Greetings gentle readers and welcome to another installment of the Sunday Morning Move. Today it’s a “Red Western”, White Sun of the Desert:
and next week’s film, Iphigenia:
Reviews of White Sun of the Desert:
Genregrinder says:
I’m barely familiar with the subgenre myself, mostly due to lack of availability and the fact that learning all I can about European westerns is already a substantial commitment. Still, even a neophyte like myself knows the reputation of Vladimir Motyl’s quintessential ostern, White Sun of the Desert (1970). This bone-dry, sometimes absurdist, often dramatic send-up of Russian history that borrows concepts, archetypes, and visual language from Hollywood westerns, like Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) and Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), and Italian westerns, like Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Italian: Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 1966) and Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966).
Tonally, White Sun of the Desert evokes the Italian comedy westerns of the same period, though it emphasizes irony over obnoxiously cartoonish contrivances and Benny Hill-style slapstick. Co-writers Valentin Yezhov & Rustam Ibragimbekov aren’t afraid to get a little silly, despite the generally grim subject matter. The action is minimal – Motyl doesn’t pay homage to Sam Peckinpah or the other hyperviolent westerns coming out of America around that time – but well executed with a nice sense of geography. Like Leone, he’s more interested in the setup than the execution.
McBastard’s Mausoleum says:
WHITE SUN OF THE DESERT (BELOE SOLNTSE PUSTYNI) – 1970, Mosfilm, 84 min. “Have you been here long?” quips laconic, seemingly un-killable Red Army soldier Fyodor to a man he’s just discovered buried up to the neck in the middle of the desert. Director Vladimir Motyl’s surreal action classic is arguably the most entertaining and beloved of the Soviet “Osterns” inspired by films like STAGECOACH, HIGH NOON and 1960s Spaghetti Westerns (and certainly by Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO as well.) Set during the Russian Civil War, the story follows Fyodor (Anatoliy Kuznetsov) tramping across the endless sands of Turkmenistan and desperate to get back home to his wife — when he’s diverted into guarding a harem of Muslim women caught in a struggle between a renegade Red Army unit and local Basmachi guerillas led by Abdullah (Kakhi Kavsadze). Filled with endlessly-quotable dialogue and song lyrics — “A knife is good for he who has it — and it’s bad for he who doesn’t at the right moment” and “No luck in dying, I’ll have luck in love” are two gems –, WHITE SUN is as visually striking as Leone’s A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, with its resourceful hero waging a one-man battle against the bandit chieftain and his army. (It also has a surprisingly feminist theme with Fyodor encouraging the niqab-wearing women to take control of their destinies: “Comrade women, the revolution has set you free!” he exhorts them.) The best comparison, though, may be to Georgiy Daneliya’s sci-fi masterpiece KIN-DZA-DZA! (also released by Deaf Crocodile): both films are about Everyman Russians trapped in surreal alien desert landscapes, and rather than freaking out, responding in the most matter-of-fact ways to whatever strange misfortunes they encounter. One of the most popular Soviet films ever made, WHITE SUN has been beautifully restored by Mosfilm for its first-ever U.S. Blu-ray release through Deaf Crocodile, in association with Seagull Films. In Russian with English subtitles.
My take: A fun romp and a twist on the Western. There is some silliness but it’s minimal and not too intrusive like some of the Italian Spaghetti Westerns. The cinematography is striking as are the props. The story is compact as a Western’s should be. There isn’t a ton of action but the film is still satisfying. I’m awarding it ⭐. It’s worth watching both in it’s own right and as an exotic example of the Western genre, but only once.
Director: Vladimir Motyl
Writers: Valentin Yezhov, Rustam Ibragimbekov
Plot (Spoilers!): Fyodor Sukhov has been away from his home for a long time. He is a Red Army soldier from the West of Russia but has been fighting in Eastern Russia. He longs for his wife and his farm.
But he won’t get to return right away. Sukhov finds himself the ward of a harem abandoned by a blood-thirsty bandit. He cannot turn away in good conscience and seeks to find the women a new home. But the bandits have returned.
After a wild series of adventures, the bandits are destroyed. Sadly, so are most of Sukhov’s allies. He can finally begin to make his way home.
***Bonus: David Bentley Hart: What Atheism Has Never Actually Challenged
What if atheism’s most celebrated arguments — Dawkins on complexity, Hitchens on morality, Harris on science — were never aimed at God at all, but at a caricature so philosophically crude that no serious theologian in history would recognise it? That is the central provocation of one of the most intellectually formidable theologians alive today.In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka sits down with David Bentley Hart — Eastern Orthodox philosopher-theologian, author of over 1,000 essays and 24 books, winner of the Michael Ramsey Prize in Theology awarded by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the man whom The Guardian called the author of “the one theology book all atheists really should read” (The Experience of God, Yale University Press, 2013).Hart has spent decades making a single, devastating argument: the God that New Atheism attacks — a kind of invisible super-being lurking within the cosmos — is not the God of classical theism at all. The classical theistic conception of God is not some discrete super-being sitting on the same ontological level with contingent reality, but the infinite fullness of being, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, from whom all things come and upon whom all things depend for every moment of their existence. To argue against Richard Dawkins’s “Boeing 747” deity is not to argue against the God of Aquinas, Augustine, Ibn Sina, Maimonides, or Shankara. It is to argue against a straw man.
Bonus bonus: David Bentley Hart on Sean Carroll
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