The story of Aleksei Balabanov’s unfinished film The American

Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema ISSN: 1750-3132 (Print) 1750-3140 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrsc20 The story of Aleksei Balabanov’s unfinished film The American Frederick H. White To cite this article: Frederick H. White (2019): The story of Aleksei Balabanov’s unfinished film The�American, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, DOI: 10.1080/17503132.2019.1645322 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2019.1645322 Published online: 14 Aug 2019. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrsc20 STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2019.1645322 ARTICLE The story of Aleksei Balabanov’s unfinished film The American Frederick H. White Department of Integrated Studies, Utah Valley University, Orem, UT, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article examines Aleksei Balabanov’s unfinished film The American and the various accompanying texts that contribute to our understanding of its place in the filmmaker’s biography. A published script, a court case, unreleased film footage and the memories of participants exist as interpretations of this unrealised project. The American was a contributing factor to the acknowledged demarcation that divides Balabanov’s life and oeuvre into two distinct phases. Given Balabanov’s enduring popularity, it is also germane to discuss the afterlife of The American, as a completed version might add to the filmmaker’s cinematic legacy. The accumulated texts that accompany this unrealised project must also be acknowledged when discussing Balabanov’s other incomplete projects. In so doing, one gains perspective on the filmmaker’s present, and potentially his future, biography as Balabanov’s posthumous legacy remains fluid six years after his death. Aleksei Balabanov; The American; unfinished film; Michael Biehn; CTB film studio I cannot say if it was so, right up until the end, but it seems to me that Lesha loved this script. And he wanted the film to be made. He was ready to give it [or] sell it to someone who would make it. I do not know how it was resolved. The conversation about this script arose several times over the years. It was published in the collection of Lesha’s scripts. (Tat’iana Kuz’micheva on Aleksei Balabanov’s unfinished film The American)1 In 2012, shortly before the domestic release of Aleksei Balabanov’s last film Me Too (Ia tozhe khochu), the filmmaker was asked about his future projects in an interview published in Ogonek. Surprisingly, Balabanov answered that he would like to return to a past, uncompleted project and even was considering the former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson as the lead character for his re-boot of the film The American (Amerikanets) (Suranova 2012). Unfortunately, Balabanov died the following year of a heart attack, never having realised this project. When asked in 2014 about Balabanov’s proposed return to The American, Sergei Sel’ianov, good friend and producer of Balabanov’s films, remembered that in very few instances had Balabanov sustained an interest in an unrealised project. However, in this case, Balabanov had watched a television program on Mike Tyson and this had sparked his interest. Sel’ianov remembered: Lesha liked working with untrained actors, and Tyson had participated in some Broadway show: he is an interesting character – flamboyant, brutal, big, unusual . . . Alesha always liked radical, CONTACT Frederick H. White University, Orem, UT, USA [email protected] © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Department of Integrated Studies, Utah Valley 2 F. H. WHITE unusual characters. And this gave the project some originality. ‘And come on, maybe we’ll think about some other American artist?’ – there is something tiresome in this: we had already gone down that road – and unsuccessfully. But this ‘side approach’ seemed to him original and interesting. We talked about this for a while, discussed it, but this decision was not a decision. It was an idea, a thought, a ‘maybe’ (Sel’ianov in Uait 2016, 225). With the untimely death of Balabanov in 2013, what significance might we ascribe to this unfinished project? The short answer is: quite a lot. Balabanov’s The American is significant because it marks a substantial disruption in the filmmaker’s life and career. Revisiting this unfinished film project allows us to examine the interruption evident in Balabanov’s creative process and cinematic vocabulary. It also illuminates a little known, but significant moment in his personal biography. In Balabanov’s first attempt in 2003 at making this film, actors were cast and several scenes were shot on location. However, as a result of conflict with the lead American actor, Michael Biehn,2 and a subsequent trial, production halted. By prematurely ending this film project, Balabanov’s established rhythm of releasing on average one film per year was interrupted and created a significant disruption in the logical networks of meaning that would have interconnected Balabanov’s films made prior to and after The American. It also contributed to the successive personal tragedies that negatively impacted the filmmaker’s life at the beginning of the 2000s. This article offers The American as a demarcation between two distinct phases within Balabanov’s oeuvre, while also interrogating the potential afterlife of this unrealised project. Early in his career as a filmmaker Balabanov adapted works by Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka – Happy Days (Schastlivye dni, 1991) and The Castle (Zamok, 1994) respectively. In 1997, Balabanov enjoyed his first major success with the action film Brother (Brat). Responding to the disintegration of post-Soviet society into lawlessness, Balabanov provided audiences with a bandit hero. The following year, Balabanov offered the dark and troubled film Of Freaks and Men (Pro urodov i liudei, 1998) about fin-de-si ècle Russian pornographers who preyed on the suffering of others for their own profits. Returning to his bandit hero in 2000, Balabanov scored another popular hit with Brother 2 (Brat 2), in which Danila Bagrov (played by Sergei Bodrov Jr.) went to America