Day: July 22, 2018

Alexey Pehov, Elena Bychkova, Natalya Turchaninova “Kindrat”

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I really love Alexey Pehov’s work. For me, he’s already become a kind of personal brand — I buy any new book of his as soon as it comes out, even if I don’t plan on reading it right away. My wife and I have different opinions on which of his books is the best. As for his collaborations with Elena Bychkova and Natalya Turchaninova, I had only read a few novellas and stories before, and over ten years ago, I started the vampire series Kindrat.

I say “started” because, at the time, only the first volume had been published. I read it, but it seemed weaker to me than Alexey’s other solo works (yes, I know they’re not exactly solo). So, for many years, the books from that series were left on the shelf.

But recently, I decided to give the series a second chance, especially since the topic of vampires has always interested me. Since I have a peculiar memory for books, I began by re-reading the first volume. Interestingly, my feelings about it remained exactly the same after ten years. But now I didn’t have to wait for the second volume to be released, so I started reading it right away. And you know what? It worked. The pacing of the narrative changed dramatically, the “annoying” moments from the first book disappeared… and in the end, I read the entire series with great pleasure.

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Edward Ross “Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film”

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How badly I wanted to read this book! And how great my disappointment turned out to be! It’s much easier to list what’s wrong with this book than to find anything good about it.

In Russian the book is titled How Film Works: Theory and History of Cinema and was marketed as “an extensive study presented as a stylish and engaging comic.” But contrary to the title and description, it’s not about how cinema works at all. Frankly, the translators share some of the blame here, as the original title is Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film, which didn’t claim to be about how cinema works, nor about theory or history.

So what is it actually about? If I were to sum it up briefly, I’d say this: it’s a collection of completely unrelated paragraphs that try to appear as a scholarly article with deep insights. More often than not, these “insights” come from other people, whom the author frequently quotes throughout the book. This is criticism in its worst form, where the writer attempts to explain what the filmmaker intended to convey, or what they were thinking. But reality shows that often the filmmaker wasn’t thinking about anything of the sort (there’s a great example with the horse in the film Afonya, which Georgiy Daneliya wrote about in his memoirs).

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