José Alaniz
People with disabilities usually realize that they must learn to live with their disability, if they are to live life as a human being. The challenge is not to adapt their disability into an extraordinary power or an alternative image of ability. The challenge is to function. I use this word advisedly and am prepared to find another if it offends. People with disabilities want to be able to function: to live with their disability, to come to know their body, to accept what it can do, and to keep doing what they can for as long as they can. They do not want to feel dominated by the people on whom they depend for help, and they want to be able to imagine themselves in the world without feeling ashamed.
(Siebers 2010: 69; emphasis added)
The Russian documentary
Anton tut riadom (
Anton’s Right Here, 2012) by Liubov Arkus, opens with a hand-held close-up of an enigmatic young man on a mist-covered dock. His gaze avoids the camera, which remains tight on his face as he lopes with vague alarm. Suddenly he starts to emit a deep-throated keening noise. In his review, Greg Dolgopolov describes these odd sounds as ‘yelping incoherently in the grey light of destitution’ (2013: n.p.), but they seem more guttural, even primal – an ape-like ‘
Ahhhhhh…’. Along with the twilight conditions, the boy’s inscrutable expression and almost total lack of context (these are the very first few seconds of the film), his eerie non-language disorients profoundly – as I have noted while watching with different audiences. The mood it creates is nightmarish, apocalyptic. But perhaps its most disturbing aspect (as elaborated below) is that this ambiguous protospeech, signifying nothing,
fails to function.We soon come to know the entrancing figure onscreen as Anton Kharitonov, a St. Petersburg adolescent with autism. We come to know him well.
Anton’s Right Here, a ‘first-person’ account of the director’s close involvement with the boy over four years, represents a breakthrough in non-fiction depictions of the disabled in Russia. This owes largely to its unflinching intimacy, an insistence on its subject’s uniqueness and the director’s determination to understand him as much as possible on his own terms. We might say Arkus sets herself the task of inverting the audience’s discomfited presumptions at that opening scene’s portrait of Anton: menacing, quasi-human, yowling.
1 She in fact repeats that same footage some fifteen minutes later, only now the backstory more fully explains Anton’s anxiety. Disquiet turns to empathy.
2 Context matters.
For all that, though – and to take nothing away from its achievement – Anton’s Right Here operates too under the influence of other, very different contexts (which it only partially resists): the long tradition of representing mental disability in Russia, and the current Putin era of ‘healthy-minded’ efficiency, competition and personal advancement. Taking such frames into account, this chapter first examines the documentary in light of its cinematic predecessors, before interrogating the film through Stuart Murray’s concept of ‘function’ in contemporary discourses of autism. In doing so, we will weigh the ethical stakes in Arkus’s very personal vision of the autistic subject amid a changing landscape for disability rights in post-Soviet Russia.
Anton’s Right Here
Divided into five chapters, the documentary details Arkus’s relationship with Anton, whom she finds in the course of researching another project. As a child, he had written a poem-essay, ‘Liudi’ (‘People’), which had achieved notoriety on the internet in the early 2000s. In the ensuing years, Anton’s condition has worsened; she finds him living with his mother Rinata (his father had long since left the family). Arkus and her cinematographer, Alisher Khamidkhodzhayev, follow the young man to Onega, a camp for autistic children on Lake Onega, and a poignant bond develops on camera. When Rinata, stricken with terminal cancer, grows increasingly ill, Arkus decides to somehow rescue Anton from life in an orphanage or mental institution – his assured fate upon his mother’s death (as a montage of quick interviews with various experts confirms).
3 In the work’s most dramatic scene, the filmmaker shows how far she will go to save Anton: she and her crew
kidnap him from a hospital (again, live on camera). Arkus’s daring act of ‘enter[ing] the frame’
4 – arguably wresting Anton’s story away from him – transgresses conventional limits on the subject/author relationship, to say nothing of the law.