to exact revenge for the murder of his friend. At this point, Balabanov was recognised as one of the leading post-Soviet filmmakers whose uncompromising style was popular with Russian audiences. Yet, ostensibly at the height of Balabanov’s popularity, tragedy struck with the death of his lead actress Tuyaara Svinoboeva, causing Balabanov to suspend filming of his latest project, only to release a highly edited version of The River (Reka) in 2002. The film portrayed jealousy and betrayal among a small group of lepers who had been banished from their Yakut community. Following this release, War (Voina, 2002) emphasised the mediation of the Chechen war through various lenses for profit and personal gain at the expense of others. Just then, Balabanov was struck by another round of both personal tragedies (the death of Sergei Bodrov Jr. and members of his film crew3) and professional setbacks (the closure of The American). Put into context, these successive calamities created what we may now understand as a significant disruption in Balabanov’s life and film career. The failure to complete The American contributed to this interruption in his filmic narrative, developed over successive films with the repetition of recognizable themes, characters and actors, which were only partially restored in future projects. Ironically, STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 3 Balabanov’s sustained interest in The American demonstrates the importance of one of its central themes, intercultural conflict, found in both the filmmaker’s early films and in his own biography. Whether Russian bandits in Chicago, a British captive held hostage by Chechens, or an American stockbroker recovering lost money in Irkutsk, Balabanov, who himself had briefly lived and travelled abroad, portrayed a xenophobic Russian nationalism through interaction with a foreign other (see for example, Anemone 2008; Borenstein 2007, 188–194; Condee 2009, 217–236; Hashamova 2007; Larsen 2003; Todd 2017; White 2016). Following the misfortune of The American, Sel’ianov challenged Balabanov to make a comedy and a melodrama as a type of therapy to rouse him from his deep depression – Dead Man’s Bluff (Zhmurki, 2005) and It Doesn’t Hurt Me (Mne ne bol’no, 2006) respectively (Sel’ianov in Uait 2016, 221–222). These two films, along with Morphine (Morfii, 2008) as homage to Bodrov Jr., were not originally conceptualised and written by the filmmaker himself.4 Only in 2007 did Balabanov return to a personal project, Cargo 200 (Gruz 200, 2007), at which point we might see some of the themes and semantic continuities that had been established in Balabanov’s earlier works reanimated. Missing, however, was a distinct foreign other as a point of comparison.5 Balabanov then completed Morphine, returning to many of the themes of his earlier pastiche of the Russian fin de siècle. In 2010 Balabanov combined his earlier work on bandit films with thematic remnants from his film project The River to create Stoker (Kochegar). In Me Too, Balabanov united many of his earlier networks of meaning in this final film: a bandit, a musician, an alcoholic, the alcoholic’s father and a prostitute travel together to reach a mystical bell tower that has taken certain people to a place of happiness. When examining Balabanov’s oeuvre one finds that it is impossible not to recognise the recurring themes, characters, plots, and actors often expected from auteur filmmakers. Although Balabanov never realised The American, the script for the film was published in 2007 along with the scripts of his completed films,6 offering a potential afterlife for this film as it might still be adapted for the cinema, for television or for the theatre; extending the boundaries of The American beyond the extant seventy-seven pages of text. Yet, this raises a theoretical problem: is the published script simply a text awaiting a film adaptation, or does it to some extent fill in a gap in Balabanov’s oeuvre, or both?7 Balabanov as an auteur filmmaker Arguably, Balabanov’s oeuvre provides coherence usually associated with auteur filmmakers. Whereas Balabanov violated the strictest categories of ‘art’ and ‘popular’ film that once demarcated such a distinction, he provided a lucid personal and political commentary on (post-)Soviet Russia across his oeuvre. Following from film critic Andrew Sarris’ theories (1970) on the auteur, Balabanov was a talented director with a distinguishable personality and recurring characteristics of style in his films that contained a discernable interior meaning. In so doing, we might adhere to the idea that Balabanov’s work is ascribed to a specific cultural and historical time; that in fact one of Balabanov’s main thematic concerns is the Russian national identity. Such a theoretical approach is not meant to diminish the collaborative effort made by a large cast and crew for each film or the role that the CTB film studio (owned by Balabanov and Sel’ianov) played in this process (Self 1985; Carringer 2001). 4 F. H. WHITE In fact, the theoretical language of the ‘network’ will be employed, which has been used by Bruno Latour to express a set of interconnected systems that unite texts (the semiotic) and objects (the material) into a whole (1993). In this case we offer a complex system of human and non-human networks that operate synergistically to create the authorship of Balabanov; a cinematic ecosystem of people, texts, physical locations and other complex systems that produced more than a dozen films. For Latour agency is a collective activity between these various human and non-human elements, which in the process of networking result in the capacity to act (1996a, 174–215). In this case, the script, the actor, the camera, the cinematographer and the director all contribute to the potential action of a Balabanov film. With such an approach some of the hesitancy surrounding auteur theory might be assuaged. Maybe most importantly for this specific article, Latour encourages an investigation of actors and their contributions to an incomplete project that allows for the formulation of a possible afterlife for the project (1996b). In particular, we will explore the networks of meaning that evolved and developed over the course of Balabanov’s films – the auto-citations, thematic continuances and intertexts that shaped his cinematic discourse. In so doing, we will discuss the various objects (published script, legal proceedings, unreleased footage) that constitute The American within the larger environment of Balabanov’s completed films. Latour has noted that projects often start as concepts, narratives and texts seeking to become real. As the project receives commitments, financial support and other affirmations, it gains reality. Projects that are fully realised are afterward organised around a single account of the project’s creation. Unsuccessful projects remain unstable without a unifying viewpoint of the participants open to new texts, interpretations and actors (Latour 1996b). In this case, we examine Balabanov’s realised and unrealised projects as a complex system of networks. As a speculative exercise, we will also examine the potential afterlife of The American as Balabanov’s cinematic ecosystem remains viable, especially as the CTB film studio and others are invested in maintaining (if not perpetuating) the filmmaker’s posthumous life and film career. The script The American begins in Brighton Beach, New York. The businessman Sasha provides the Wall Street broker Nicolas McGuire (Michael Biehn; Figure 1) with a tip on a Siberian aluminium company. Nick goes against his boss’s orders and buys over $55 million worth of this stock, which the next day is worthless once the company has declared bankruptcy. Sasha recommends that Nick go to Siberia to open a legal case contesting the bankruptcy as the only way to recover the money. For this, Sasha provides Nick with contacts in Irkutsk, including Katya (Irina Nizina), who might act as a guide and translator. Aleksei Bolotov (Aleksei Chadov) is a prisoner in Irkutsk, having taken the fall for a local crime boss, but is able to escape into the woods of western Siberia. Almost frozen to death, Alesha is rescued by an indigenous hunter (Mikhail Skriabin) from the Irkutsk region, who nurses him back to life. While Alesha is recovering, Nick arrives in Irkutsk and meets Katya, who is Alesha’s sister, and will act as his translator. After several failed attempts to meet with the former owner of the aluminium company, Nick learns that he has been charged with theft in the United States. His case has been turned over to the FBI and his wife has left him. STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 5 Figure 1. Michael Biehn as Wall Street broker Nicolas McGuire. Now, in a similar predicament, Alesha and Nick are seeking refuge at Katya’s while avoiding police sweeps. Nick next meets with Mikhail Korotich (Valerii Todorovskii),8 the present owner of the aluminium factory, in an attempt to recover the money that has been lost. Just as it seems that Nick might have struck a deal, Korotich is killed in front of Nick by a Chinese hitman. Blamed for the murder, Nick and Alesha travel to Norilsk in order to obtain fake passports and then return home, while posing as roadies for the band Leningrad. While avoiding both the police and local gangsters, Nick and Alesha decide on a plan that will save everyone from capture, arrest or death. Eventually, Katya, her son and Nick are living in the taiga of Irkutsk with the indigenous people who had once nursed Alesha back to health. Alesha, seeking revenge from the criminal element that landed him in prison, has taken a large amount of money that will provide financial resources for everyone. He then elects to make his way to America. In the end, the American will remain in the wilds of Russia, while the Russian will try to start his life anew in America. Sergei Astakhov, the cinematographer for the film, offered the main intent of The American: ‘We wanted to show that, despite all of the social, political and economic differences, people are similar in their human traits. In the end, the main character of the film was to fall in love with a Russian girl, marry her and stay in Russia’ (Astakhov in Uait 2016, 170). Mariia Kuvshinova has argued that had The American been completed, it might well have generated an intense response from Russian audiences given the intercultural conflict and nationalistic issues confronted within the film (Kuvshinova 2013, 94). It is important to note that this would not have been a surprise for Russian audiences, but in fact would have been anticipated.9 However, it is quite ironic that the intercultural conflict between Russian and foreign characters, for which Balabanov’s films were known, manifested itself in real terms when conflict between the Russian director Balabanov and the foreign actor Biehn became one of the reasons for the closure of the project. Filming and the court case Balabanov originally wrote the script for The American in the hope of enticing Bruce Willis to play the lead role (Mazur in Uait 2016, 57). Once the script was already written, 6 F. H. WHITE the film studio CTB entered briefly into negotiations with the English actor Gary Oldman, who was known in Russia, along with Willis, for his role in The Fifth Element (1997).10 Balabanov also pitched the film to the American actor Willem Dafoe, while they were both at the Telluride Film Festival. Eventually, Balabanov sent Dafoe the script, however, even after Balabanov ‘pestered him for a long time, [Dafoe] refused’ (Palacios 2013). By 2003 CTB had committed to make the film with Aleksei Chadov in the part of Aleksei Bolotov, Irina Nizina to play his sister Katya and Michael Biehn in the main role of Nicolas McGuire. Biehn was well-known in Russia for his role as Kyle Reese in The Terminator (1984) and as Lt. Hiram Coffey in The Abyss (1989). Chadov had just recently worked with Balabanov on his film War, which told the story of Russian and foreign captives of Chechen rebels. Filming for The American took place in New York from 4–7 November 2003. Although Balabanov was satisfied with Biehn’s early performance on film, the actor caused a disturbance with the crew by engaging in heated disputes over wardrobe with the costume designer Nadezhda Vasil’eva.11 On 7 November, the cast departed for Moscow and two days later flew to Norilsk (Figure 2(a,b)). Upon arrival, Biehn reportedly had difficulty adjusting to the time change and chose