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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Re: DBH on naive atheism,
There’s a place in Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion where he recalls being asked about the possibility that the visible world is a kind of synthetic reality instantiated within something (residing in a world inaccessible to us) analogous to a computer simulation. Dawkins admitted that he had no idea how one could disprove such an hypothesis, apparently without recognizing the irony that this is analogous to what historic theism affirms, that the Ground of the world’s being transcends the world. In this brief section, a couple of sentences long, he undermined the central premise of his entire book.
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With apologies to infernalists among the commentariat, my favorite (admittedly, also the only one I have read) writing of David Bentley Hart:
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/god-creation-and-evil.pdf
Thanks for the link, I’m breaking my brain on it right now.
I don’t really see the irony, since the proposition is formulated to be equally unfalsifiable and unprovable.
I’m okay with DBH’s hypothetical God.
It surely is inconsistent with any of the Gods written about in human history.
the DBH God surely has never related to human beings and there is no reason to think It ever will.
all Gods are the fictional inventions of superstitious ancient men that supposedly we will meet when we die.
the best evidence points to a certainty that we all will die and enter the nothingness of eternal death.
even if the God of DBH happens to be real and true.
no big deal.
I watched this movie a week ago, just by chance. I was particularly amused by the ironic contrast between the grim reality of what is shown and Comrade Sukhov’s politically correct commentary. And the at times rather absurd visuals of the flock of ladies being herded this way or that way.
AFAIK the film is supposed to happen in Central Asia, during the Basmachi uprising around 1923 or so.
Thanks for the correction, I don’t know where I got “East Russia” from.
I had always thought of God through the lens of the notion of equilibrium in game theory: not stupid ones like Prisoner’s Dilemma, but more broadly how an interaction of observable facts and beliefs that sustain a set of outcomes, which in turn generate the observable outcomes that sustain those outcomes. Sadly, no one really thought of Christian theology through a game theoretic lens: the only one out there that even tries something analogous is an execrable (imho) by Steven Brams which fits with Dawkins’ notion of God, sadly….
Will watch. The Leone movies were hugely popular in Europe and made Eastwood into a icon who was thereafter accosted by the Euro man on the street.
They also made him a star here whereas before he was a TV Western second banana.
I admit to never having heard of this film before. I must live a cloistered life indeed!
If it is half as much fun as the spaghetti westerns, it will be a well-used Sunday morning.
Stay safe, at 24 frames a second!
Enjoy!
I’ve heard this is the most popular of the various “Osterns”, and I found the desert landscapes quite compelling when I saw it a few years back. Another curious such film would be The Headless Horseman (Vsadnik bez golovy) (1973), whose story was set in nineteenth-century Texas, though it was filmed in Crimea with supporting actors from Cuba.
Regarding Sergio Leone, many people tend to dismiss his films as “spaghetti Westerns”, but Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) is unquestionably a very powerful and cinematically stunning work — perhaps Henry Fonda’s most chilling role to boot.
If I were theistic, I think that the original deists were probably on to something with their worldview. I.e. why would a hypothetical creator of the universe care what some simple organisms on one of a near infinite number of planets like Earth think or do with their lives? Basically the deists felt that god takes no interest in peoples’ daily activities and does not notice or answer prayers but would probably be more akin to a distant and impersonal force far removed from our perception of things.
He might care because he created that near infinity of worlds and lives. In one of his books, Hart takes the deists to task for their lack of understanding of the theological arguments for God’s existence. Hart argues, drawing from Aristotle I believe, that God is a logical necessity.
The relativistic nature of the universe has been well explored for over 100 years. Light = time = space. What is unknown is how it comes to be. The most currently plausible hypothesis are some version of what we experience is a projection or eventuation of some more fundamental reality possibly involving something we can refer to as other dimensions. Since humanity of subhumanity has developed enough frontal lobe to ask the question, we have tried to wrap our piss poor wet wear around the wonder of existence. The result has been the evolution of religion and the religion of science. As Lao Tzu wrote long ago, language fails and falls far short of characterizing reality. The language of science, math, is now in first place as a tortured attempt to do the same.