What emerges more prominently over the course of the film, however, is a subtle, achingly intimate portrait of Anton: his charming boyishness and vulnerability; his unknowable gaze and language (consisting of echolalia or repetitive speech, and other verbal tics); unpredictable bodily movements (e.g. he tent-poles his blanket over himself at odd angles); and, at times, heart-wrenching emotion, as when tears stream down his face on his way back to the hospital after a brief furlough.
5Furthermore, Arkus – a long-time film critic and occasional actress, but first-time director – finds brilliant devices to visualise Anton’s plight.
6 A wintertime long shot early in the movie shows the boy walking in snow as voice-overs from different people seem to bicker over what he needs: ‘On ishchet cheloveka, kotoriy ego poimet…. Dlia nego samoe glavnoe, to, chto ty chuvstvuesh’…. A chto dlia nikh samaia bol’shaia travma? Predatel’stvo, konechno, kak i dlia vsekh…On ne mozhet byt’ bez cheloveka riadom’ (‘He’s looking for someone who will understand him…. What’s most important for him is what you feel…. What’s the biggest trauma for them? Betrayal, of course, like for all of us…. He can’t be without someone by him’).
Other sequences verge on the lyrical. We see close-ups of Anton through reflections, branches and plants, recalling Andrei Tarkovsky’s opening for Ivanovo detsvo (Ivan’s Childhood, 1962). These shots of the blank-faced boy evoke what Stuart Murray calls the popular conception of autistics’ faces as ‘masks’ or ‘curtains’ which foreground their social withdrawal (2008: 113). Likewise they contrast sharply with photos of Anton as an infant, smiling happily.
As if to defuse viewer presumptions about the ‘sordidness’ of her subject matter, Arkus sprinkles high-culture markers throughout: at one point Anton reads aloud from Mikhail Lermontov’s 1832 poem
Parus (
The Sail), while his stepmother Nina sings ‘V lunnom siannii’ (‘In the Moonlight’), a turn-of-the-twentieth-century lyrical song by Yevgeny Yuriev (1882–1911). The lyrical song (romans), a genre initially denounced as a bourgeois holdover by the Soviets, resonates with Arkus’s anti-authoritarianism elsewhere in the film. Nina sings it near the end, when she, Vladimir and Anton have all settled at an idyllic dacha, to heal as a family. But the song’s more immediate relevance is intertextual, involving a different ‘rehabilitation’. For precisely this piece is heard in Alexei Balabanov’s notoriously grotesque
Pro urodov i liudei (
On Freaks and People, 1998), in which it is performed more than once by enslaved conjoined twins. Arkus’s inclusion of ‘In the Moonlight’ thus ‘overwrites’ its dehumanising, ableist association with the earlier film. Through these and other means, the documentary seeks to re-centre long-marginalised others in Russian society.
Birth imagery, too, makes conspicuous appearances. We repeatedly see Anton completely under covers, as if in a cocoon, pupating. (This seems a way of blocking out unpleasant stimulation.) In footage of him disembarking from the watercraft (which in terms of chronology immediately precedes the film’s ‘mysterious’ opening), not only do we come to understand why Anton feels so distraught as to yowl – ‘izvestie o tom, chto uezhaem, Anton vstretil s otchaianiem’ (‘Anton reacted to news that we were leaving [from Onega] with despair’), Arkus notes – but his uncertain movements, ambling off the boat, then back on, then off again, signal a sort of stillbirth. Many details of this key long shot seem ripe for a psychoanalytic reading (complete with a raised-voice law of the father): the water, the red of the boat and of Anton’s clothes, Arkus entering from offscreen to help, and Khamidkhodzhayev angrily yelling at her, ‘Lyuba, iz kadra!’ (‘Lyuba, out of the shot!’). Odder still, the ship is brightly labeled ‘Comet-9’, evoking the neurotypical stereotypes of autistics as ‘alien’ beings; Anton has landed on Earth. If nothing else, such shots attest to the volatility of autism as a cinematic subject.
