Popular depiction of the Soviet Union used to hinge on the Cold War’s ideological expediencies, and only with the country’s dissolution in 1991 was there a concerted push toward historicizing it as an object of cultural fascination. With modern Russia, something similar appears to be at play. Its invasion of Ukraine notwithstanding, Russia’s clout atop the literary and cinematic stages has more often been defined with recourse to its Soviet past as a means to critique its present. The likes of Sergei Loznitsa (Ukrainian by nationality, but Soviet by fascination) demonstrate this phenomenon, as do — though to a lesser extent — Andrei Zvyagintsev and Kirill Serebrennikov, the great directors of contemporary Russia. But a post-Soviet psyche stubbornly eludes the silver screen; we’ve had The Death of Stalin and Petrov’s Flu, but these narrative fictions invariably overplay their hand while understating life as it is, whether during peace or war, or some in-between state.
Documentaries, in lieu of straightforward narratives, may thus offer a more free-flowing avenue of expression, and Artem Terent’ev’s Knife in the Heart of Europe further stretches the conventions of this expression. The director’s second feature after Petersburg (2020), an adaptation of Andrei Bely’s eponymous novel, Knife could potentially be described as personal, diaristic, or essayistic, yet its formal qualities arguably subvert these designations one way or another. Referring to the Russian territory of Kaliningrad, nested between Poland and Lithuania and historically a province of the Prussian Kingdom, the film’s title conveys a tone of awe and geopolitical angst, and its sequences replicate to some extent this feeling. But rather than devolve into kitsch or sentimentality, Terent’ev imbues his footage with a melancholic unease as he stitches together lo-fi fragments of the enclave’s environment and inhabitants. His opening shot surveys a collection of glassware and portraits in his family dacha, while voiceless captions describe his lineage to a grandfather who had fought in World War II and, before passing, lost his memory.
An elliptical sensibility both invigorates and frustrates Knife, as Terent’ev’s camera — perhaps the metaphorical knife to pour out and stave off his feelings of weltschmerz — doesn’t exactly lend itself to logical or even associative structuring. The fragmentary nature of the film’s inquiry into place and space is best apprehended on its own terms, as an incomplete and possibly voyeuristic phenomenology of post-Soviet existence that lacks political or spiritual grounding. Teenage boys and fishermen roam the overgrown countryside at dusk and dawn, while the elements both of nature and of civilization comingle in solemn perpetuity. A bridge linking the Kaliningrad enclave to Lithuania mournfully stands in the distance, the Russian and Lithuanian flags billowing neutrally across the water; a shot of the river’s currents dissolves, almost, into an illusion of black ripples across a sea of white like the birds that fly high above. Insofar as Terent’ev fixates on these images, as opposed to other more tangible and deliberately elided ones, Knife expresses the aching and unrepresentable crux of its title: a country and people with a heart, but with no sense of a future to call home.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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