The Village Detective: A Song Cycle — The Village Detective: A Song Cycle( Blu Ray)

I recently watched Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) and, with a few caveats really enjoyed it; The Village Detective: A Song Cycle (2021) follows that film and shares much the same purpose and themes. It tells the story of some reels of film salvaged from the seabed by an Icelandic lobster trawler in 2016, which turned out to be - unlike the treasure trove dug up in Dawson City - parts of the very non-rare Russian film The Village Detective (1969), starring Mikhail Zharov as Fyodor Ivanovich, a policeman. Zharov (1899-1981) was one of the most popular Russian actors in his time, though his was a popular, not critical, fame; he made over 70 films and was an equally prolific performer on stage, he was also notably the first Russian to sing on film in Road to Life (1931). The Village Detective tells his story, using clips from his films, interspersed with commentary on Russian history and cinema, and the role that cinema performed in Russian society.

The Village Detective, which concerns the theft of an accordion, would appear to be pretty awful; it’s hard to truly tell because the footage is throughly ruined, corroded and mangled, and that’s really the justification for Morrison’s film: the abstract, beautiful imagery that results from the film’s corrosion. And it is beautiful: with flickering, morphing passages as the footage shifts from the shot scenes to changing patterns and colours; though they pale in comparison to the footage also shown from the ‘lost’ 1917 film The Fall of the Romanovs, which features images melting and morphing very much in the manner of demented AI. So, the footage is absolutely compelling, but it soon becomes apparent that Morrison’s film will largely consist of such footage, and certainly three quarters of the way through it becomes a little tired - still beautiful but the trick has been revealed. The trouble, compared with Dawson City, is that there is a less compelling narrative to The Village Detective; Morrison purports to tell a history of Soviet cinema, as well as exploring philosophical questions introduced by footage from the 1970 film Zharov Tells where the actor muses on acting and life, but it’s all rather slim, and hangs by a thread where Dawson City is more convincing. An observation to be made is that in some respects both films are, to a greater or lesser extent, akin to ‘films one might see in an art gallery’ - and that’s not a criticism, but your patience may vary - but where Dawson City has an intriguing narrative, wider commentary, and ‘origin story’, The Village Detective simply doesn’t. On a final note, the soundtrack is largely great, and dominated by the accordion, echoing one of Zharov’s film roles as a musician.

The disc comes crammed with extras. First up is an interview with Morrison which justifies The Village Detective as the story of an actor who spanned the twentieth century and indeed Russian cinema, but the film itself doesn’t truly fulfil such a brief; however he does illuminate Zharov as an actor who often played characters who were lagging behind the times. Morrison states there there are two approaches with such found materials: to pursue the poetic qualities of the footage itself, or to contextualise the footage historically and culturally: I feel The Village Detective attempts both and satisfies neither. After this are several of Morrison’s short and shorter films, the first two are great: Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 (2014), and The Unchanging Sea (2018). Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 is a collage of footage from WWI, showing combat drills and combat footage (I think…), as well as footage from military hospitals and  aerial combat. The forty-one minute film is largely black and white but tinted in places, and the whole thing is of course mangled to abstraction at points. There are some great shots of German soldiers on rooftops - I love early film footage of rooftops, couldn’t tell you why… - as well as compelling post-bombardment ruins; the soundtrack is by the Kronos Quartet, and I’m sure I heard some Dada sound poetry at some point… The Unchanging Sea is a thirty minute collage of old sea related footage, framed as a dream of a young woman asleep on a rocky shore. It’s great, beautiful and engaging, with lots of shots of rocky coastlines and the emptiness of sea horizons; it’s my favourite film on the release. Sunken Films (2020) is next, an eleven-minute mini documentary about the RMS Luistania which was torpedoed off the Irish coast in 1915, with the deaths of 1200 passengers and crew. There’s a nice romantic subplot, but Morrison’s interest is in the reels of film that were salvaged from the wreck in the 1980s: The Carpet from Bagdad (1915), and Ireland A Nation (1914). The disc closes with Let Me Come In (2021), an eleven minute film that could be seen as a wonky pop video; it combines more mangled and morphing footage, of a man and woman in romantic situations, with a song, with the lyrics on screen. The song has a nice sound but didn’t bowl me over, and the whole thing perhaps outstays its welcome slightly. Finally, the release comes with a booklet featuring an essay, an extended review, really, of the film by Peter Walsh, which adds some welcome context and technical commentary.

Somehow I had the idea that The Village Detective: A Song Cycle preceded Dawson City, and that made sense to me as the former seemed like an attempt at an approach that blossomed with the latter; however… it did not, and this is curious because The Village Detective does feel like a less developed cousin of Dawson City. On reflection I enjoyed it for its duration, but it wasn’t satisfying or overly provoking. However, with the extra films here, and Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 and The Unchanging Sea being particularly good, you are getting a large amount of material, and certainly those into more abstract film will find much here.