The scene – one of several in which the director increasingly violates the injunction to stay off-frame – also represents a re-birth. For ultimately, the filmmaker’s directness and self-examination leads us to the realisation that Anton’s Right Here is also a self-portrait; Arkus’s own needs and personal trauma play a shaping role in her sense of mission (family members, including her father, were repressed by the Soviets). As she puts it: ‘Istoriia ne pro to, kak odin chelovek pomog drugomu, a pro to, kak odin chelovek uznal sebia v drugom…. Anton, kotoryi ponimaet tol’ko iazik liubvi, i na men’shee ne soglasen, eto ia. Eto tot samiy drugoi chelovek vo mne, kotoryi vо vsiu zhizn’ nuzhno bylo ubivat’ sebia, chtoby vyzhit’ (‘This is not a story about how one person helped another, but about how one person found herself in another…. Anton, who understands only the language of love and will agree to no less, is me. This is that other person in me, who all my life I’ve had to kill over and over so I could survive’).
Audiences responded; in 2013
Anton’s Right Here won two of the Russian film industry’s most significant prizes – a Nika and a Golden Eagle, for Best Documentary – and earned above averagely in limited release. The page devoted to the film on the
Seans website features glowing accolades from leading auteurs, scholars and critics. Alexander Sokurov’s comment there is representative: ‘Zdes’ vyrazitel’nye sredstva kino napravleny na to, chtoby doyti do samoi suti, razobrat’sia v prirode cheloveka, pred’iavit’ nam to, shto my o sebe ne znaem’ (‘Here the expressive powers of cinema are directed towards reaching to the very essence, to grapple with the nature of man, to show us that which we don’t know about ourselves’) (quoted in Anon. 2012). The questions remain, however: How do ‘the expressive powers of cinema’ accomplish this? And what role does Anton’s autism play in the process?
The Function of Function
In an important essay, ‘Autism Functions/The Functions of Autism’ (2010), Murray argues that ‘An idea of “function” and “functioning” is central to contemporary discussions of autism’. He cites such common descriptors for spectrum disorders as ‘low-’ and ‘high-functioning’, as well as the insistence with which discussions of these conditions center on notions of ‘too much’ (i.e. savantism) or ‘too little’ function (2010: n.p.). Too much or too little for what? As Murray writes:
[T]he worrying aspect is that an idea of autistic functioning equates with an idea of disabled human value, that the shorthand that ‘function’ has become allows for processes of assessment and judgment that fix those with autism into inflexible ontological categories, and that these categories themselves then pass for the norm. Equally, there is a very real sense that this idea of function dangerously misrepresents the actual nature of ability and intelligence in those with autism, that it creates the presumption of a link between the condition and the ‘deficit’ in a manner which misreads what autistic intelligence actually is. (Ibid.)
Media depictions of autism, both fictional and non-, have internalised the ‘blanket term’ of function, which allows for ‘a series of interconnected moments between the cognitive, linguistic and the social’ (ibid.). In a vicious loop, these unexamined biases yield highly-flawed representations which themselves influence presumptions about and relations with real autistic people, as well as state policies directed toward them. This was clearly the case in the Soviet Union.
7More worrying still: the ways in which the function frame dovetails too with the demands of late capitalism, which has so profoundly reshaped Russia since the collapse of the USSR. While focused on autists assimilated into the labour force in the neoliberal West, Murray’s thesis applies just as well to conditions in Anton’s home country:
[T]he working individual with autism is also the individual who behaves in an orthodox manner, whether that behavior is deemed ‘acceptable’ by society at large or is consistent with the stereotypes that come with perceived ‘extraordinary ability’. Such individuals, in this emerging terminology of assessment, can be understood to be useful and valuable. The language of function and the functional here carries overtones of management systems and the rhetoric of supply-side macroeconomics, vocabularies that are themselves increasingly part and parcel of the languages utilized by the major autism charities and foundations in their fundraising activities. (Ibid.)
The ubiquity of the function imperative in twenty-first-century discourses about disability (including mental disability) compels the question: to what extent does it participate in even an expressly ‘spiritual’ film, whose supporters call ‘chudo na ekrane, zadokumentirovannoe rozhdenie dushi v nash mir’ (‘a miracle on screen, the documented birth of a soul into our world’)?
