into one.
When gelded it serves
as a horse,
and is allowed to keep its beautiful
satiny antlers,
whereas the foolish males
cut theirs to ribbons.
You could go on praising reindeer forever.
With those velvet handlebars...
and the way they have of kicking themselves
along with their heels
they're the closest thing to a bicycle
that God ever created.
If I had the money, I'd shoot a spot
commercial in their honor,
and I'd run it between two showings...
or better still between two reels.
The picture would break off suddenly,
and you'd see something like this:
(United Productions of Siberia Presents)
"We interrupt this film not to sell you
some new miracle product,
but to remind you of an ancient irreplaceable
product to end all products: reindeer.
They make fine pets;
they're less of a nuisance than dogs,
less intimidating than cats,
less insidious than fleas.
Reindeer are all these things and more.
Are you dissatisfied with your car?
Reindeer will transport you.
Are you dissatisfied with your tailor?
Reindeer will dress you.
Are you dissatisfied with your doctor?
Reindeer will look after your health.
Are you dissatisfied with your interior?
Reindeer will redecorate you.
Are you dissatisfied with your destiny?
Reindeer will bring you luck.
And don't forget that for young
and for old alike,
reindeer are wholesome food,
chock full of life giving chlorophyll.
Housewives of the world, wherever
you may be,
in Moscow, Rome, New York,
Peking or Paris,
beware of imitations such as moose, or elk.
Always ask for genuine reindeer."
We followed the reindeer
to the Evenks' camp.
Evenks, as you all know, are Tunguses.
Reindeer and Tunguses have
always been associated,
but it's a question whether Tunguses like
reindeer because they're useful,
or whether reindeer like Tunguses
because they're light.
For centuries Tunguses and reindeer
were nomads together.
But now all that's changed.
With a wisdom that would have
done credit to King Solomon,
they've been assigned home bases.
They may not show up there
for years on end,
but they've nevertheless graduated from the
dubious category of 'nomads,'
into the respectable one of
householders on the move.'
Having presented the head of the
family with a plastic wallet,
a gift which he appreciated all the more...
as the Arctic world suffers from a
serious lack of Woolworth's stores,
we were treated to the ritual offering of
freshly sawed off reindeer antlers.
But don't waste your pity -
the operation hurts about as much
as trimming fingernails.
At least that's what we were told
by the grandfather in Tungus,
by the father in bad Russian,
and by the little boy in
excellent Russian.
For these children, who have inherited their
ancestors bear hunting instincts,
go to school, and learn trades.
This may be a bad sign for the
future of bear hunting,
as 103 year old grandfather
Innokenti says,
"Bear hunting is for youngsters.
When you're over eighty it
begins to be dangerous,
because in the days when
Innokenti hunted Mishka
- the name these people give to every bear,
as if there were only one -
he was armed with a spear,
and nothing else.
But Innokenti killed that single
bear eighty-five times over.
As for Mishka himself,
I met him in Yakutsk.
Actually, his name was Ushatik,
which means "Little Ears."
Beneath the somewhat
moth-eaten exterior,
due to an overturned samovar
when he was little,
he was a jovial, rather talkative, bear.
Boris Sergeivich found him in
the Taiga as a baby,
and he'd been a member of the
family ever since;
he was "cousin bear."
After a breakfast of red berries,
Ushatik the bear took his morning
walk through Yakutsk.
We went with him.
Since you can never tell how a
bear will react to a camera,
we were offered the protection
of an armed policeman.
But since we're much more frightened
of policemen than we are of bears...
we politely declined.
On our way we attracted the attention
of a group of Pioneers,
who were thrilled to meet
a film crew,
and even more so when they found
out that we were French.
Here we met with all the ingredients of
the Soviet citizens' incredible,
rather touching, admiration
for our country:
one quarter French Revolution,
one quarter Zola's novels,
one quarter Comédie-Française,
one quarter secret passion for Gay Paris,
and four quarers...
As I listened to this tribute to Yves Montand
I looked around me.
Undeniable energy, enthusiasm,
and the will to work.
A faith that the future will be as bright
as the past was dark.
Huge gaps, and a firm
determination to fill them.
While recording these images
of the Yakutsk capital
as objectively as possible,
I frankly wondered whom
they would satisfy.
Because of course you can't describe
the Soviet Union as anything...
but the worker's paradise,
or, as hell on earth.
