It’s been thirty years since we’ve been this worried about a nuclear apocalypse. In the 80s, the balance between the two great geopolitical powers was so fragile that the slightest provocation, the smallest misunderstanding, might have caused the outbreak of a nuclear war. During that decade, the ‘before’ and ‘after’ scenarios of such a war became the subject of several films: almost documentary in style, educational, and made with dozens of technical and scientific advisors. They were as clinical as an emergency manual, and absolutely terrifying. As early as 1965, Peter Watkins had made the wonderfully chilling The War Game for the BBC, but the film was considered “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting”. By the 80s, nothing was too horrifying any more. The same BBC produced and broadcast Threads (half Ken Loach, half George A. Romero: kitchen sink apocalypse) and other countries produced their own versions with the same purpose. These are methodical films, like military reports. They are cautionary films.

Dead Man’s Letters, the first feature film by Konstantin Lopushansky, is not a cautionary film. Rather, I would say it is a film essay. One thing is clear: the manner in which we arrived here is of no particular interest to the director. When the film begins, the image is already tinged with a yellow, sallow light. The old man (the titular dead man) is no longer alive, but is still yet to die. He and his wife are shut in the basement of a museum, protected from the poisonous air on the surface. We note two sources for the work of Lopushansky: the museum as a Noah’s Ark of the idea of civilisation, and the various ways in which that civilisation, ours, is destined to bring about its own demise. Dead Man’s Letters is the first film in his Apocalypse Quartet. Sometimes it is military, at others it is climatic. This one exploded with the force of ten thousand suns. Walls were ripped apart like paper. The wind is dense, metallic. And the dust floating in the air means there is no longer any sense of day and night, a cycle existing since the beginning of creation because “even God needed to have some notion of time”. That’s one of the things the old man writes in the many letters he sends, but that will never reach their destination. Another character writes “a draft message for a future civilisation”. Both write letters to the future. But what future will that be, and what civilisation will read them?

In an interview, Lopushansky was asked if he was an optimist or pessimist. In his reply he cited Aleksandr Blok (I haven’t found the source, but I will trust him): “Optimism is a very poor philosophy because it does not understand the tragedy of human life”. Lopushansky understands it. But would it be fair to call him a pessimist? The old man in this film cannot and does not want to believe that the world can simply die (but this may be due to a sense of personal responsibility: we hear of his discoveries, which earned him a Nobel prize). We don’t really know who this man is, and it’s not important. Later on we find out that the war didn’t need anyone in particular to start it off. In the end, humanity may meet its demise due to simple human error.

And after all this, what is left? The first act of this new civilisation is to gather together those who will help to build it, and leave those it deems unnecessary to fend for themselves: the orphans, the sick, the elderly. The museum basement will keep them — them and everything else that no longer holds any value: art and history, books saved from the furnace, ideas. The dead who, despite everything, go on living.

To generalise, let us say there are two types of Russian director: the scene setters and the painters. Lopushansky learnt from both. Emil Loteanu was one of the former: literary, choral, choreographic in the way he arranged his actors and the camera, excessive (in that manner of excess that opposes tedium, about which Chekhov wrote so well). But it was another of Lopushansky’s teachers that was truly fundamental to his aesthetic and work ethic, one of the most important director-painters: Andrei Tarkovsky. A painter of icons, like that other Andrei, Rublev: a painter-monk, poet, philosopher. When choosing who to take up an apprenticeship with, Lopushansky accepted the offer to join the shoot of Stalker (1979), and the experience would become a defining one. That film, like this one, also begins and ends in yellow, but there is more to it than that, of course: from Tarkovsky he learnt self-denial, the idea that making a film is, above all, a moral act, and that everything else is secondary. The belief that art cannot be achieved without sacrifice (another title by the master).

Towards the end of Dead Man’s Letters there is a scene that could have been filmed by Tarkovsky. And, in fact, it was, in Nostalgia (1983): a man crosses a space, from right to left, with a lit candle in his hand, trying to prevent it from blowing out. After various attempts, he succeeds and, his promise kept, dies. Here, it is a girl who carries the flame shielded in her palm. She walks from right to left. And afterwards, she lights more candles. Did she fulfill her mission? Will she live? Before dying, the old man leaves them with a prophecy: “Remember: the world has not died (…) for while a man follows his path, there is still hope for him”. Lopushansky knows well that the world belongs to the orphans.