8 What is the function of the function of autism in
Anton’s Right Here? To begin to answer, I want to look at a number of scenes, shots and cuts which relate to the film’s primary themes of love, national critique and the ‘miracle’ of cinema. At the centre of them all lies Anton’s autism – and, to one degree or another, this question of function.
The Beach
‘Pervoe vremia’ (‘At first’), says Arkus in voice-over, ‘Anton boialsia kamery, a ia boialas’ Antona. Ia boialas’ prichinit’ emu vred ili bol’ kakim-nibud’ neostorozhnym slovom. Boialas’, chto on ubezhit’ (‘Anton was afraid of the camera, and I was afraid of Anton. I was afraid of inflicting harm or pain on him through some careless words or other. I was afraid he would run away’). We hear these words over a series of shots in which Anton walks off, avoids the apparatus’s gaze, fleeing along the trails and woods of the Onega camps. Eventually he grows ‘to love the camera’ and even enters shots he should not.
The breakthrough happens on a lake beach at dusk. A baseball-capped Anton, in his characteristic back-and-forth motion, approaches the off-screen Arkus (the camera pans to follow) before retreating to the water’s edge, twice. Arkus asks if he wants to write on the sand. We then see a closer medium shot of Anton, his back to us, framed against the water. The implication: something about writing, sociality, water and the camera are about to effect a change. Indeed, we return to the longer shot as Anton shuffles back up the bank. Then, a jump cut: Anton is ‘helped’ to close the distance to Arkus again. He hugs her, over and over, caresses her hair, smiling radiantly. A miracle.
Everything about the action in this sequence speaks of spontaneity; Arkus and Khamidkhodzhayev, after patiently following their subject, have captured a crucial moment in June 2008: ‘the birth of a soul’. And it does take a heart of stone to remain unmoved by the scene. Yet notice too the extravagant artificiality of its construction: the steady camera, which is not hand-held but rather seems to sit on a tripod (hence the smooth pans); the ‘catalytic’ effect of Arkus’s suggestion to write (which we can link with the poem that first brought them together, as well as with Anton’s apartment walls covered in his scrawl – biblical associations and all); the water imagery and soundscape betokening birth; and, last but not least, the ‘assistive’ jump cut, which literally brings our two protagonists into physical contact. It all points to i) a staged quality on location and ii) meticulous editing to achieve maximum emotional impact.
The beach ‘birth’ scene, eight minutes into the film, serves both as lynch-pin to the film’s narrative and as a marker of authenticity – the rest of the story, as well as our emotional commitment to it, flows from its sands. Yet even here the chicanery of montage – to put it bluntly – remakes the pro-filmic event to manipulate viewers’ perceptions (to say nothing of their heartstrings). While such orchestration is inherent to all cinema, including documentaries, the stakes here seem transformed by the presence of an autist, whose way of thinking defies conventional ableist categories. Is our cognitively disabled subject made to ‘function’ onscreen in ways to which a more presumably autonomous neurotypical might object? Do metaphor, ideology, the language of souls and rebirths and Final Cut Pro swoop-in to speak for Anton where other figures might verbalise more directly for themselves? The question, once raised, practically answers itself. Dolgopolov seems to worry along similar lines when he writes: ‘There is something in the fine line between Arkus’s seemingly tacit cooperation with Anton that stops the documentary from becoming an act of exploitation, but it does walk a fine line’ (2013: n.p.).
The Portrait
Throughout the film Anton mostly utters such repeated phrases as ‘Anton tut riadom’ (e.g. ‘OK, eat pea soup’, ‘Will sleep on bed on yellow bed here’, as well as ‘OK, Anton’s right here’). But, as the ‘walking in the snow’ scene suggests, there is no shortage of people in the film who speak about Anton, for Anton, against Anton – though they rarely do so in deference to Anton.