For example: "Yakutsk: capital of
the Yakutsk...
autonomous Soviet socialistic
republic is a modern city,
in which comfortable buses made
available to the population,
share the streets with
powerful ZIMs,
the pride of the Soviet
automobile industry,
in the joyful spirit of
socialist emulation,
happy Soviet workers,
among them this picturesque
denizen of the Arctic reaches,
apply themselves to making Yakutsk
an even better place to live."
Or else: "Yakutsk is a dark city
with an evil reputation.
The population is crammed into
blood colored buses,
while the members of the privileged cast...
brazenly display the luxury
of their ZIMs...
a costly and uncomfortable car at best.
Bending to the task like slaves,
the miserable Soviet workers,
among them this sinister looking Asiatic,
apply themselves to the primitive labor
of grading with a drag beam."
Or simply: "In Yakutsk, where
modern houses...
houses are gradually replacing
the dark older sections,
a bus less crowded than
its London...
or New York equivalent
at rush hour...
passes a ZIM, an excellent car,
reserved for public utilities
departments...
on account of its scarcity.
With courage and tenacity under extremely
difficult conditions, Soviet workers,
among them this Yakut, afflicted with
an eye disorder,
apply themselves to improving
the appearance of their city,
which could certainly use it."
But objectivity isn't the answer either.
It may not distort Siberian realities,
but it does isolate them long
enough to be appraised...
and consequently distorts
them all the same.
What counts is the drive
and the variety.
A walk through the streets
of Yakutsk...
isn't going to make you
understand Siberia.
What you need might be an imaginary
newsreel shot all over Siberia.
I might screen it for you in the town's
spanking new movie theater.
And the commentary would be made up of
those Siberian expressions...
that are already pictures in themselves.
"The season of dying water" is winter.
"The ghost of the winter hare" is snow,
with its foolhardy flakes.
"The grey ox that drank all the
water in the valley" is the frost,
which leaves trapped angry
boats behind it.
My newsreel would begin with
these images of winter...
a long white night that
lasts half the year.
A weather balloon would take you high over
the Verkhoyansk mountains,
the coldest region on earth,
with a temperature of 92º below zero...
and a population of eight thousand.
You'd see huge caterpillars carved out
of pebbles by gold mining dredges.
You'd see silver birches that look
like owls' tracks in the snow.
And then, as if someone had gathered
up the forest in a giant sheaf,
trunk against trunk, and sheared
it off with cheese wire,
you'd see Yakutsk planting
its paving stones.
You'd see a topsy-turvy world in which
houses move to their tenants on sleds,
And hunters take live animals into
the forest and set them free.
A year from now the hunter of the streams
will kill the beaver he's fondling today.
A year ago the trapper of the
tundra was playing...
with the silver fox that he's going to snare.
There's not much time to be sentimental
over animals...
whose furs are a natural resource.
For centuries past, the
country's only one.
Actually there were others though.
Siberia has turned out to have been a poor man
sleeping on a mattress stuffed with gold.
The problem was how to get at the mattress.
And now for the Siberian version of
Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend:
Larissa Popugayeva is a parachute
jumping geologist...
who was dropped into the
middle of the taiga,
in the spring of 1954, to look
for a blue layer.
After four months spent enduring
the unendurable,
she made her strike,
and they wound up with diamonds.
The deposit is richer than
any in South Africa.
To look for gold they drown the land.
Before the dredges scoop up
the ore and carry it away,
a kind of firemen, dressed like
mantucky wavers
let fly at the soil with hoses.
The real firemen are
dressed like aviators.
Because when there's a fire in Siberia
it's most likely to be the forest,
that other great natural resource
that's burning up.
And when there's not enough
rain to put it out...
they make it rain firemen.
To go from the forest
to the factory,
to go to the market, to school,
or on a holiday,
Siberians always take an airplane.
With no competition from
trucks or trains,
these planes have lost all their glamour.
They're like women in a
world without men.
They're just flying buses.
Except that they set you down
in out of the way places...
where you're advised to dress like a bear
if you want to pass unnoticed.
And then I'd show you the Yakuts.
Now don't get the idea they're distant
cousins of Nanook of the North.
They've got their artists, and surgeons,
their writers and bards.
In very ancient times the wise Eley...
and the daughter of the mighty Omogoï...
joined in matrimony to produce
the first Yakut.
But most of all I'd show you
the spring festivals,
when the dancers whirl, the curdled
mare's milk flows freely,
and the old shamanic poems
are revived:
Approach, O stallion of the
steps and teach us,
Come forth magic bull of the
universe and answer,
O spirits of the sun, who live
on the seven southern hills,
O jealous mothers of light,
Let your three shadows
stand tall and straight,
And thou in the west
on thy mountaintop,
O Lord my father,
With thy dreadful strength,
thy powerful neck,
Come forth with me.
