#Katia Golubeva

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Three Days (1991), dir. Šarūnas Bartas

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'The Intruder' – a sensual odyssey on Criterion Channel

Claire Denis’s vivid and visceral The Intruder (France, 2005) stars Michel Subor as Louis Trebor, a grizzled old lone wolf who has left the herd for a solitary existence in the Northern wilderness. Or so it seems from the first images, wandering through the wilds under his hard, tight face etched with years and mane of white hair, leading a pack of dogs. Louis may be a Russian spy, he certainly…

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The Intruder

directed by Claire Denis, 2004

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Yekatarina Golubeva in Few of Us, Sharunas Bartas (1996)

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The Truth About Stalin’s Prison Camps            

Mar 05,2020   Video by Coda Story: Generation Gulag       

Vera Golubeva spent more than six years in one of Joseph Stalin’s gulag camps. Her crime? “To this day, I still don’t know,” she says.

In a new documentary from Coda Story, Golubeva remembers the excruciating details of her imprisonment. When she was arrested, along with her father, mother, and sister, Golubeva was taken to KGB headquarters and tortured. She was eight months pregnant. “I felt as if they were burying me alive,” she says in the film. Shortly before being transferred to a labor camp, Golubeva gave birth to a baby boy, who died just days later while in the care of KGB agents. “It was the worst cruelty,” she says.

From 1918 to 1987, Soviet Russia operated a network of hundreds of prison camps that held up to 10,000 people each. When Stalin launched his infamous purges in 1936, millions of so-called political prisoners were arrested and transported to the gulags without trial. The first wave of prisoners were military and government officials; later, ordinary citizens—especially intellectuals, doctors, writers, artists, and scientists—were arrested ex nihilo. At the camps, many prisoners were executed or died from overwork and malnutrition. The death rate often hovered around 5 percent, although in years of widespread famine, the mortality rate could be as high as 25 percent. Historians estimate that as part of the gulag, Soviet authorities imprisoned or executed about 25 million people.

“That sum is unfathomable,” Katia Patin, who produced the film about Golubeva, told me. Golubeva’s story is part of a powerful oral-history series called Generation Gulag, which Coda Story created to better understand the gulag experience. “We made a point of not relying on numbers to tell the story of the gulag,” Patin said. “Instead, we focused on individual stories as a way of capturing the gulag’s massive scale, as well as the ripple effect set in motion when the Soviet machine of repression bore down on a single person.”

Now is a more important time than ever to examine this dark period of Russia’s history. In a poll conducted in 2019, 70 percent of Russians said they approved of Stalin’s role in history—a record high. And nearly half of young Russians said they had never heard of the Stalin-era purges, known as the Great Terror. In Russian school textbooks, the gulag is either glossed over or mentioned as a footnote.

“Russia has misrepresented its crimes against humanity by refusing to address them,” Patin said. “It’s incredible to think that not a single person was ever held responsible for running the gulag.”

In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Stalin has been rehabilitated as a figure credited with the U.S.S.R.’s victory in World War II—a narrative that leaves little room for examining his role in the gulag, Patin said. The Kremlin has warned that “excessive demonization” of Stalin is, in fact, an “attack on the Soviet Union and Russia,” and Putin has even gone so far as to praise Stalin as an “effective manager.” In 2015, Putin forced museums to remove evidence of Stalin’s crimes. (This state-sanctioned historical negationism has also included the myth that the gulag created industrial success in Russia. In fact, it was an economic disaster, as output almost never compensated for the cost of running the camp system.)

On March 5, the anniversary of Stalin’s death, people across Russia gather to commemorate the millions of people who suffered under his rule. “You can say that gulag survivors have successfully reclaimed the anniversary,” Patin said, “but each year, a crowd also gathers outside the Kremlin walls, where Stalin used to be buried, with flowers and portraits of the leader.” Statues celebrating Stalin have recently been erected in Russian cities. On March 5, people leave flowers by them too.