Among the most egregious instances: a scene in which Arkus objects to the boy’s removal after only nineteen days from a so-called ‘elite children’s home’ (internat) with that institution’s staff. He has been acting disruptive and does not get along with the other kids. In an extended take, a medium close-up, we see an unnamed woman in glasses lit by fluorescents that seem to drain human warmth from the image. Most striking, though, is a portrait of then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on a wall behind her (you really can’t not see it), which seems to authorise and reinforce the staff member’s opinions as the scene unfolds. The key exchange, all in the aforementioned shot, is this one:
Woman: ‘Anton, k sozhaleniiu, interesa k rabote i zaniatiiam ne proiavlial. Razve ego mozhno v masterskuiu otpravit’? A libo v shveinuiu, libo v tsekh po sboru ruchek?’
(‘Unfortunately, Anton didn’t demonstrate any interest in work or classes. Can he really be sent to a workshop? Or to a sewing shop, or a pen assembly shop?’)
Arkus (off-screen): ‘A on mozhet pisat’ chasami…’
(‘But he can write for hours at a time…’)
Woman: ‘Nu, khorosho, on mozhet pisat’ chasami. Skazhite mne, pozhalujsta, kakaia pol’za, esli chelovek pishet chasami? My staraemsia privivat’ i vospitat’ im prakticheskoe znanie, da? I vot oni obuchaiutsia po professii tsvetovod. Eto praktichno. Oni potom, esli khorosho zakonchat, osvoiat, oni mogut trudoustroit’sia. Eto daet vozmozhnost’ zarabotka, da?, v zhizni, eshche tam chego-to. Byt’ poleznym obshchestvu. A pisat’ chasami, nu a tsel’, skazhite mne. Dolzhen by byt’ konechnyi resul’tat, konechnyi itog.’
(‘Well, great, he can write for hours at a time. So, tell me, please, what use can a person get out of writing for hours at a time? We’re trying to train our children in practical skills, aren’t we? So they learn, for example, how to be a florist. This is practical. Then, if they master that well, they’ll be able to find a job. This gives them a chance to earn money to live and so on. Be useful to society. But writing for hours at a time – well, what’s the point in that, tell me. There would have to be a result, a final product’).
The scene comes off as a condemnation of Putinism, whose ‘practical’ economics-driven values sap the life out of human relations the way the fluorescents ‘deaden’ the woman’s image. In a world where what matters is only ‘a result, a final product’ – in short, function – people like Anton have no place. (Arkus, in addition, seems to attack dodgy patriarchal figures: here Putin and, in the scene which immediately follows, Anton’s father Vladimir, who meets him for an extremely awkward session of tea-drinking.) This treatment of defenceless autistic boys simply fulfills the prerogative of a compassionless society produced by power, personified by one man. Yet here, too, we have a bit of ‘functional’ editing. For in the gap between the woman saying ‘But writing for hours at a time’ and ‘well, what’s the point in that, tell me’, Arkus inserts a jump cut. Who is speaking for whom, again?
Putin’s image also appears on a television at another institution, the Petergof Neuropsychiatric Hospital, where doctors tell Rinata autism is not a diagnosis in their country, where neglected disabled children live in overcrowded conditions with overworked staff – in other words, a vision of hell (or so the film presents it).
9 The triad of Putin, a soulless healthcare system and human suffering is once more cinematically reinforced.
Much of the rest of the film depicts Anton as victim of that convergence, as he repeatedly fails to conform, even at Camphill Village Svetlana, a seemingly ideal charity-funded community for mentally disabled people on Lake Ladoga – very much the anti-Petergof – where he does well for a time. Everyone wants Anton to function; he never does. His father, in the excruciating tea scene, tells him over and over to speak louder. Other residents at Svetlana object when Anton shirks his work duties and disrupts evening dinner.
10 Later he manages to perform chores well while accompanied by David, a Svetlana volunteer – but when David leaves, Anton reverts to his old impractical habits. He runs away several times, eventually getting hit by a car. When Anton winds up in an institution (from which he is ‘rescued’ by Arkus), he cannot live on set schedules and appears drugged, slowly wasting away on his bed. Even the saint-like Sarah Hagnauer, the director of Svetlana, comes to speak in terms of function in reference to Anton’s, antics, which have driven her staff to the verge.