I'd show you the whirling dervishes
of the spring thaw,
and the routed armies of winter
retreating under insults,
while the whole pagan people
invent the resurrection.
I'd show you reindeer coming down to
meet the rising tide of warmth.
And further north, the last
days of winter,
when the reindeer shows
an athletic streak...
I'd forgotten to mention earlier.
And my imaginary newsreel
would end here,
with this Kentucky Derby in the
looking-glass world
- for which there are no losers -
everybody wins a prize.
The most treasured prize of all undoubtedly
being the return of summer,
and its companion: color.
Now we can go back to Yakutsk,
and there, in the ruthless light
of the wintry climate...
that has forged this country,
that has laid so many pitfalls and
landmines for its people,
we might better realize what a victory even
the simplest achievements represent:
houses protected from the cold,
schools, libraries,
and all the other things,
which they point out to us so proudly
we can't help smiling.
Yet, our irony may be more naive
than their enthusiasm.
Twenty years ago, Grigory
Savine is thinking,
I fought a bear right here where
we're building now.
Every Russian knows the story of the bear
that helped the peasant build his house.
In the end the bear turns out to be a
well-bred Stakhanovite bear,
who gives the whole village
a helping hand,
and who wipes his feet before
he goes into the isba.
The tradition must have died
out though,
since this is where I came across my
friend Ushatik again,
having a swim in the river.
On the outskirts of Yakutsk,
as we were coming back to town,
an interested audience was watching the
antics of Ushatik the bear.
He'd managed to slip his leash and
was demonstrating...
his anarchist tendencies with the
shifty quickness of a puppy.
For a moment it even looked
like he was going...
to get his paws on Boris Sergeivich's
motorcycle.
Had Ushatik been corrupted by the movies?
Was he going to ride away like the trained
bears in the Moscow circus?
But no, his greediness got the better
of his thirst for freedom...
a touching sight.
But let cynics be comforted:
Boris Sergeivich watches over Ushatik with
such fatherly concern
because he's thinking of the day not so far away
when he's going to eat him.
I'm writing you this letter from the
Land of Darkness.
That was the name Marco Polo gave it,
and that was the picture in the minds of
the first conquerors from Muscovy,
who left behind these wooden ostrogs,
like rooks standing on a chessboard
after the kings have died.
Schoolchildren learn how the
emperor of Russia
and the emperor of China fought over the
province of darkness.
Since neither of them knew
the other's language,
the final treaty was drawn up in Latin
by two Jesuit priests,
the only ones who could
understand it.
Christianity got very little out
of that transaction.
One more evil spirit in Siberian legends
named Jesus Christ...
is the only trace left by the interim
rule of the popes,
between the shamans and
the commissars.
From this point on, the work of today's builders...
runs parallel to the older themes
of Siberian mythology,
and the underground journey
of the black shaman,
the men and women who succeeded...
in making stone houses stand upright
on the Siberian soil...
have made that journey too,
and for the same reason.
I took the shamans journey down
one of the shafts...
at the Low Temperature Research
Institute.
Six Feet below the surface you
come to the ice layer,
and that frozen ground we've
mentioned already.
Beneath that are the caves.
I was expecting machinery, long tunnels,
and lunar landscapes -
but I wasn't expecting flowers.
Preserving flowers until springtime...
is merely an attractive sideline
for these technicians.
In their spare time they've invented
a Frigidaire for nostalgia.
But there is more to be gotten
out of this cold mine,
or rather this cold menagerie.
Here the enemy is under lock and key,
he can be studied, manipulated, and tested
to see how he reacts.
All this is done on grocer's scales in
subway corridors...
at a constant temperature of 26.6º
Apparatus that might have been borrowed
from a physics classroom
provides data on the resistance of ice
to stone and metal.
We see showcases full of frozen jewels
and earrings for a giantess.
We even see André Gide in person,
as well preserved as the flowers.
The walls and ceiling of the mine are
carved out of sand,
solidified by the freezing temperature,
which acts like cement.
But at the slightest touch
they crumble to dust.
Seen from close up, they are
nebulae of seashells -
not so long ago the ocean was here.
However it's the future that makes the low
temperature experts' heads spin.
They believe that man will find hospitality
beneath the surface of this hostile land.
Their laboratory experiments
are the working model...
of an underground universe straight
out of science fiction.