My own piss poor wet wear has had a glimpse and it was strictly experiential and can only be approached in memory. I was thinking of my own revelatory experience upon reading about Nietzsche’s here:
https://aeon.co/essays/the-mysticism-of-nietzsches-doctrine-of-the-eternal-return
The problem with what many call religious experience is that one normally comes back to earth. The fall back into the labyrinth of self and all its baggage. Nietzsche’s seems especially goofy but any revelatory experience that is rendered after the fact is just pretty empty words. So my own silly attempt is about the common perception of time as history. People see time as composite history. I see time as the immediate. That the eternal is now and the universe (history) is a pretty big flywheel. Whether that flywheel anchors time, or time being a knock on effect of a more fundamental reality, it could conceivably just wink out. I don’t know and don’t really care. My own small part in time is I channel energy and, by the laws of conservation, that is part of the historical flywheel (karma).
Anyway, if time is now and creation is continuous, blaming it on a creator falls so far short of an explanation that worshiping it with religious tropes instead of wonderment and curiosity seem like a waste of the experience.
What you describe sounds very much like the ancient Greeks who had two words for time, Χρονος (Chronos) as in old man Father Time, understood as linear time, and καιρός (kairos) which I would describe as a timeless moment, or if you prefer, timeless time. Paradoxical of course. Infinite dwells in the finite. Eternity intersects with temporality. I think it is difficult for westerners to understand these different conceptions of time as our cultural psychology proceeds from Latin rather than Greek. And Latin has only one word for time, tempus, which is linear time or progression of time, i.e. history. The Latin word aevum is not at all an equivalent of καιρός and still has a sense of time as progression.
In my opinion, having a sense of timeless time as opposed to linear time is healthy. It’s what allows us not to comprehend, but at least apprehend that which is infinite.
JP, both well said and well lived
This Hart fellow sounds like he’s made a career out of inserting himself into questions nobody asked.
Oh, I think that lots of people have questions about the claims of the New Atheists…
Hart is very highly regarded in parts of the world-wide christian “movement.” More among Orthodox (perhaps also Catholics, though I have no evidence of this), much less among US evangelicals due to his universalism.
I have the impression that he is a superb writer. He’s a tight thinker, as the above-linked reflection on some of the implications for soteriology of the doctrine Creatio Ex Nihilo indicates.
I believe that his book The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami is highly regarded.
His argumentation is both dense and subtle. I’ve read, and re-read, a number of his books. It’s like power lifting for the brain. I must admit I struggle with many of the concepts. He is also unafraid to use 5$ words. Some are critical of this.
Yes, but reducing atheists’ stance to caricature is more of the same. Most atheists I know reject the presumed patriarchal intelligence that most western Christians take for God. Or marshall as Ultimate Infallibable Uncontradictable Decider to manipulate the masses. Mr. Hart and anyone the heck else–hell else, more importantly–who cares to can spend time delving into whether there’s some intelligence behind or within creation; I can say emphatically that that doesn’t interest me. I’m with Kant that some spiritual and moral basis has to underlie our inquiry–for me that’s a belief in humanity and nature whose basic well-being I seek (as an interdisciplinary ecologist) to nurture. But Marx was right (Einstein understood this): it’s hard enough to wrap our arms around material reality, and that’s quite wondrous enough. Therefore, as Marx told the Young Hegelians, my philosophy begins on the ground. Start somewhere in the sky, you have a VERY hard time agreeing on first principles, let alone locating your selves.
As the magnet on my fridge says: ‘It’s your hell; you burn in it.’ I’m content with calling myself an atheist out of antagonism to THAT kind of religion, and we’d be lying–Mr. Hart would be lying–if he/we didn’t admit that that’s the dominant strain, the “God” that has so reductively and uncreatively and boringly has been pushed on us, on the poor and–as Marx saw, with more tenderness than given credit for–as opiate for lo these many. I get that church is cheap entertainment and SOME sense of the collective for lots of people in lots of culturally arid places, chance to dress up and be social. I’ll spend my Sundays as my Ethical Culture parents did, in rest, restoration, reading (when possible), pleasurable discourse with nature and friends.