Such scenes affirm the link between autism and isolation; Anton can never fit in, neither with other mentally ill people nor with a competitive society that privileges pragmatism over uniqueness. Yet Anton – and this seems very much the point of the film – is the most ‘functional’ of all. As Arkus puts it, the whole story began with his writing ‘People’ and posting it on the internet. It put everything in motion, from the comfort of his dying mother to his escape from institutionalisation to the reunion with his father to Arkus’s self-realisation to the very film we watch today, and beyond. The climax of the film, in which Anton’s recitation of his poem-essay ‘People’ plays over a montage of anonymous crowds as well as the men and women we have come to know, is nothing if not functional – dramatically, emotionally, powerfully so: ‘Liudi terpiat. Liudi ne terpiat. Liudi poterpiat…. Liudi konechnye. Liudi letaiut’ (‘People endure. People can’t endure. People will endure…People are finite. People fly’).
The Camera
The cinema scholar Yurii Tsivian has praised Anton’s Right Here:
V etom fil’me sbylas’ mechta Dzigi Vertova – mechta o tom, chto kamera izmenit mir, gradus chelovecheskikh otnoshenii; mechta o tom, chto geroi sam voz’met kameru i stanet soavtorom. Imenno eta vertovskaia ideia i est’ vnutrenniy siuzhet Liubinogo fil’ma. Anton – chelovek, kotoryi, vo-pervykh, otkryvaet poeziiu, vo-vtorykh, otkryvaet kino. (‘In this film the dream of Dziga Vertov has been realised, a dream of the camera changing the world and the degree of human relations; a dream of the subject himself taking the camera and becoming the co-author. Precisely this Vertovian idea is the embedded storyline of Lyuba’s film. Anton is a person who first discovers poetry and then discovers cinema’). (Quoted in Anon. 2012)
It is true that Anton at one point gains access to the camera at Svetlana, and shoots in his own ‘cine-eye’ style. As Dolgopolov describes it: ‘He instantly goes against the grain of filmmaking – shooting the sky and the clouds, which fill the screen. He sees the clouds in close-up and revels in the pleasure of his handiwork’ (2013: n.p.). ‘Letaiu!’ (‘I’m flying!’), we hear Anton exclaim as he zooms in. ‘Letaiu!’ (‘I’m flying!’). This footage closes the film.
On the other hand, a more fully-realised Vertovian revolutionary vision would have Anton in charge of editing his own footage, not being subject to Arkus retaining control and choosing to include it through the power of the final cut. More central, I would argue, is how Arkus deploys that power not only to alter the order of events, repeat sequences, add syrupy background music and otherwise reconfigure reality, but also to exclude whole swathes of Anton’s ontology. (Again, such exclusions happen in all documentaries; this is what makes the director’s choices about what to leave in and out, as well as their motivations, so consequential.)
For one thing, Anton – a healthy teenage male – exhibits no sex drive, in a cultural context that has traditionally infantilised and asexualised the disabled, especially the cognitively disabled. Secondly, as Arkus told an interviewer: ‘In the whole movie, I only included one episode in which Anton is actually screaming out loud…. There are certain things that you should not overdo. People will ask why there is so little of that, because it is the reality of their lives. But the camera can only do so much’ (quoted in Nelson 2013: n.p.). The director clearly treads a fine line between engaging her audience with the real life struggle of her subject, and alienating it with ‘too much’ naturalism (tantrums, self-harm).
11 This trade-off, however, means an even greater distortion of who Anton is – and as a person with autism, he finds himself in a very disadvantaged position to object.
Instead, to a considerable degree we get not the dream of Dziga Vertov or the discovery of cinema, but the dream and self-discovery of Liubov Arkus. The film, in fact, is cut, its narrative arc structured and events arranged to arrive at the critical lesson that Anton ‘is that other person in me, who all my life I’ve had to kill over and over so I could survive’. Yet, as Murray reminds us, ‘the “we-learn-from-them” story is a staple of both film and literature…promoting the disabled figure either as a figure worthy of pity, or, conversely, of heroic perseverance and achievement’ (2012: 68).