to drink himself to sleep the next two evenings with a mix of hard liquor and beer (Award of Arbitrator 2016, 4). Since adolescence, Biehn had engaged in alcoholic behaviour and, as a result, had participated in rehabilitation programs, maintaining sobriety for over three years prior to his work on The American (Award of Arbitrator, 2; 13). Supposedly this struggle with alcoholism was well-known within the filmmaking community. There is some debate, however, as to whether Biehn’s alcoholism was known to CTB and whether CTB dealt with the situation appropriately (Award of Arbitrator, 3; 10–11; 19).12 The first day of shooting in Norilsk, 11 November, Biehn again clashed with wardrobe. As shooting continued, Biehn reportedly became more irritable and arrived on set intoxicated. Balabanov grew increasingly dissatisfied with Biehn’s performance on camera. And yet, court documents would later note that neither Balabanov nor Sel’ianov discussed with Biehn between 11 to 13 November their dissatisfaction with his onscreen performance due to drinking (Award of Arbitrator, 4). Figure 2. (a) Balabanov and Biehn review the script together; (b) Biehn and Balabanov in Russia during filming of The American. STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 7 On the morning of 14 November 2003, the film company flew to Irkutsk. After a protracted travel schedule that included a 12-hour delay at the Norilsk airport, the company arrived in Irkutsk the morning of the following day. Filming was to continue that evening. As filming began, Biehn appeared to be intoxicated and it was decided that filming would be stopped. Similar behaviour was exhibited the following evening and Balabanov called Sel’ianov in Moscow and stopped production of the film (Award of Arbitrator, 5–6). On 17 November, Biehn was hospitalised at the Irkutsk Diagnostic Centre and treated by Dr Aleksandr Koritnikov for ‘acute alcoholic intoxication’ (Award of Arbitrator, 6). Twenty-four hours later, Biehn was released from the hospital after a course of treatment. The following day, Biehn was officially notified that he had been fired. On 20 November, Sel’ianov arrived in Irkutsk and met with both Biehn and Balabanov. Biehn contended that he could continue film production, but it was decided that CTB could not continue filming and risk the possibility of a poor film that would lose money (Award of Arbitrator, 8). Almost immediately, there was an attempt to contract with another American actor in order to save the project. Again, CTB turned to their casting agency in the US and entered into negotiations with Woody Harrelson, who had acted in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), Milos Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flint (1996) and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998). The only problem was that Harrelson was not available immediately. Unfortunately, in order to salvage some of the footage that had already been shot, it was vital to continue filming during the winter months. As time progressed, however, it appeared that CTB would not be able to reclaim any of the existing footage and would have to re-shoot everything from New York, Norilsk, and Irkutsk. In the end, it was decided for a myriad of reasons, including financial and psychological concerns, that it was not worth beginning the entire project once again (Kuvshinova 2013, 97). By late April 2004, Associated Press was reporting that the Russian production company CTB was suing the actor Michael Biehn for breach of contract. ‘Biehn was “excessively intoxicated, his speech slurred and erratic, and he had trouble walking,” the lawsuit said. At times, he carried a Pepsi bottle containing vodka, was belligerent with the film crew and made advances on female production employees, the suit alleges. The behaviour continued for several days, according to the suit.’ Neither Biehn, nor his representative at International Creative Management provided comment for the story (AP 2004). In July 2004, a neutral arbitrator was selected to settle the dispute between Biehn and the CTB film company that had been filed in Los Angeles Superior Court (Award of Arbitrator). At issue was whether in firing Biehn and closing down film production, CTB had violated an earlier escrow agreement. The specific legal issues of this case are less important than the events that led to the suspension of filming and the legal text that will forever accompany the afterlife of Balabanov’s The American. After all, if only a screenplay existed then future projects would have only had to adapt Balabanov’s text; however, the court case tainted the project itself and contributed to the disruption in Balabanov’s film career, while also adding to personal problems that rendered the filmmaker for a time despondent. Latour has argued that interpretations of a project cannot be separated from the project itself. The motivations and interests of various participants, human and nonhuman actors, in any project will become more or less real as part of the networking process as the project comes closer to realization. Even as a project fails, those new 8 F. H. WHITE interpretations are incorporated into the next attempt at realization (Latour 1996b, 172; also Meikle 2013). As a result, the script for The American becomes intertwined with the Award of the Arbitrator and the unreleased footage of the film, shown as part of the court case (Award of the Arbitrator, 10).13 Kuvshinova has argued that the death of Svinoboeva and the resulting film The River represents the pivotal moment for the filmmaker, marking a rupture in Balabanov’s filmography (Kuvshinova 2013, 89). Others, including Tat’iana Kuz’micheva, have stated that the death of Bodrov Jr. and members of his film crew caused a profound change in Balabanov’s life and career (Nieman 2018). The failure of The American due to Biehn’s behaviour and the decision to cancel production must be placed within this larger context in order to truly understand the cumulative effect of the project’s failure. Instead of a single event, it was a succession of personal and professional tragedies that resulted in this significant disruption in the filmmaker’s oeuvre. Although Balabanov continued to make successful films after