Please remember that the Baikal is there mainly to give me the time of 336 rivers; the other side of a story of rubbish; the foreignness of Siberia, its stories of couples - Angara and Yenisei; Khorido and the swan-wife. That the old people's life in abjection was a pact of two lovers. Olga and the narrator. So is this a movie 'about' the Baikal, or a movie 'about' stories of couples? Or is it a movie 'about' telling stories? The mix-ups, the other version? Do you really think that my interest in the Baikal is any more than its function in this movie?1
Lake Baikal, near Irkutsk, is one of the world's natural wonders. It's 636km long, it covers 31,500sq km (roughly the size of Belgium) and it is one of the Earth's geographical features visible from space. It contains about one fifth of the world's fresh water reserves and it is the deepest lake in the world with a maximum depth in the middle of 1,620m (deeper than three Empire State buildings standing on top of each other underwater). The lake freezes over each year from January to May and the local inhabitants then build makeshift roads across it. In summer, the water is remarkably clear and it is possible to see to depths of forty metres.2
The lake supports between 1,500 and 1,800 animal species - most of them peculiar to Baikal - and it is home to the world's only freshwater seal, the Nerpa. Its unusually rich environment appears to be due to geological properties. Mark Sergeev, a poet from Irkutsk, writes that
Baikal water is truly living: from the surface to the depths, 1637 metres, Baikal has given a home to a multitude of forms of life. Unlike all other deep lakes of the world in which the lower depths are dead, poisoned by hydrogen sulphide and other gases, here the entire thickness is rich in oxygen. The water is mixed both by horizontal sea currents, around the lake and around each of its three hollows, and by vertically rising and falling currents. Now, scientists have discovered that thermal springs beat up from the bottom of Baikal, and no kind of pressure - and at the very bottom of Baikal it is enormous - can prevent the underground forces from driving out these jets. Moreover, the only viviparous fish in the temperate zone, the small, transparent golomyanka, more than half of which consists of fat, plys calmly between the surface and the bottom. Deep water fish, as is well known, can withstand the dreadful pressure with the help of a special air-bladder. The golomyanka has no such air-bladder. This is Baikal. The beginning of its wonders.3
For many, it has become a measure of the world's ecological status and reports on the lake's health vary. While the Russian authorities claim that there has been some environmental damage in the past, they say that this has now been reversed. Other accounts, such as the following, claim the opposite:
Factories and pulp mills have been dumping hundreds of millions of gallons of effluent into Lake Baikal each year for decades. As a result, animal life in the lake has been cut by more than 50 percent over the past half century. Untreated sewage is dumped into virtually all tributaries to the lake. Islands of alkaline sewage have been observed floating on the lake, including one that was 18 miles long and three miles wide. These "islands" have polluted the air around the lake as well as the water in it. Thousands of acres of forest surrounding the lake have been denuded, causing such erosion that dust storms have been reported. So much forest land in the Lake Baikal region has been destroyed that some observers reported shifting sands that link up with the Gobi Desert; there are fears that the desert may sweep into Siberia and destroy the lake4
The territory surrounding the Baikal is inhabited by descendents of the Buryat, a shamanistic society whose people believe that the lake is home to their protecting spirits. In the 1990s, there has been an revival in this culture with the appearance of many young shamen who have created a spiritual centre on the lake island of Olkhon. At a 1993 ceremonial rite at this centre, shamen watched as a wide band appeared on the surface of the Baikal, interpreting it as a possible sign from God.
The lake lends itself to interpretation. Almost every account of the lake's geographical and physical properties refers to the chameleon-like character of the water:
Even more astounding are the colour metamorphoses of the lake's surface. The water taking into itself the smallest changes in the weather, the angle of the sun, moving clouds, or mists coming from the taiga, seasonal changes on the shores, soft greenary, the malachite radiance of summer and fire of autumn - change the shades from blue-white or silver-grey to a piercing blue or slate-black with white wave sprays. You can stand for hours on the shore and, riveted, watch this ever-changing sport of water and sky, taiga and cliffs. Even those who live here and see the lake-sea daily and hourly, cannot boast of ever having seen Baikal identical on any two occasions...5
For Joao Penalva, Lake Baikal is the perfect screen on which to project his amalgam of stories. The immensity of the place, its overwhelming natural statistics, its burgeoning flora and fauna, and all its human history provide a universal backdrop for the couples that appear in 336 PEK. Perhaps because the film has a Russian setting and the visual imagery is slowly paced, comparisons have been made between Penalva and Tarkovsky. A closer relationship, however, might exist between the ocean in Tarkovsky's Solaris and Penalva's Baikal. For Kelvin, the protagonist in Tarkovsky's story, the ocean reflects the desires and past histories of any mind that perceives it. It acts as a mirror, unimportant in itself but representing the story of Kelvin and his wife or Kelvin and his father - an ocean as backdrop to the story of couples. For Penalva, the Baikal is not the focus of the film yet its amorphous character easily absorbs the various stories that he has woven together.
