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ZINA |
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REVIEWS |
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"This
beautifully shot work beavers into the imagination with surprising power."
Derek Malcolm, The Guardian
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ZINA
"Director
Ken McMullen skilfully probes into the unhappy life of Zina(Domiziana Giordano),
the daughter of Leon Trotsky, believed to have committed suicide in Berlin
in 1931, shortly before the advent of National Socialism. Much of the story
unfolds during Zina's bouts with a psychoanalyst, Dr, Kronfeld(Ian McKellen),
in which she remembers some of the incidents in her own life and that of
her father when in exile. The acting all round is top notch, especially
Ian McKellen as the silently intense analyst and Domiziana Giordano as the
disorientated Zina, alternately diffident and outspoken.
In all an intelligent, sensitively made film that skilfully and imaginatively
handles a difficult subject-" Variety
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"..it
is difficult to think of anything else since Brecht's Galileo which has achieved
such empathy with historical figures and such intellectual grip on historical
events."
Sight and Sound |
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"Ken
McMullen has made a film that could captivate audiences in all countries...[an]
intelligent , sensitively made film that skilfully and imaginatively handles
a very difficult subject"
.Variety |
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"Intellectually
and formally this is a most ambitious movie...I greatly admired this poetic
picture."
Philip French, Observer |
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"This
is an important film.. wholly absorbing...made to the highest quality. It
marks the flowering of Ken McMullen."
Review Magazine
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ZINA
"
Brechtian is not the word to apply to Ken Mcmullen's remarkable film, but
it is difficult to think of anything else since Brecht's Galileo which has
achieved such empathy with historical figures and such intellectual grip on
historical events. Zina never attempts to distance the spectator from the
facts of the case, which begin prior to the account of the Russian Revolution
and Trotsky's exile, with a brief litany on the tendancy of revolutions to
sacrifice their most original thinkers to their ideologies. Thereafter the
account of Trotsky on the Turkish island of Prinkipo, composing his history
of events from which he has been excluded, or dancing to the alien rhythms
of jazz while speculating on the their relation to the industrial age, is
intercut with scenes of his daughter Zina in Berlin, talking about her exclusion
from her father's life to a psychoanalyst. Through her own displacement, she
senses the terrible consequences of her father's displacement from history.
Zina may be the first masterpiece of a new genre which has attempted to psychoanalise
history and to 'historicise' the individual psychodrama."
Sight
and Sound International Film Quarterly. |
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"Intelligence
throbs throughout the story...A completely imagined and intellectually mature
piece."
Alexander Walker. The Evening Standard
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ZINA
1930.
Zina Bronstein, Trotsky's elder child by his first wife, has come to Berlin
to be treated by Professor Kronfield,(Ian McKellen) after a nine month stay
with her father, in exile on his Turkish island of Prinkipo. Her treatment involves
the use of both psycho analysis and hypnosis, reveals a mixture of memory, fantasy
and hallucination in which Trotsky figures prominently. Flashbacks show Zina
with her father, his second wife, Natalya, and his followers (including Andre
Breton) on Prinkipo. Zina's half brother Lyova is also in Berlin with Jeanne,
and at an exhibition of revolutionary art they make contact with Molanov, a
Stalin-supporter who is regretting Trotsky's defeat. They discuss developments
in the Soviet Union. Zina protests that she is always excluded and interrupts
despite Jeanne's attempts to restrain her. Having earlier cast herself as Trotsky's
eyes and ears in Berlin, Zina now speaks to Molanov under the momentarily delusion
that she is Trotsky himself. Jeanne leads her away. Zina's delusions get worse,
while the political situation in Berlin deteriorates with the rise of Nazism.
Trotsky admits that, despite her sickness, Zina sees clearly what is happening
in Germany, while she, in her letters, begs him to "step down" to her illness.
She also fails to understand why he cannot come to Germany to intervene politically.
In her last analytic session, she describes how, at the age of two, she discovered
that her father had fled from exile in Siberia to the West, leaving his family
behind. When she leaves Kronfeld expresses his fears on her account. |
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