this period, there are certain distinct differences in the way that Balabanov approached the material and with whom he worked. For example, Balabanov did not again employ Astakhov as his cinematographer after 2006, creating a new visual style for his films with Aleksandr Simonov. Similarly, Balabanov never again cast Viktor Sukhorukov in a role after 2003, although Sukhorukov had appeared in a majority of Balabanov’s earlier films. Most importantly, Balabanov never again worked with western actors or filmed on-location in the United States or Europe. As a potential result of this last issue, Balabanov’s brand of Russian nationalism, for which his films were sometimes criticised, no longer explicitly took the United States or the West as a point of comparison. The American in Balabanov’s oeuvre In a film director’s catalogue, the film that was not made or was not completed often can assume mythical proportions. One such example is Sergei Eisenstein’s Que viva Mexico!. Masha Salazkina has explored how this film helps to unite the early Eisenstein (1920s) with his later (post-1932) period. Although left incomplete, the footage of Que viva Mexico! displays elements of the early constructivist filmmaker and the first traces of a later organic mythological approach. ‘As such, it sheds light on a central concern of Eisenstein scholarship, the shift between early and late Eisenstein, and further clarifies the differences between his work of various periods’ (Salazkina 2007, 46; see also Geduld and Gottesman 1970; Salazkina 2009). Matthew Harle has argued that there are historical and cultural constructions to be found in an abandoned work. The project’s initial creation and even its abandonment leave ‘textual, contextual and spatial networks’ that have cultural value, if for nothing else because ‘unfinished plans situate a reader in the immediacy of an earlier time’ (2019, 13, 20). In the case of The American, actors were cast and several scenes were shot on location. A resulting court case provided additional textual remnants of Balabanov’s unfinished film and an explanation for abandoning the project. Most importantly, a published script for The American has offered a potential afterlife for this film as it might still be adapted by CTB. As Harle notes, these unfinished projects often are an inadvertent source of biography for the filmmaker that might change critical discourse around the trajectory of a film career as the unfinished work is considered with the publicly disseminated works (2019, 21). STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 9 Dan North has questioned whether a film must pass through the complete process of production, distribution, exhibition and consumption in order to be semiotically productive. In response, North suggests that the unfinished film adds ‘a speculative intertextual chain reaction’ that allows scholars to address the historical and epistemological gaps in the lives and careers of those in the film industry. More to the point, a filmic text is constructed out of citations, references and antecedents leading to an on-going ‘circuit of interpretations and re-readings’ thereby eliminating the dichotomy of finished and unfinished films (2008, 5; 7). In this case, The American contains references and antecedents from Balabanov’s earlier films, thereby marking a significant continuity in the filmmaker’s creative process. In particular, Balabanov had been developing the theme of intercultural conflict by placing a foreigner in an alien cultural environment. Balabanov first explored this theme by sending Danila Bagrov (Bodrov Jr.) to Chicago to confront the mob boss Richard Mennis (Gary Houston) in Brother 2. Along the way, Danila met the truck driver Ben (Ray Toler) and a news reporter (Lisa Jeffery). After foiling Mennis’ business plans in Russia, Danila and Dasha (Daria Lesikova), a Russian prostitute, manage to escape the Chicago police and the Ukrainian mafia in order to board an Aeroflot flight home to Russia. Brother 2 provided a new sense of national pride as demonstrated in the final song of the film soundtrack: ‘Departing Letter’ (Proshchal’noe pis’mo), also known as ‘Goodbye America’, which also articulated the post-Soviet disenchantment with the American ideal (White 2016). In War, Balabanov had begun to explore the specific theme of the westerner in Russia. Balabanov cast British actor Ian Kelly to play John Boyle. The character of Nick was to continue to develop this theme in The American. Similarly, Margaret’s (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) desire to remain in Russia with Captain Medvedev (Bodrov Jr.) at the end of War, was to be realised more fully in Nick’s decision to remain in the taiga with Katya at the end of The American. The failure of this film, along with the other tragedies mentioned above, significantly disrupted these constructed networks of meaning, which depicted a type of confrontational Russian nationalism that had become synonymous with Balabanov’s films. Semiotician Winfried Nöth suggests that contemporary literature has become metafiction, texts are intertexts, architecture is about architecture and film is concerned with self-reference (2007, 3). In the films of Balabanov this frequent reflexivity goes beyond ironic, postmodern self-commentary. In fact, these self-references had become an expected characteristic of Balabanov’s films. Audiences anticipated quotations, allusions, adaptations, influences, borrowings from texts or films that are less about the source and more about the way in which Balabanov made them his own. With the abandonment of The American, this intricate self-referencing network was not repaired, and then only partially, until the release of Cargo 200. After The American, a western other almost completely disappeared from Balabanov’s films, replaced with a more poignant examination of Russia itself as a Godless society devoid of moral restraint. Otherness was shifted more emphatically to ethnicities found within the post-Soviet space, limiting the possibilities for a distinctive examination of Russia within a global context. Instead, Balabanov focused on many of the tensions that had historically existed within Russia and the Soviet Union. As a result, Balabanov’s