There is a world elsewhere

Goncharov (1973)

Some of my personal favorite internal variants of the Goncharov poster 🤗❤️

why did you people come up with russian names for what is supposed to be a movie set in italy. what was the thought process here. why does she sound like she walked out of a tolstoy novel

an insane response, but i can't fight this. carry on

im being hunted for sport in the notes

i could write a post about the many Futurist paintings that appear in the background of scenes in Goncharov (and specifically paintings by Natalia Goncharova, ofc) and how these paintings are used to express the fragmentation of the self, and tie back to key moments in the movie like the train scene, if you think about “Landscape with a Train”… but also it’s late & i’m tired so let’s just pretend i did

I also think it's really important to look at futurism as another axis of Russian and Italian crossover too? Like there's some very clear parallels made between the characters in the film and the futurist ethos - this drive towards an unattainable utopia through the abstraction of the self - which was so similar in Italy and in Russia but which differed in some very key ways especially in the conception of the built environment and the "man of the future". It's absolutely undeniable that Italian futurism influenced Russian futurism but to what extent is still a point of contention in art historical circles.

Futurism played with time as its axis of abstraction rather than space like cubism does and i think this is very important when looking at the structure of the film - time is mutable within the futurist construct just as it is within the temporal structure of the film. Jumping off of your mention of Goncharova's "landscape with a train" which shows up just barely in frame in the Cafe where Katya and Goncharov get breakfast, I also want to call attention to the presence of Pannaggi's "speeding train" which shows up in the window of a gallery during that one scene where Goncharov is waiting for Andrei to leave the restaurant. This can then be contrasted to the postcard Andrei keeps on his desk with Malevich's "woman at the tram stop" from 1913. Interesting that as the movie goes on Goncharov begins to be represented by Italian futurism while Andrei's attendant artworks become more and more Russian/soviet. I'm just using the train motif because op already started talking abut them (soldiers are another big one!) but this just draws a parallel between the two characters - both are waiting for this bright train of the future that they will never see.

Tldr: gnawing on drywall.

yknow i tried to avoid the hype, but that final scene with the clocks? the music? goncharov changed me as a person. katya stan for life

Goncharov (1973) - variant poster 2

[link: variant poster 3]

Goncharov (1973) - variant poster 3

OKAY GUYS SO someone already beat me to the main theme but they must have had another source because in my torrented zip file i also found the FUCKING CLOCK THEME omg

i uploaded it to my youtube channel so everyone can listen

It’s a little known fact that Rutger Hauer’s iconic “tears in the rain” monologue from Blade Runner (1982) was inspired by Goncharov’s “You think you have time” speech in Goncharov (1973). Hauer called Goncharov’s lines the most moving words ever filmed.

When Katya said “Of course we’re in love. That’s why i tried to shoot you.” And Goncharov said “If we really were in love you wouldn’t have missed.” 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

when you realize those are the last words they speak to each other

This, and then when Andrey kills Goncharov at the end… Andrey didn’t miss.

everyone mixing up harvey and al’s characters have you even seen the movie…..

The string heavy score of Goncharov always pleased me. Who else remembers this piece, the confrontation on the bridge, the cutaways to the clock?

With Goncharov’s resurgence, I thought people might like to see this! Saul Bass did a limited edition poster in 1973, not because he was hired, but because he was so moved by the film. I learned about it in my design classes in undergrad, but because it wasn’t actually the theatrical release poster, not many people know about it. 

The funniest thing about the original Goncharov post is that I have seen people do exhaustive amounts of research in order to discern that it's a misspelling/mistranslation of Martin Scorcese's "Gomorrah" and then go "well this explains everything" while never once questioning why it's on shoes

I forgot most people wouldn't understand it on sight, tbqh. Professional blindness.

The thing that matters is not that it was on a shoe, but that it was on a machine embroidered (or machine woven I wasn't looking that close) label.

What happened is, someone at the labels-for-boots factory ran a cool looking piece of text in a language they didn't understand through either an OCR program, or any number of similar software to convert text in a photo to a digital format that can be fed to the embroidery machine.

It came out with good visual balance so off it went, to be sewn onto boots.

The text was from the English language poster of the film Gomorrah.

It was run through an OCR intended for use with both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, but was not set to recognize English properly, hence some dead giveaways like 'production' becoming 'prdhhhco' and, y'know. The title. Goncharov.

It might have been ripped from a JPEG online but given age of Gomorrah, I would bet it was scanned off an old movie cover or movie poster.

It's on a shoe because shoes often need a big fancy label or decal to make them pass for branded products at a glance. It's the same principle as those "CUGGL" shirts in the "GUCCI" font.

Anyway this happens all the time when clothing is made for both English and Russian speakers by people who do not read either language. It's a lot of fun to browse AliExpress and try to guess what the original text was.

really surprised that no one has mentioned the Shakespearean themes of Goncharov. i guess the ship wars loom larger now, but when it was first released in the 70s, it was in direct dialogue with Hollywood’s obsession with spectacle and grandiosity. there’s a reason Scorsese was attracted to the project; his visual language of mass-produced grit and the intensity he demanded of his lead actors made him the perfect fit for this cult classic. 

the famous Pompeii shoot-out, known for its commentary on the futility of nationalism, is perhaps the most obvious overture to the film’s Bardic origins, but other clues abound: the rotting docks where Katya and Andrey first meet; the constant references during the poker scene to Goncharov’s education; even the homoerotic apple-buying sequence, which at face value seems like a classic Scorsese study of masculine one-upsmanship and repressed sexual desire, echoes the underlying theme of mankind’s futile search for a second Eden. strains of Montaigne can still be felt in the film’s brutal closing scene, featuring – of course – a mirror, revealing Goncharov’s dissociation from his own humanity. unlike his Shakespearean counterpart, Prospero, Goncharov refuses to turn from his path until it’s too late, and he pays the price that The Tempest only hints at. 

some might argue that Scorsese went too far in altering the ending this way, but as the New York Times said in their 2009 review, after the original footage was resmastered and rereleased: 

And anyway, how else do you explain Katya’s “ghost” scene?