Description
A documentary film by Thomas Lahusen and Susan Solomon. Color & b/w; French, English, and Russian (French & English subtitles), Digital HD 16:9; 55 min. Chemodan Films. In production.
The search for Alexander Roubakine, a 20th- century Russian national whose world was the “no place” of border crossings. Neither a fulltime diplomat nor spy, Roubakine positioned himself at the junction of much of the traffic between Paris and Moscow in the interwar years. A refugee from Tsarist prison, he became a loyal servant of the Soviet government in France, member by marriage of an illustrious high bourgeois (and leftleaning) French family, expert at the League of Nations in Geneva, fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, World War II prisoner in French concentration camps in the Pyrenees and Algeria, and, finally, researcher in the Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow favoured with the privilege of foreign travel.
The film chronicles a double odyssey—the kaleidoscope of passages of Roubakine and his pursuit by the filmmakers, who are always a step behind their quarry. The film, shot in Paris, Moscow, Geneva, Lausanne, and New York, contrasts the “voice” of Roubakine that sounds from his autobiography with interviews of surviving family members, personal photos and letters, and official Soviet-era documents.
The film brings to life the Russian and French avantgarde culture of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties in Paris (a book of Roubakine’s poetry was illustrated by cubo-futurist painter Natalia Goncharova). The camera pans to the immense mirrored ballroom of the legendary dancer Isadora Duncan, whom Roubakine knew; it pauses in the sumptuous gardens at Courance with their fluid line between sky, trees, and water, designed by Roubakine’s father-in-law, the paysagiste Achille Duchene. The film captures the experimental school in Meudon run by Roubakine’s wife (now inhabited by a physician turned big-game hunter whose salon contains a 12-foot stuffed alligator he bagged in Africa). A door is slammed in the face of the filmmakers when they try to access the flat in Lausanne that housed the 100,000-volume library of Roubakine’s father, and where Lenin and Trotsky came to call.
Historical retrieval has its dangers. In pursuit of the traces of Roubakine, who had fled Paris in 1941 to avoid arrest, the filmmakers suffered a near fatal accident (filmed in detail) when a 15- ton truck hit their car.
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