Anton’s Right Here is not Rain Man, of course, but Arkus continues to speak of her own personal transformation, with Anton as its stimulus, in very similar terms (see Nelson 2013). If for her Anton served as the stimulus, then for Anton that role was played by the camera, she maintains. Indeed, the power of cinema to effect change offscreen attains a utopian religious stature in the film. ‘Ia davno poniala, chto kamera glavnoe deistvuiushchee litso etoi istorii’ (‘I had long realised that the camera was the main character in this story’), Arkus says in voice-over, as the people mentioned flash by. ‘Kamera pomogla pape priniat’ reshenie. Kamera prodlila Rinate zhizn’. Ona umerla, kogda kamera byla vykliuchena. Kamera izmenila Antona. Kamera izmenila menia’ (‘The camera had helped his dad make the decision. The camera extended Rinata’s life; she died when the camera was off. The camera transformed Anton. The camera transformed me’).
The film’s climax occurs when Vladimir and his second wife Nina watch footage of Anton on computer monitors, which precipitates tears and the final decision to move to a summer home that Arkus has procured, if they will take Anton with them: ‘[I]menno etot prosmotr i vse pridedushchie s’emki reshili delo’ (‘[It was] precisely this viewing and all the previous filming we did that settled the matter’), Arkus’s voice-over insists.
12We last see Anton docilely doing chores at the dacha with his father and step-mother. By then his transfiguration into a ‘functioning’ adult – realised first and foremost through the camera’s power to penetrate to the essence of things – seems complete. Complacently gathering firewood, hauling buckets of water, peeling potatoes, he appears as happy as anyone in such circumstances – perhaps more so. Over a long shot of Arkus and Anton strolling the woods, her voice on the soundtrack declares:
Za eto vremia Anton mnogomu nauchilsia: plakat’, gotovit’, myt’ posudu, govorit’ po telefonu, ne boiat’sia sobak, razgovarivat’ s liudmi. Nauchilsia ne ubegat’, ne kusat’ ruki, ne rvat’ odezhdu…U nego teper’ bol’she spokoistva, i menshe sveta. Anton nauchilsia terpet’. I ia nauchilas’ terpet’. Nu, vozmozhno, eto priuvelicheniie. Vo vsiakom sluchae my umeem eto luchshe, chem prezhde. Terpet’-to, chto chelovek vsegda odin, dazhe kogda seichas kto-to tut riadom (‘Over this time Anton learned a lot: how to cry, how to cook, to wash dishes, talk on the phone, not be afraid of dogs, how to talk to people. He has learned not to run away, not to bite his arms, not to tear up his clothes…. He is calmer now, and less radiant with light. Anton has learned to endure. And I have too. That may be an exaggeration, though. In any case, we can do it more easily than before. To endure the fact that human beings are always alone, even when someone is right here’).
One irony of this resolution: Anton has become someone closer to the sort of person lionised by the staff member at the ‘elite’ children’s home (with the portrait of Putin): a ‘practical’ worker with real skills, who follows orders well. Another irony: the change is effectuated not only through ‘the expressive powers of cinema’, or the state, or bonds of blood, but by an outsider to the family with the resources to make it happen, to engineer the happy ending.
Bakuradze lauds the film because ‘on ne dokumentoval real’nost’ v chis-tom vide. On korrektiroval real’nost’, menial ee v korne i zatem sozdaval dokument. Anton tut riadom – eto kakoi-to novyi, tretiy vid kinematografa’ (‘it didn’t document reality in its pure form. It corrected reality, changed it at its roots and then created the document. Anton’s Right Here is some kind of new, third species of cinema’) (quoted in Anon. 2012). A functional cinema, in which ‘people endure’. But is a conventionally functional cinema at odds with the experience of autism?
