What we see is history. The striking wooden lighthouse on Khodovarikha burned down, as we learn at the end of Stanislaw Mucha’s documentary about a Siberian weather observation station. And its four protagonists would no longer be found here today either: Vladimir, the former head of the meteorological team, bought another station that had been abandoned and moved there, the married couple Sascha and Alexander gave up the meteorological profession entirely, and the neighbor Wassili died, two years ago, when Corona broke out and the old man who was born on Khodovaricha was one of the first to protect himself with the Russian vaccine Sputnik. A few days later he was dead.
What we see is contemporary history. Immediately after Stalin came to power, he had 22 such observation posts built in the far north of the Soviet Union on the Arctic coast; Khodovaricha is the northernmost of these, a peninsula in the Barents Sea. Three people are stationed there, and one can probably not speak of career highlights.
When Stanislaw Mucha first heard about the existence of this place in 2016, when he was shooting his documentary “Kolyma – Road of Bones” in Siberia about today’s perception of the GULag system, the weather station had been managed by the same man for almost twenty years. But when Mucha was allowed to travel to the restricted military area for the first time in autumn 2018 with his cameraman Marcus Winterbauer and an interpreter, this director had just been instructed in psychiatry himself and a completely new crew consisting of Wladimir, Sascha and Alexander had been there for two months there. They didn’t know what this film crew would do to them for two and a half weeks. Never mind that it would come back for a month each the following winter and summer. And you can see that on their faces.
Since the beginning of the weather station, the supply ship has come once a year and delivered filled barrels. An empty one has never been taken away again. Sascha and Alexander lining up the leftovers.
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Image: W-film/Cinnabar
What we see is a horror story. Of unbearable narrowness and monotony, but which never turns into loud tones in front of the camera. And from a border crossing. When Alexander had to go to the nearest town for dental treatment between the winter and summer visits of the film team (the return trip took two weeks), Vladimir made advances to Sascha, who was staying behind with him. Mucha doesn’t say how far they went, but once they say that Sascha was dragged through the station; so you can assume rape. After Alexander’s return, the encroaching leader made off, but when Mucha is there for the last time, Vladimir arrives again: with the supply ship that passes by once a year. The air crackles in the final minutes of the film, although nothing is happening. And that’s what makes the horror.
“Be glad the film doesn’t smell”
What we see is “Weather Maker”. This title is metaphorical and at the same time concrete, because the measurement data collected every three hours by the crew on Khodovaricha are used for weather forecasting. Above all, however, the three meteorologists are caught in a permanent personal low, they are forced to make bad weather. How else could it be in a place like this? “Be glad that the film doesn’t smell,” said Mucha at the Frankfurt preview of his film.
Stanislaw Mucha, born in Poland in 1970 and educated in Berlin-Babelsberg, has been our cinema man for the farther East of Europe since “Absolut Warhola”, his documentary about Andy Warhol’s Slovakian home village from 2001: for the regions, one could say, where to Volker Koepp no longer wants to drive. In contrast to Koepp’s work, Mucha’s films have nothing melancholic about them, but rather take a subversive look at the post-Soviet situation. “Wettermacher” is no exception, because the sparse commentary, as always spoken by Mucha himself, is almost maliciously laconic. And the tundra doesn’t exactly invite admiration either.
For a long time one wonders what the film wants to document. Climate change is touched on once, the Russian war against the Ukraine only began after the cut was completed, and we learn next to nothing about the professional activities of the three meteorologists. But when the personal drama unfolds, “Weathermaker” becomes another muchatypical mood picture from the fringes of our civilization. It shudders – and not because of the cold.
