Which is to say, I'm going to complain now. I think I've mentioned some of the positives of this program--namely, that it's the holy grail--but it also has a few flaws, the foremost of which is the fact that we have ten hours of activities planned every day.
That's sort of an exaggeration. We have three hours of class in the morning, and an hour and a half of lecture in the afternoon, and then usually two or three hours worth of something after that.
It is, however, also not an exaggeration: I leave at 8:45 in the morning, and have so far returned at times like 9:15, 10:00, and 5:15. Part of this is because I tend to walk home, but I feel that it's fair to include that: it takes a long time.
And some of the activities they plan for us--
We have movie days; there are supposed to be seven of them. It starts with a lecture by a student of international film, continues to a movie, and then finishes with a small amount of additional discussion about the movie. It may just be that I'm in a bad mood today, but everything I just said is a terrible idea.
By the time four o'clock rolls around--and that's when these movie things start--we've all been concentrating on Russian for, oh, eight hours or so. This, as it turns out, is actually very difficult, and I don't think any of us get enough sleep, so it's probably fair to say that we not only don't give a damn about Russian film at that point--most of us are actually against it. And then, as I mentioned, the first film was silent. And boring. Very good for our Russian.
The second film was Ballad of a Soldier, which was a 1959 war/love story. Maybe I don't understand classic film or, again, maybe I'm in a bad mood, but this was probably the cheesiest film I've ever seen. Some films try for this status, and fall short because of it: this one was sincere. It goes something like this: Alyosha is a 19-yr old signal corps member, and he is going to die alone in a foreign country.
Alyosha begins by single-handedly eliminating a pair of German tanks in a moment of panic. In place of commendation for these heroics, he asks for a day's leave to go home to see his mother, because he didn't get to say good-bye and he wants to repair a hole in the roof. On the way home, boy meets girl who just happens to sneak a ride on the same train, and they fall not-quite-instantly in love. Eventually they separate, Alyosha gets home long enough to visit his mother for about five minutes, and then heads back off to the war.
That's a little cheesy, but it could be well done. The things they do along the way, though! Before he gets to the train, Alyosha encounters a friendly happy soldier who wants him to take a message to his wife while he's between trains; the rest of his friendly happy platoon overhears this and pesters the sergeant until he agrees to let Alyosha take their two cakes of soap as a gift to the wife. At the train station he helps out a crippled soldier going home, and convinces him to go back to his wife. Not all of these have to do with wives, but do you see where this is going? There are probably a dozen or more scenes that are included as obviously sentimental slice-of-life deals. And I don't want you to think the acting is good, either, but you'd have to see that for yourself. Another day, I probably would have called it so bad it was good.
Also, this was preceded by half an hour of the lecturer telling us how much he liked this move, and 15 minutes of interview with the director, who was talking about how the movie was his magnum opus.
None of that was strictly relevant, though. The relevant thing was that it had subtitles in English, so we weren't really learning much Russian from it anyway, were we? Couldn't we have just gone home?
I'm being unfair, I know. But I really wanted to sleep.
Ok. I think that's enough of that. Next time I'll actually talk about St. Petersburg; I promise.
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