I don’t think he’s reducing the arguments of all atheists to caricature, merely the ignorant New Atheists. He actually has a lot of respect for more rigorous atheists; he mentioned a guy named Mackie or Mackey as one of them in one of his books.
Your stance on how interesting the possible source of everything that exists is not uncommon in the atheist discourse and one that puzzles me. I think it’s a dodge to avoid the possibility of encountering ideas that challenge their assumptions. Good arguments exist for God’s existence, not unanswerable according to some, but compelling and worthy of consideration.
Hart is -deeply- critical of fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible, and the holy texts of other religions as well. He has gone far as to write a new interpretation of the New Testament, one that aligns with the thinking of the early Christian thinkers. He also reveals how the concepts of damnation and original sin were later developments in theology, not held by the earliest thinkers.
Yeah, I’m with Mr. Kirby below–Mr. Hart can believe in fairies and sprites all he likes; just don’t inflict it. If we start from first material principles and go from there, I can work with him. Like Einstein, I think that the universe and our world are quite wondrous enough.
I’m also with Mr. Kirby in thinking that this is an inapposite–not ultimately terribly rigorous–insertion here. But the internet is capacious, even as traffic is increasingly controlled; please have some 1s and 0s!
I suspect that Walter Kaufmann was right when he suggested that there really is no logically clear and well-defined proposition that theists affirm and atheists deny.
Aren’t “new atheists” just the same as “old atheists” but making use of what science has provided in terms of reaching global audiences via the Internet and Radio to become more prominent and well known, along with more societal secularism meaning it is safer to be more vocal as atheists?
Still Mr Hart believes in fairies and mermaids, and unless he means in an allegorical sense, is he really worthy of being featured on this site?
Sure he can make arguments and talk all day long about what his version of God is, and how it is not what current mainstream religions are pushing, but that is just his interpretation, and has no more value than anyone else’s simply because he says so. No point saying he has written lots of books. So did L Ron Hubbard.
The absolute massive problem any religious person claiming knowledge about God has is that they cannot objectively get anyone else to agree exactly with their version. This is in contrast to science, where anyone can conduct the same experiment and get the same answer, or more importantly anyone can disprove any idea by objective demonstration.
At best, IMO, Mr Hart can argue about why there is something rather than nothing, and personally decide to use God as an explanation. Does that really help though? Does it matter? Is that a sensible idea of God? Or is he just being hubristic and somewhat lacking in imagination?
The name “New Atheists” is the common term used. I only used it to indicate a certain group of not very well informed atheists. I’m not responsible for the logic of it. ;)
His interpretation of God is not uniquely his. It is shared by countless thinkers before him, from many traditions. He bases his argument on the notion of contingency, whose earliest known proponent that I’m aware of was Aristotle.
The lack of agreement about the qualities of God is not a “massive problem”. It just makes sense. Finite minds engaging with the infinite? No wonder there are different takes. God is not the material world, constrained by time and causation. You confuse things when you contrast these ideas with science.
These matters are important, they matter, if one is engaged in an honest quest to understand reality. Science cannot provide us the answers to the most fundamental questions of existence. As for the mermaids and fairies, I’ve heard a bit of this but not
much. I bet he has a good argument for what he believes, literally or not.
White Sun is also quite a nice restaurant in Kostroma on the Volga river. The food and service are superb, and prices quite reasonable given the high quality. I recommend it the next time you’re in the area. The decor includes pivotal scenes from the movie. When we first ate there I hadn’t seen the movie yet so I had to track it down.
One of my favorite movie scenes is when he’s dreaming of a wife who would do all the tasks around the house–and it’s quite a voluminous list! This is actually a sly and intelligent reference to male/female roles in the context of Soviet equality and it’s application to traditional ethnic groups. Soviet cinema has a lot of subtle references like that. The films can be enjoyed on the surface, or discussed in depth. Great pick, thanks!
My pleasure!
Yes, I enjoyed it very much.
My thanks, again, Semper Loquitur, for your film recommendations. I enjoyed White Sun of the Desert very much — a movie that would never have come to my attention w/o your contributions to NakedCapitalism. Best regards.