Notes on Kira Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome
Asthenic Syndrome is an anti-political film. By anti-political I do not mean that nothing is opposed, I mean that the opposition is not combative, as it not only succumbs to weakness but affirms it. The condition cannot truly be moralized as righteousness is a posture of strength.
Oppositional politics in this film has died along with the official politics that affirmed the triumph of the socialist will in the context of the old battles to defeat injustice. This 1990 Soviet film is not a heroic image of anti-Stalinist protests against tyranny that so thrilled American admirers of the Prague Spring and Polish Solidarity. It is something else. No flags, banners and signs, or barricades. Indeed, no enthusiasm.
The film was correctly seen as expressing some ‘further’ development of the theme of social alienation that had given us so many classics of European postwar cinema. It is more hopeless, certainly leaving no room for a heroic posture of affirming what Beckett called “worsening” in some ode to joy, and there are many, that properly accounts for it. Nobly suffers and dies the tragic figure we admire. Not here. And that makes it a much truer picture of our world.
This is a key film of the time whose significance reaches beyond the Soviet and Eastern European context, for the simple and obivous reason that what is being opposed is everywhere. It has been widely recognized for some time not only that there is a single global capitalism that it is is oppressive and destructive, but that it has no clear alternative, though its its increasingly authoritarian versions may well appeal, as classical fascism (and at least some forms of Marxism) did, to oppositional postures and stances, with their enthusiasms. So what is to be done?
Social criticism persists as a negativity that is expressed not merely as critique but as resistance, because the fact that there is nothing to be done hurts and the people who feel this are not silent but obnoxious. The film itself resists dismissing this resistance; if these were psychological cases, they would be in Soviet hospitals, not unlike ours. What happens here is that things are falling apart. That’s our syndrome.
The subversive behavior of classroom delinquents? You could turn that idea into a splendid thesis (and become one of the hopelessly disenchanted yourself when you fail to get a post with tenure, as most academics today so fail). It might sound promising as well as cute, to some audience. Yawn.
Oh dysphoria, oh ennui, oh shit! Today for every worker who could enjoy a barricade, a hundred workers say this sucks and resign themselves to desperation. This film for a banner then if only as if in lieu of one. It describes a way of being in the shit that resonated easily enough with Soviet viewers for whom disenchatment was rife (and not or not only because Stalinism was criminally ‘evil’, it also was annoying in the less crusade-worthy way of the working classes everywhere, and more in America in recent years than when this film was made (and seen in some university theaters like Berkeley’s where I first did). This seems somehow further rotted than the disenchantment of the beatniks and their successors in American pop culture, though minus the media celebrations, it is also more of that.
The Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi thinks something like this condition is where it’s at today, and the truth if not happiness of this is that living well is also dying well, and in the long process of dying that is irreducible to profitably managed identifiable conditions, as the mind drifts from order back into chaos, the resultant sensitivity to the visible chaos/order boundary in conditions of marked precarity not only encourages much violence but also renders the condition a thinker’s friend. The world is dying under capitalist command, and there is no clear image possible of what can be done. Berardi is hopeful of an emergent alternative that will have a slower tempo. But while that’s one form of a Beckettian “fail better,” this is another.
History is always about both the time referenced and that addressed. America (not to mention Muratova’s Ukraine) in 2025 resembles Soviet Odessa in 1990 as it also differs. Certainly, there, here, and everywhere, it’s worse. So it is appropriate I end with this. The sharpest recent lyric comment on this I know is Leonard Cohen’s last song, “You want it darker,” which expresses the thought not only of a dying man but about a visibly darkening world, one of enthusiasm-extinguishing in the drudgery of subjected activity inspiring transgressive hopes that now more often seem only deadly. This song’s implied hope is that while the extinction of a flame darkens the world, not all destruction is total; tomorrow, if not for me, for you, or some one (if there is or will be anyone there), who knows? A brighter future is possible: that’s the hope, the very idea of hope, and now it’s more doubtful and dim. There is a boredom you can die from, and despair of the kind that has driven so many Americans to death by heroin, suicidal mass killings, or adulating new demagogic monsters, including ones who market the mask of their proudly avowed depravity. Now, of course, and of causes larger than the figures readily available to take the blame, accompanying all that is once again the rush to warfare, marketed as targeting evil agents but effectuated by piling up corpses. The active resistance to genocide sometimes evokes the willed embrace of refusal in futility that must remind us of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters (or film history’s evocation of the parallel events set to evocations of Dante’s Inferno in Wajda’s Kanal, a precursor of Muratova’s along with Ashes and Diamonds, which effectuates the movement into despair of someone who can still clings to heroism (anti-Nazi, anti-Soviet, or just theatrical) winding up on a trash heap (references there being recent and contemporary history but also confrontations with the state worthy of Chaplin and Kafka). Many others come to mind, like Angelopoulos’s The Beekeeper (a man who after the end of traditional life (his daughter’s marriage) can’t deal with the modern world, including its insouciant youth). Those are narratively representable historical crises of a traditional mode of life out of joint, which means positing some idea of modernity as solution. Now the social crisis is deeper, no remedy in sight. We remember, too, when alienation still had something like a musical feel, so to speak, that you could enjoy, as in Antonioni, whose world is not that far beyond redemption. Akerman is closer, sometimes, but not even her films are more cutting than Muratova here. The Aesthenic Syndrome feels like the sound of a song on a dying record player that turns the melody into a machinic drone like a cry of a dying animal. As in America from the beats to grunge music and beyond, trash heaps were wonderful sociological metaphors in 1957, they were in 1990, and they are today, as, even and especially within the bounds of social criticism, the infernal is said in many ways. Fail worse, describe it better. Thanks to the late Ms. Muratova for making me hurt, for thinking is like laughter in that nothing calls for it more than, to cite Beckett again, unhappiness. This is good shit.