The Village Detective: A Song Cycle (2021) The Ocean Gives Up Its Mysteries (Review)

In 2016, a crew of Icelandic fishermen operating in the North Atlantic Ocean, dredged up something surprising from the seabed – four decaying reels of film, semi-preserved by the ocean’s natural resources of hydrogen sulphide, that set innovative documentarian Bill Morrison, of Dawson City: Frozen Time fame, on a fascinating odyssey into not only cinematic history, but the history of Soviet Russia. The result is a documentary like no other; The Village Detective: A Song Cycle, released to Blu-ray by Second Run this week.

The story begins with the bemused fishermen presenting their surprising haul to Iceland’s National Film Archive. We witness the painstaking, careful examination of the dirt-encrusted, rusted reels and arrive at the film’s first mystery – what exactly has been discovered? The discovery of the Cyrillic title cards upon the scarred negative reveal the origin of the film to be Russia, but what is the film? And could it be a lost masterpiece? It is here that Morrison enters the proceedings, tipped off of the discovery by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. In an email, Jóhannssonn asks Morrison if what was happening at the National Film Archive may be of interest to him and it is this exchange that brings about Morrison’s movie.

The Village Detective: A Song Cycle is a mystery, in more ways than one. What is discovered on the crenulated frames of the discovered reels is a Soviet-era movie entitled Derevensky Detectiv (The Village Detective). Directed by Ivan Lukinsky and released in 1969, it was just one in a series of popular mystery movies featuring the celebrated Russian star of stage and screen Mikhail Zharov as the rural district police lieutenant, Fyodor Ivanovich Aniskin, the literary creation of novelist Vil Lipatov. On those four reels that the North Atlantic Ocean gave up, a sequence emerges of the movie’s central mystery; the theft of an expensive accordion from the village club of a farming collective. From here, Morrison shapes his own movie as a mystery, holding back several crucial facts regarding the nature of Derevensky Detectiv, least of all, how it came to be resting on the bottom of the ocean on the Mid Atlantic Ridge. Taking its discovery as a jumping off point, Morrison weaves a tale not only of the film, but also its star and Soviet cinema itself.

Of course, its hardly surprising that a low-key movie like Derevensky Detectiv is a mystery, an unknown quantity, to audiences beyond the borders of Russia, but the same fate has befallen its star Mikhail Zharov too. This is arguably more surprising (though not uncommon of course), given that, as Soviet cinema curator Peter Bagrov explains on camera, Zharov was a huge star whose career encompassed seven decades and innumerable screen credits. He would have been, as Bagrov attests, known by 99% of Soviet audiences, a fame comparable to the likes off Hollywood stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. Zharov made his big screen debut at the age of just fifteen as one of Ivan the Terrible’s soldiers in the silent historical epic Tsar Ivan Vasilevich Groznyy and, ironically, it is arguably his role as another of Ivan IV’s of Russsia’s warriors, Malyuta Skuratov, in Sergei Eisenstein’s two-part epic Ivan the Terrible (1942-1944) that Zharov is best known to Western audiences. In between those films came many more, too many to mention, but notably an appearance in the Soviet Union’s first talkie, 1931’s Road to Life, in which he played a bandit leader, capitalising on this introductory sound-feature by playing the guitar and singing musical numbers. He was awarded the People’s Artist of the USSR in 1949 and three Stalin prizes in 1941 and 1942 but, when his father and mother-in-law, Jewish physicians, were accused along with several other Jewish doctors of plotting against the state in 1948, Zharov refused to denounce them and his career suffered.

He was still extremely popular with Soviet cinemagoers, but in the wake of this state-sponsered antisemitic campaign and with his own advancing years, he was reduced to lending his diminishing talents to populist minor fare like the Derevensky Detectiv series. He died, aged 82, on 15th December, 1981. Across The Village Detective: A Song Cycle, Morrison tells the actor’s story, finding motifs in his many screen appearances that tie into the unfolding mystery of both the film reels and the central conceit of its plot. For example, in a film about a stolen accordion, its remarkable how many times Zharov had picked up that same instrument throughout his career. Through his films, Morrison also shows the changing face and shifting loyalties of Soviet Russia; from its privileged Tsarist beginnings to its false Communism of Stalin and Khruschev. Through it all appears Mikhail Zharov, a seemingly fixed point, yet changing interceptibly as his nation’s cinema reflects the climate of society surrounding it.

Ultimately, just as the ocean gave up its mystery, so too does Morrison give up the mystery regarding the reels themselves. In the final moments we learn that Derevensky Detectiv is not some great lost film. A HD print exists of it which appears, in all the astonishing clarity of that format, like a burst of sunlight after murky clouds of the slowed-down, silent and distorted sequences Morrison has repeatedly presented throughout his film. In fact, Bagrov estimates that, if we factor in all of the former Soviet territories, it is likely to be broadcast somewhere at least once a week. It is eventually surmised that the film would have been on a Soviet ship in the North Atlantic, just one of the entertainments projected for those on board, before it was unceremoniously cast to the depths.

Morrison is an inimitable filmmaker, a visual artist who uses the medium of cinema and the moving image. As such, it is unfair and indeed difficult to judge how he approaches a subject and erroneous to try and compare with others. That said, I did find myself longing for a more immersive take on the actual nuts and bolts of exploring and conserving the material uncovered, whilst his choice of slowing down the decaying footage and playing it to the strains of accordian music ultimately felt oppressive and arduous to me, the initial fascination of seeing such deteriorated ghostly footage soon wearing off when played at such snail-like speed. Nevertheless, that initial tingle at seeing the imagery bleed its way through the crenellations is satisfying for any cineaste.

Second Run’s release also includes several short films of Morrison’s by way of extras, including 2014’s Beyond Zero 1914-1918, The Unchanging Sea (2018), Sunken Films from 2020 and lastly, 2021’s Let Me Come In. the package is rounded off by a sixteen page booklet featuring writing from film historian Peter Walsh.

Mark’s Archive – The Village Detective: A Song Cycle (2021)