brand of Russian nationalism after 2003 was much more inward looking. As examples, in Dead Man’s Bluff 10 F. H. WHITE racism is expressed when the character Eggplant (Grigorii Siiatvinda) is constantly referred to as an ‘Ethiopian’ even though he has no accent and persistently responds that he is Russian; in Morphine the focus is on the Jewish element within the Russian revolution represented by Gorenburg (Iurii Gertsmen); Stoker revisits earlier themes of Russian banditry, but this time with the Yakut Skriabin seeking revenge against former military buddies (Russians) for killing his daughter (Aida Tumutova). Although it is impossible to say what changes to the script might have occurred during the filming process, Balabanov’s published script follows a similar pattern as his earlier films, even with possible sequels offered that would have further developed these themes of Russian nationalism and intercultural conflict. As examples, Alesha’s story approximates that of Danila Bagrov of Brother and Brother 2. Alesha is part of the Russian bandit culture and effectively navigates the dangers of post-Soviet society, often by means of violence. While Nick’s story shows similarities with The River, which was filmed in the Yakut language with indigenous actors including Mikhail Skriabin, and with War. Nick is prepared to assimilate (possibly uncomfortably) into a foreign culture in order to escape the personal problems that follow him into this new cultural milieu. Perhaps, one could even imagine a sequel in which Alesha finds his way to America via travels through China and Mexico (as suggested at the end of The American), with the United States as a disappointment (echoing Danila’s experience in Chicago) or a land of endless opportunity (experienced by Danila’s brother). Similarly, Nick’s decision to stay in Russia, to hunt and to fish with the people of Siberia, might have allowed Balabanov to exercise some of the ideas that had informed his desire to adapt Waclaw Sieroszewski’s The Limits of Sorrow (Predel skorbi; Polish title Dno nędzy, 1900), which became the basis for The River.14 In either case, Alesha in America or Nick in Siberia, Balabanov would have continued to use foreign otherness as a lens through which to view post-Soviet society. The afterlife of The American During arbitration, raw footage and scenes from a ‘Making of The American’ video were shown to the arbitrator as part of the court case. When Sel’ianov was asked in 2014 if there was any plan to release the remaining footage of The American, possibly as The River had been re-cut and then distributed, Sel’ianov responded: There is nothing to show. We filmed [over] nine production days: four in New York, three in Norilsk, two in Irkutsk. From the point of view of the protagonist [Biehn], it is all so bad. Generally, we do not deal very much with archives, which is probably wrong, as we do not specifically store [the footage]. Somewhere I have it lying around, but I do not consider it suitable to publish – this is an extremely unfortunate page in our history with Lesha (Sel’ianov in Uait 2016, 226). As Harle has noted, unmade or unfinished films ‘can be subject to a peculiar kind of cultural re-functioning: reappearing, evolving or morphing into other media’ (2019, 111). As a result, a script like The American could have an afterlife as an alternative CTB project or a memorial cinematic homage to the deceased filmmaker. After all, Balabanov himself had toyed with revisiting the film project with Mike Tyson re-cast as Nicolas McGuire, so the script was left open for reinterpretation by the author himself.15 STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 11 The interesting question remains (and here we move into pure speculation) – is this Balabanov’s filmic text and, as a result, should it be interpreted in his cinematic style or is this a text available for any and all potential adaptations or revisions? Latour has raised the tantalizing question regarding the accumulation of interpretations that accompany an unrealised project such as The American. In this context, as well as the real possibility that Balabanov’s other unfinished projects might eventually be realised, a speculative exercise explores some of the disadvantages associated with making The American in the future. This seems germane given Balabanov’s enduring popularity. One could only imagine what Quentin Tarantino or Lars Von Trier might do with this script – two directors with whom Balabanov has shared some cinematic similarities. However, foreign directors might not fully appreciate the Russian contexts embedded in this film; elements that make this film time and place specific. Aleksei Uchitel’ made the unsuccessful bandit film Break Loose (Vos’merka, 2013), based on the novel The Little Eight (Vos’merka, 2012) by Zahkhar Prilepin, which was originally advertised as a continuation of Balabanov’s Brother dilogy. Would Uchitel’ make a better bandit film with Balabanov’s screenplay and the support of the CTB film studio? Even more appropriate might be Vasilii Sigarev, whose dark and unrepentant films harmonise well with Balabanov’s pessimistic depiction of human nature. In his film The Land of Oz (Strana Oz, 2015), Sigarev paid his final respects to Balabanov by asking the actor Aleksandr Mosin to make a cameo appearance while reprising the role of the bandit from Balabanov’s final film Me Too (Khokhriakova 2015). Also noteworthy is that Vasil’eva contributed to this film during the first few weeks of production. Film critic Zara Abdullaeva (2015) wrote of Land of Oz, ‘The Balabanov masks of the 90s [that were everywhere] acquired flesh, blood, substance, familiar and unbearable details in Sigarev’s film. It turned out to be an elegant and smashing Russian comedy’. Russian film critics noted Sigarev’s tribute to Balabanov, especially to Balabanov’s dark comedy Dead Man’s Bluff that trivialised the banditry of the 1990s. Another compelling option might be Iurii Bykov whose films The Major (Maior, 2013) and The Fool (Durak, 2014) have been widely praised by film critics and audiences alike. As with Balabanov, Bykov is not afraid to confront the harsh realities of contemporary Russia and, in particular, he has depicted the corruption and