Conclusion: Anton’s Not Here?
Through an examination of the Russian documentary Anton’s Right Here, this chapter has argued i) that films devoted to the autistic must contend with the unique complexities of this population, and ii) the strategies filmmakers use to try to negotiate that complexity can easily work at cross-purposes to each other. In seeking to ‘humanise’, they may in fact achieve something closer to the opposite (or in any case, some very mixed messages), not in spite of but because of the satisfying dramatic payoffs involved.
In Russia, a nation with a nascent disability rights movement and an ancient tradition of marginalising physical/cognitive difference, the odds would seem even longer for producing respectful, dignified, complex cinema on such subjects. Therefore Arkus’s remarkable film, with all its pitfalls and unexamined presumptions, its transgressions and mysticism, deserves great praise for a portrayal of autism that comes, before anything else, from a place of real love. Its mission lives on: after the movie’s release, Arkus headed the St. Peterburg branch of Vykhod (Coming Out), a foundation for autistic children, and in late 2013 founded the Anton’s Right Here Centre, the first institution in Russia to provide job training and other support to adults with autism. It initially served some forty autistic adults and twenty people with different psychological issues (see Stolyarova 2013).
But putting forth Anton as a living alternative to an intolerable status quo, in which human beings are warped by a soulless function ultimatum and work ethic, poses its own problems. To say the least, it seems too heavy a metaphorical burden for Anton or anyone to justly bear. The hardest thing, as we have seen, is to resist the impulse to remake autistic people into symbols, over which they have precious little say; i.e. to make Anton ‘not here’. One way to avoid this, Murray contends, is to make ‘the presence of the person with autism, rather than an abstracted idea of the condition itself…the starting point of any enquiry’ (2008: 28). Due to the especially potent spell it casts over our perceptions, perhaps cinema should heed that counsel even more closely than other media.
I want to close with a minor but exemplary manifestation of that spell from
Anton’s Right Here. Some fifteen minutes in
, our young autistic sits apparently despondently in the passenger seat of a car, as someone shuts the door on him. We see him in a tight close-up, through the glass. It’s sunny. He’s waiting to start the journey home from Onega. We know he does not want to go, because Arkus has told us. The camera dwells on him for a few seconds. Then, after a jump cut (considerable time has passed because the light changes), Anton gazes up, apparently at something in the distance. An eyeline match cut ‘shows’ what our subject ‘sees’: tree leaves rippling in the wind, the woods beyond. On the soundtrack, a car engine starts up. In short, we witness an autistic experience fabricated through Eisensteinian montage.
I have no inkling what really caught Anton’s attention, what if anything actually made him look out the window at that moment. For all I know those trees could have been filmed somewhere a hundred miles away, twenty years earlier. But the sequence is well edited. It brilliantly and subtly captures a boy’s disappointment at leaving a cherished spot; his sadness seems to suffuse the leaves, all aflutter. I know those shots of Anton and the trees ‘feel’ right. Art overlaying life often does.
I love that sequence, but I prefer to think Anton was not just looking at trees. Or perhaps glimpsing something in trees that I never will. He may have seen lots of other things, too, things I can’t imagine. All the while, he might have been thinking thoughts far beyond my comprehension – but no more or less human.
‘People are finite. People fly.’
NOTES
FILMOGRAPHY
Arkus, Liubov (dir) (2012) Anton tut riadom. 110 minutes. CTB Film Company/Masterskaya Seance. Russia.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lebedinskaya, Klara S. and Olga S. Nikolskaya (1993) ‘Brief Report: Analysis of Autism and its Treatment in Modern Russian Defectology’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 23, 4, 675–79.
Murray, Stuart (2008) Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
____ (2012) Autism. New York, NY: Routledge.
Phillips, Sarah (2009) ‘“There Are No Invalids in the USSR!”: A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History’,
Disability Studies Quarterly, 29, 3. Available at
http://dsqsds.org/article/view/936/1111 (accessed 13 July 2015).
Siebers, Tobin (2010) Disability Theory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.