THE MARITIME CLIMATE
Symposium
In 1974, what should have become one of the cheekiest politically satirical musicals of the USSR ran into trouble with the country's cultural bureaucracy before it could be completed, and thus became a cinema monument of a special kind instead. In 1992, Latvian director extraordinaire Rolands Kalniņš took it upon himself to personally re-edit his film, which had been left in tatters by the censors, relieving THE MARITIME CLIMATE of its status as an exemplary victim of Soviet cultural policy. The result is colourfully fragmentary, defamiliarized and actually quite cool, as when the brigadist beaus employed by a natural gas company repeatedly recite the formula for water while sunbathing… unadulterated freestyle decolonialization!
In 1974, what should have become one of the cheekiest politically satirical musicals of the USSR ran into trouble with the country's cultural bureaucracy before it could be completed, and thus became a cinema monument of a special kind instead. In 1992, Latvian director extraordinaire Rolands Kalniņš took it upon himself to personally re-edit his film, which had been left in tatters by the censors, relieving THE MARITIME CLIMATE of its status as an exemplary victim of Soviet cultural policy. The result is colourfully fragmentary, defamiliarized and actually quite cool, as when the brigadist beaus employed by a natural gas company repeatedly recite the formula for water while sunbathing… unadulterated freestyle decolonialization!