Like all Russians they've read Jules Verne,
and are getting ready for the journey
to the center of the Earth,
just as their colleagues, the astronauts...
are giving the kickoff from Earth to the Moon.
When we surfaced again, we were a
bit dizzy from the cold,
and from looking into the future.
We pictured to ourselves the Yakutsk soccer
team playing host at last...
to a team from Odessa,
or even Marseilles,
in an underground stadium with
electronic referees...
that go 'tilt' whenever the fans boo.
There'll no longer be a season for soccer
and a season for track,
but perpetual springtime for all things,
including the culture parks,
those playgrounds for adults which winter
also empties of their visitors.
Culture is what's left behind when
everyone has gone home.
We wandered through that
deserted freezing park.
We looked at the posters announcing
the last movies of the season.
Oddly enough the titles were familiar:
Fidelio, The Queen of Spades,
Don Quixote.
A little gypsy wind was
scraping our bones,
and in front of the library the
statue of Ordjonikidze,
bolted to its pedestal like Ulysses
lashed to his mast,
looked as surprised as we were to see a
strange visitor at the far end of the path:
a black horse with its legs hobbled.
Ordjonikidze had been deported to Yakutsk
before becoming its protector.
Had he also become the guardian
angel of escaped horses...
seeking refuge in this windswept
cathedral?
Like Mozart's Commendatore,
Ordjonikidze nodded at the horse and the
animal vanished into the woods.
Seeing us, he must have realized that he
was on the wrong set.
He probably reappeared instantly in a Yakutsk
legend a thousand years earlier.
Man's memory is incapable of retaining more
than one name in any given category -
which explains monogamy and advertising.
In North America the gold capital was Dawson,
in Siberia it was Aldan.
This settlement used to be
called 'Camp Invisible,'
after the little river that
runs through it.
When it became a town they
changed the name to Aldan...
because it sounded better.
The new name was taken from another river
which doesn't run through the town.
But you can't have everything.
Fretwork windows, curtains, and
rubber plants,
there's no doubt about it we're
in Russia alright.
But let a buckboard drive by, let the
band play a little gold music,
and you're in frontier America.
Siberia had its own gold rush,
on those same steamers with
the tall smokestacks...
that would one day bring Charlie Chaplin
home a millionaire,
in those same railway stations where the
trains always stop at high noon;
the same mirage worked its magic.
If you'd already struck it rich enough to buy
a ticket on the Trans-Siberian,
the first part of your journey
was relatively easy.
In fact it was downright luxurious.
The Trans-Siberian, with its
drawing rooms,
kitchens, bathrooms, pianos,
bedrooms and chapel,
was a kind of castle on wheels,
and it had two advantages
over most castles:
there were no stairs to climb,
and it went all the way across Siberia.
Up to this point the scenery has
been basically Russian,
but once you cross the Ienissei
the scene changes.
The uniformed engineers were just
beginning to regret Moscow,
when the American 49ers were
already exploring Arizona.
You expected to see Indians?
Well they were there too.
Indians?
Cowboys?
Rustlers?
Trappers?
Gunfights?
And romances.
While the Siberian gold rush never
mustered as many prospectors...
as its Yukon equivalent,
it did involve 15 nationalities,
2000 professions,
and an unknown number
of years in prison.
More remarkable is the fact
that until 1927,
ten years after the revolution,
the Soviet government had no control
over the Aldan district.
There were gunmen on the roads,
smugglers in the towns,
and gold dust would change pockets
whenever someone...
quick on the draw met someone quicker.
In short, you had all the ingredients
of a Western.
In those days knives between
the shoulder blades...
were more common than hammers and
sickles on the shirtsleeves.
As for women, they say there were
none at all in the beginning,
which is a sad thought,
But later there was only one,
sounds even worse.
But that woman was a Communist.
And it was she, one Judith against 4000
bearded Holophernes,
who saved the city.
Today under the watchful gazes of a
few surviving Holophernes,
the gold diggers have become
workers like any others.
But in memory of that woman who achieved
the triumph of right over might,
the gold in Aldan is guarded and handled
only by members of her sex.
After countless doors, keys,
armored plates and strong boxes,
we were finally going to see the gold.
We saw it.
Here it is.
Disappointing isn't it?
As I said before, there are two
ways of finding gold:
it's like catching a thief, you
can shadow him...
- in other words sink a mine shaft,
or you can throw out a dragnet -
in other words use a dredge.
But there are also the
rugged individualists.
They remind me of the old time
cross country bicycle racers,
before the sport became organized.
You'd see them wandering around
town at every halt...
with their bikes on their shoulders
looking for a hotel or a repair shop.
