Welcome to Our Blog
Here we will share our impressions of the films we are studying and discuss reading assignments. You are expected to blog on the weekend about the latest screening and to comment on postings of other classmates as well. The blog will also serve as a resource for articles you find on the topics we are covering. Your first assignment will be to blog this weekend about a potential topic for your first film review.
Hi. Is this where we blog about Thief? I don’t have any idea, but this is where I’m gonna do it.
So, I’ve been thinking a lot about Katya’s death. In the 1950s, so few people survived abortions unscathed in the US; I doubt many survived them in Soviet Russia. Katya’s choice seems sort of like a death wish. I can understand how economically, emotionally, and socially it would be very difficult to raise two children each of a different father, alone. But in a society that stresses family, it seems a strange choice to make. In each boarding house, Katya, Sanya, and Tolayn become, at least temporarily, a cohesive unit. Or rather, they pretend to be. They certainly fool their neighbors. Would it have been so difficult for Katya and her two children to find a new boarding house and make a new family of neighbors and fellow comrades?
Maybe I’m being too logical about this. Maybe for a woman who was in such an intense roller coaster of a relationship as Katya was in, being reminded of the child’s father every time he/she speaks or smiles is too much to bare.
I think in my paper I’d like to broadly examine the idea of patriarchy in Soviet Russia through the film’s portrayal of the relationship between the boy Sanya and his adoptive father Tolyan. How is this relationship indicative of the relationship between comrades and country, or, more specifically, between men and motherland? Furthermore, I’d like to think about the role of Stalin as a father figure in Soviet Russia. What does it mean to the film that Toylan tells Sanya that he is the son of Stalin (and tells him it’s a secret, no less)? Finally, how does the breakdown of the relationship between Sanya and Toylan parallel historical events and social feelings during the breakdown of the Soviet Union?
“The Thief” left me with many questions. A great source of them was Toljan’s claim of being Stalin’s son. The tattoo, I’d imagine, was a prison tattoo, used so he wouldn’t be hit by guards on the chest. It was probably easier to make something up than to say that he was in prison, but the grandeur of the lie surprised me. He might have been trying to instill a sense in Sanja that Stalin was the father of all people in the Soviet Union. He also might have been trying to instill a sense of grandeur in himself and have Sanja respect him more, which leads me to another question.
Toljan’s true intentions were unclear. Whether he was merely interested in Katja or actually took an interest in Sanja can be argued. My thoughts, though, are that it was a bit of both. While he would sometimes push Sanja away and only take interest in Katja, he also at times acted a father figure for Sanja. During the scenes where he helps Sanja deal with the neighborhood bullies and in the bathhouse, he instills a sense of what he thinks a man should be in Sanja. He might have lost his father at a young age as well and seen himself in Sanja, but he also might have been a complete hedonist who saw him as nothing more than a tool to help steal.
An idea that I would like to write about is the idea of Sanja’s search of serenity in a role model, such as his mother, father, or Toljan. The repeated visions of his father and how they ended once he started seeing Toljan as a father figure show an underlying for some need of someone to look up to. He also becomes completely emotionally shattered when he sees Toljan with another women at the end of the film and feels that he and his mother have been completely betrayed. These ideals are something that I would like to look into further.