“There are two types of history in Russia: the history that belongs to the state, and history that belongs to families,” Patin said.

Putin may promulgate a glorified version of Stalin to promote patriotism, but ultimately, Golubeva gets the last word.

“The KGB was committing open crimes against humanity,” she says in the film. “It’s my firm belief that only people with a traitor’s heart went to work for the KGB.”

[theinsatiables]

боже мой...

My first sight of Yekaterina Golubeva was in Claire Denis’ J’ai pas sommeil (I Can’t Sleep, 1994). The film opens with the bracing image of her driving her beat-up car into Paris, cigarette held at a neat downward angle from her mouth, holding a stare of concentrated insolence. She played a young Lithuanian girl barely able to speak French who’s drawn to the city by the promise of work from a theatre director who had once seduced her.

In fact her story is almost a sideline to that of a series of murders of old ladies committed by a gang of gay men, all based on a real incident. But Golubeva’s defiant attitude and arresting looks (she wears overlarge men’s jackets with great style) created a thrilling screen presence. Particularly memorable were scenes in which she uncontrollably laughs out loud in a porno cinema, and in the midst of heavy traffic determinedly bashes the car in front being driven by the unresponsive director. Her resilience carries her through, but then as her eccentric aunt tells her, “When you don’t know how to do anything, beauty can be a real help.”

Golubeva (who usually appeared on credits as Katerina or Katia) was in fact born in St Petersburg when it was still Leningrad, and had come to attention through the films made by her husband, the Lithuanian Sharunas Bartas. First appearing in Three Days (1991), she plays one of a quartet of lost youths trying to find their way in the broken down city of Kalingrad. Bartas belongs to the minimalist, not to say miserabilist, school of filmmaking of whom the high priest is Béla Tarr. But his reliance on long takes allows the audience an intimate view of Golubeva’s extraordinary looks, her doe eyes and fleshy lips placing her somewhere between a Baltic Nastassja Kinski and a Balthus model. Seeing this film, maverick French filmmaker Leos Carax declared himself in love, switched muses from Juliette Binoche and cast Golubeva in the central female role in his ambitious and extravagant Hermann Melville adaptation, (1999).

Pola X dealt with a young author (Guillaume Depardieu) who abandons his exquisite country-chateau lifestyle to follow a mysterious, dowdily dressed young woman who claims to be his forgotten half-sister (Golubeva) into a forbidding Paris for a life in the gutter. Golubeva’s heavy accent and poverty-row attire are used to underline her presence as a symbol of suffering and the ravages of war, following in line the way she appeared in Bartas’s films. She also took part in a very explicit sex scene, played out in semi-darkness.

Her fearless attitude to self-exposure was again evident in Bruno Dumont’s misfire of a road movie Twenty Nine Palms (2005), in which she played one half of an ill-matched couple driving through the Californian desert on a journey into appalling violence. Dumont has said he cast Golubeva because she was so much the character, who in his eyes was a wildly temperamental young woman with a slight grasp of French and even less of English, and whose mood swings made her the girlfriend from hell. While gallantly performing scenes of highly vocal sex, nevertheless she seemed perhaps to be revealing how unhappy she was as a foreign actress playing out the fantasies of very singular French male directors.

Claire Denis cast Golubeva again in The Intruder (2005), as the mysterious woman who facilitates the black-market heart transplant of the film’s central character. Once more she was smoking cigarettes meaningfully and remaining apart from everyone else, but at least Denis allowed her to express humour and illuminated her beauty in a gentler fashion.

However, her fate was usually to be asked to perform roles that played more on her tortured, mournful side. From what little is known publicly of Golubeva’s private life, her move to Paris was never fully resolved. She had three children (the last of whom is being raised by Carax), and her death, which is rumoured to have been by her own hand, came only at the age of 44. But like a latter-day Louise Brooks, her iconic image will forever remain alive with us on the screen.

-David Thompson

[elcineasta]

L'intrus (The Intruder) | dir. Claire Denis (2004)

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