Similarly, but in their case deliberately,
the last gold diggers shun
organization and security.
Their technique is the same
as the dredge.
They use the old California sluice gate,
which deposits the gold in the
bottom of a gutter.
But the dredges bring up more gold in a day
than these men do in a year.
If they became workers they'd earn
more and live far better.
But they want the gold.
The Yakut princesses were buried wearing
solid gold rings set with tiny scraps of iron
- a far more precious metal in those days.
And when I jokingly asked a worker if he
wasn't tempted by the nuggets in his care...
he answered quite sincerely,
"What for? I don't need any false teeth."
These are two examples of the same
healthy indifference
before and after a short bout of fever.
But the lone prospectors have never
gotten over the fever.
And perhaps they never will.
Tolerated at times, outlawed at others,
they live in the wake of the dredges like
gleaners on the heels of harvesters.
Sometimes they're drafted
for menial work,
but most often they're left
to their own devices.
They may well be the only
Soviet citizens...
not to benefit from social security,
pensions, and free medical care.
There is no earthly reason
for them to go on.
Do they have some
higher motivation?
I'm not so sure.
There is scarcely more freedom
in their individualism...
than there is gold in the mud they sift.
However they've been handling
them both for so long now...
that at times they forget which
one they're looking for.
And perhaps in the last analysis they're
not prospecting for gold at all,
but for mud.
As we sailed down the Lena
again on our way back,
we didn't recognize her, the big lazy sister
of a few months ago...
had now become this black girl
studded with imitation jewels,
shimmering with sunlight that was
absent from the sky.
At nightfall, however, the Lena recovered
her magic powers.
We no longer thought of her merely
as a waterway,
a provider, a shepherdess for barges.
She was Lena the healer, the enchantress,
the cradle for monsters.
Kion Kiubei, the she devil
exorcised by the popes...
and despised by active
party members,
has finally found her true expression
on the stage.
And the gods, devils, and heroes
of Yakutsk,
whose presence we sensed lurking behind
everything that had thrilled us in Siberia,
lived again before our eyes
in Yakut opera,
side by side with the towering
shadow of Niurgun Bootor,
the legendary hero who overcame the forces
of nature to liberate mankind.
I am Tiuenia Mogol,
the young warrior,
Iuriun Volan has captured
my bride Tuyarima.
Her body lies in chains and the
old miser of the ice flow...
has her soul imprisoned
in a leather purse.
Yet I will set her free. Neither the wolf,
nor the otter,
neither the inquisitive fox
nor the impartial bear,
nor the luminous spider spinning her
web in the Northern sky shall stop me.
I will wave my spear at the
constellations...
and drive before me with my
whip the cowering snow.
The next morning, we came to
the Lena boulders.
The very spot where Niurgun Bootor
fought the devil.
And suddenly a chanced landing brought us
face to face with a magic larch tree,
on which the people hang ex-votos.
Thus, only a few miles away from
the economic planning office,
and apparently not endangering in any
way the construction of socialism,
men offer up humble objects
to an unknown god.
In the light of this tree Yakut opera
ceases to be mere folklore.
- I am Kiuius, the mother of Tuyarima.
My husband is rich, and I
have costly furs.
But Iuriun Volan has stolen
my dearest fox.
And since thou hast gone
from my side,
thy sharp teeth o fox, gnaw
endlessly at my heart.
Oh thou beloved,
O thou sweet wise snow,
O beloved face,
O tree of mourning,
Why were thou planted?
On the banks of the Lena, the heroes
gather for the quest.
Soruk Bollur, Aïyi Umsur, Aan Eskel,
these knights with names like swords,
are the Lancelots and the Galahads...
of an adventure that will take
them all the way to the pole.
Lacking a compass, they have Niurgun
Bootor's symbolic arrow,
to guide them like a star.
Today the Yakuts have other
stars to guide them.
When Sputnik added its imitation pearl
to the Northern constellations,
its coming had been expected
since the dawn of time.
All around us the Siberian earth
swarms with beckoning signs,
and we felt it was deeply symbolic that
the first living creatures...
sent into space were Siberian
dogs, the Laïkas.
Switching from sleds to rockets...
is the Siberian way of keeping
abreast of the times.
I am writing you this letter
from a distant land.
Her charred trees and
empty wastelands...
are as dear to me as her
rivers and flowers.
Her name is Siberia.
She lies somewhere between
the Middle Ages...
and the 21st century.
Between the earth and the moon,
between humiliation and happiness.
After that...
it's straight ahead.