brutality of the provinces – essential elements of The American. More importantly, Bykov dedicated The Fool to the memory of Balabanov as a symbol of determined independent filmmaking (Bennetts 2015). Each director offers a different, potential afterlife for Balabanov’s unfinished project. Take as an example, the adaptation of Ol’ga Pogodina-Kuz’mina’s play Clay Pit (Glinianaia iama, 2008) that had interested Balabanov for a time and for which he wrote a script (Balabanov 2017). The film was eventually made by Vera Glagoleva and was released as Not Strangers (Ne chuzhie, 2018).16 The screenplay(s) follow Mila after she returns home from living in the big city, only to find that her sister is about to marry a man from Central Asia, causing conflict within the family. Pogodina-Kuz’mina is quoted as saying, that Balabanov’s version portrayed nationalistic confrontation, while Glagoleva’s adaptation was concerned with reconciliation (Al’perina 2018). A comparison of the two film versions might address some of the issues raised in this article about the potential afterlife of unfinished Balabanov projects (as an example, see Ezerova 2018). 12 F. H. WHITE Conclusions We might now contextualise the first six years of the twenty-first century as a period of disruption in the life and work of Balabanov with distinct differences in the way that Balabanov approached the material, the actors and the crew with whom he worked before and after The American. During the first part of his career, Balabanov seemed to mirror Russia’s own geo-political position in the world. When Russians needed most for a hero to emerge from the chaos of the post-perestroika period, Balabanov’s Danila in the film Brother displayed a moral superiority over Westerners and their deleterious music and culture. Danila’s popular line, ‘All of your America is finished’ remains an enduring quote from the film. In Of Freaks and Men, Johan returns from Europe to establish his pornography business, presumably after his own corruption in the West. In the intervening years, Russian living standards improved and Russian audiences no longer wanted to be made to feel as though they had ‘lost’ the Cold War. As a result, Danila evolved into a national hero in Brother 2 when he went to America to exact revenge for the murder of one of his friends. This film marked the end of the idealization of life in America that many Russians had nurtured in previous decades. With the establishment of Vladimir Putin’s law-and-order society and improved standing in the world, Balabanov began to test a Westerner’s fortitude within the post-Soviet space. Therefore, in War the Englishman Boyle and his Danish fiancée find themselves in a hole while held captive by Chechen rebels. The American was to continue this articulation of national heartiness. With the failure of this film, Balabanov no longer juxtaposed post-Soviet Russia with the West. The theme of intercultural conflict with a western other was replaced by historical tensions within Russia and the Soviet Union. Arguably, Balabanov’s brand of Russian nationalism was different. Therefore, The American and the texts that accompany it remain distinctive relics (or actors according to Latour) within Balabanov’s oeuvre. Just as important, the script originally anticipated a film that was not completed and now invites adaptations of the published version. Therefore, the script of The American is both about the absence of Balabanov’s film and about an implied future project yet to be realised. The published script provides continuity in Balabanov’s oeuvre, especially in understanding the evolution that occurred in his films before and after The American. The script acts as connective tissue, uniting these two periods and within it can be found remnants of Balabanov’s cinematic vocabulary. The American now includes a published script, a court case and unreleased footage (along with a list of actors for specific roles). Any adaptation should consider these various intertexts and metatextual elements, as well as the networks of meaning reconstructed by Balabanov in his films after 2003. Yet, Balabanov’s depiction of the Russian bandit subculture, intercultural conflict, Russian nationalism, the violent destructiveness of a dissolute post-Soviet society and other themes from the early 2000s, may no longer receive a positive response from audiences when screened in 2020. Thus, the new life of this filmic text will either become a nostalgic experience for audiences, or it will require a substantial adaptation, emphasizing more modern themes. In any case, future audiences will expect from a new version some homage to Balabanov. The most difficult task in this situation will be to create something new and innovative, while yet paying tribute to the deceased filmmaker. This new version of The American, in a sense, will be asked to restore Balabanov’s networks of meaning and to repair Balabanov’s STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA 13 cinematic ecosystem, while also meeting audience’s expectations to be old and new at the same time. It is for these exact reasons that Sel’ianov recounted that even for Balabanov an updated version of The American ‘was not a decision. It was an idea, a thought, a “maybe”’(Sel’ianov in Uait 2016, 225). As a result, for now, The American will remain just that – an unfinished film with an as yet unrealised afterlife. Notes 1. From Anna Nieman’s interview with Tat’iana Kuz’micheva, Balabanov’s film editor for most of his film projects after 2003. A shortened, English-language version of this interview is published in KinoKultura 59, but this quote is taken from the yet unpublished Russian version. 2. Several attempts were made to contact Michael Biehn through his talent agency and through Facebook for this article in order to understand and to represent his side of the story. The only response I received was on Facebook’s personal Messenger, a simple ‘Hello,’ which I understood as a polite refusal of my many attempts to schedule an interview. Therefore, I have relied on the Award of Arbitrator, which I believe to be an unbiased legal document, and the interviews of Balabanov’s family and friends, which I recognise as potentially biased remembrances of events, in order to reconstruct the story of The American. 