The lake acts as a pretext for the gathering and binding of disparate narrative elements. This process of absorbing such diverse matter reveals another level of imitation within 336 PEK. In the classical tradition, imitation referred not so much to the mimicking of something or someone as the ability to transform that raw material into an entirely new work. This transformation was most commonly described by using the example of digestion and it finds its most powerful expression in Seneca's Epistles. In letter 84 'On Gathering Ideas' Seneca says we should gather ideas as bees cull nectar from flowers, transforming it into honey:
We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading ... we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origins, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came. This is what we see nature doing in our own bodies without any labour on our part; the food we have eaten, as long as it retains its original quality and floats in our stomachs as an undiluted mass, is a burden; but it passes into tissue and blood only when it has been changed from its original form ... Let us loyally welcome such foods and make them our own, so that something that is one may be formed out of many elements.6
This metaphor was still in use by the Renaissance when Erasmus came to describe the best way in which to bring together source material:
All that you have devoured in a long course of varied reading must be thoroughly digested and by the action of thought incorporated into your deepest mental processes ... Then your mind, fattened on fodder of all kinds, will generate out of its own resources not a speech redolent of this or that flower or leaf or herb, but one redolent of your personality, your sensitivities, your feelings ... 7
Today, under the guise of consumerism, it permeates all aspects of western culture. In an age of information, the assimilation of material is paramount as is our need to transform it into something new, creating a construct that presents each of us as an individual, different from each other.
The paradox in 336 PEK is that Penalva absorbs, digests and transforms a wide array of stories and creates an individual presence - the engineer from Irkutsk - beneath which he still lurks as a spectral figure. Incognito, he oversees the transformation of his collected material, occasionally surfacing in the background like Hitchcock in a crowd scene from one of his movies.
In 336 PEK Penalva is the invisible translator. The Baikal becomes home to his various stories and the Russian language carries the narrative in the soundtrack. Neither the lake nor the voiceover are important in themselves, rather they demonstrate the process of translation that has taken place. Discussing this aspect of the film, Penalva says that
Quite a bit has been written about 336 PEK, mostly focusing on the mechanics of memory, and it has become a film 'about' memory. To me it is still primarily a film which uses its original English text as subtitles to its Russian translation, which in turn is the film's soundtrack. The 'plot' is 'Russian' because the text is spoken in Russian.8
Translation (traditionally another form of imitation) at once represents the possibility of transforming a narrative from one language to another and the impossibility of ever acheiving a like-for-like transfer of meaning in that process. By placing the original text in the subtitles and ascribing the translation to the soundtrack, Penalva inverts cinematic hierarchies and exposes the gap in meaning that is at the heart of translation. We cannot understand the main text in the voiceover and we rush to find answers in the transient subtitles. In this way, 336 PEK is a genuinely 'foreign' movie - it confronts us with the distance between experience and language. It tells us that we are never at home.
Notes
1. Joao Penalva, email to Francis McKee, Tuesday, May 2, 2000.
2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/choice/spreadlove/siberia.shtml
3. Mark Sergeev, 'Word of Poet', http://www.friends-partners.org/~irkutsk/baikal/mark.htm
4. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, 'Why Socialism Causes Pollution',
http://www.fee.org/freeman/92/dilore.html
5. Mark Sergeev, 'Word of Poet', http://www.friends-partners.org/~irkutsk/baikal/mark.htm
6. Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, 3 vols. trans. Richard M. Gummere (London: William Heinemann, 1930) 2: 278-81.
7. Erasmus, The Ciceronian: A Dialogue on the Ideal Latin Style, trans. Betty I. Knott. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986, 402 vol. 27 of The Collected Works of Erasmus.
8. See Penalva,'On the other hand, this is not my voice'