3. Twenty-seven members of Bodrov Jr.’s film crew perished at Karmadon Gorge in Vladikavkaz. Balabanov felt particularly responsible for this senseless tragedy because he had recommended the location and knew many of the people in the crew. Vladimir Kartashov had provided production design on The Castle and Brother; Marina Lipartiia had worked on four of Balabanov’s films as film editor. Most of the other crew had either worked on Bodrov Jr.’s film Sisters (Sestry, 2001) or Petr Buslov’s Bimmer (Bumer, 2003), both produced by CTB. 4. Stas Mokhnachev originally wrote the script for Dead Man’s Bluff. Valerii Mnatsakanov wrote the script for It Doesn’t Hurt Me. Balabanov used Bodrov Jr.’s script for Morphine as the basis for his film of the same name. 5. Yakut actor Mikhail Skriabin plays Sunka, who is Vietnamese, as the logical replacement for Faulkner’s Tommy. African-American Tommy is a visually recognizable other and Sunka’s role as an illegal worker from a Soviet proxy state creates interesting parallels. No longer employing a foreign actor, Balabanov uses an actor with whom he had worked previously, in The River, to fulfill this role as other. Interesting here and in Balabanov’s other films are his references to the Soviet Union’s military involvement during the Cold War and in the postSoviet period: Brother, Brother 2, War, It Doesn’t Hurt Me, Stoker, Me Too. With these veterans of Soviet conflicts are also found oblique references to Russian and Soviet colonization. 6. The script for The American was published in (Balabanov 2007, 355–432). 7. Since his death, two of Balabanov’s unrealised film scripts have been published. My Brother Died (Moi brat umer) was first published in Balabanov (Arkus, Kuvshinova, and Shavlovskii 2013, 350–63); ‘Clay Pit. A film about bad people’ appeared in English in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema (Balabanov 2017); it remains unpublished in Russian. Significantly, The American is the only unfinished film script to be published during the filmmaker’s lifetime. 8. Mariia Kuvshinova has stated that Viktor Sukhorukov and Evgenii Mironov were meant to play the two oligarchs, but Sel’ianov was unable to confirm this fact and instead stated that Valerii Todorovskii was cast as one of the oligarchs (Kuvshinova 2013, 97). 9. Brother, Brother 2 and War in particular depict a type of Russian nationalism that is xenophobic and specifically anti-American and anti-Semitic. Caucasians/Chechens are singled out for particularly harsh treatment as well. The script for The American again employs these xenophobic themes directed at these specific groups. 14 F. H. WHITE 10. The theatre specialist Oleg Loevskii shared this information with me in an interview on 2 March 2017. Balabanov asked Loevskii to revise the script for The American while CTB was in negotiations with Gary Oldman. 11. The following information was provided as part of the legal case, Award of Arbitrator, of the CTB Film Company (Claimant) and Michael Biehn (Respondent) that was registered in the Los Angeles Superior Court, case number BC 314452. Here to fore referenced as Award of Arbitrator. In this case, the document states: ‘During the time in New York Biehn had very heated disputes over his wardrobe with the costume designer, Nadia Vasilyeva, Balabanov’s wife. Biehn became angry and they screamed at each other. Disagreements between Biehn and Nadia and wardrobe staff continued throughout production, including screaming, which on occasion brought Nadia to tears’ (Award of Arbitrator, 3). 12. Biehn, as Respondent in this arbitration process, conceded that between 11–17 November he did drink ‘a significant amount of alcohol while in Russia, and concedes that he was hung over on one occasion and that on another occasion he may have still been under the influence of alcohol when he arrived on the set for shooting. [He testified that on 16 November he] had trouble focusing and felt disoriented. He suffered from the effects of insufficient sleep, anxiety, and other problems that may have been the result of sleep deprivation and excessive use of alcohol.’ And yet, the arbitrator finds that neither Balabanov nor Sel’ianov promptly sought to correct the situation nor did they try ‘to talk openly to the actor [about his drunkenness that supposedly resulted in unsatisfactory performances] rather than allow the matter to become irretrievable’ (Award of Arbitrator, 11). In fact, the arbitrator found a ‘failure to mitigate’ as CTB ‘failed to take steps during the production, [. . .] to mitigate the consequences of the conduct which they claim caused the firing and the later termination of the production’ (Award of Arbitrator, 19). 13. As part of the arbitration, the arbitrator viewed the raw footage of scenes meant for the ‘Making of The American’ video. This footage was meant to show the impact of alcohol on Biehn’s performance. 14. During his many years in Siberian exile, Sieroszewski wrote one of the first ethnographic accounts of the Yakut peoples (along with several literary works). 15. Admittedly, the shot preparation and visual contours of the 2003 film project were guided by Astakhov, who had worked on Balabanov’s previous films: Happy Days, Brother, Of Freaks and Men, Brother 2, The River and War. The costumes were designed by Vasil’eva. As a result, some assumptions could be made based on their previous work with Balabanov regarding the visual elements of The American. 16. This film was also left uncompleted due to the death of Glagoleva in August 2017, but a version of the film was completed by producer Natal’ia Ivanova and cinematographer Aleksander Nosovskii. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Frederick H. White is a Professor of Russian and Integrated Studies in the Department of Integrated Studies at Utah Valley University. He has published six books and over thirty academic articles on Russian literature, film and culture. He is one of the leading specialists on the Silver Age writer Leonid Andreev and has published in the areas of Russian Modernism, psychiatry and literature in the Russian fin de siècle, the economics of culture and post-Soviet cinema. 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