Elizabeth Randa
Russian 255
Final Paper
Professor D. Nemec Ignashev

Rogozhkin’s Tower of Babel Set in Northern Finland in September of 1944, near the end of World War II, The Cuckoo is a look at how common experience and human compassion transcend nationality, ideology, and even language. In 2002, Russian director Alexander Rogozhkin created a film in which the main characters are forced together by war to find in one another, companionship, love, and ultimately understanding. The film is made more complicated in that each of the three main characters, Anni, Veikko, and Ivan, all speak different languages. Anni, played by first-time actress Anni-Kristiina Juuso, is a native speaker of Saami, the language of the indigenous people of Northern Finland, more commonly known as Lapland. Anni-Kristiina plays a young Saami woman living alone, as the army took her husband away. Ville Haapasalo, more famous as an actor in Russia than in his native Finland, plays a condemned sniper, and speaks Finnish. Lastly, Ivan Bychkov, plays a soldier being taken to a court martial for anti-soviet sentiment, speaks Russian. The three come together at Anni’s home. The three try to communicate to one another with varying levels of success. As Rogozhkin said in a statement, they “understand each other while not understanding each other.”
One of the first things an audience member notices about this film is the fact that the three main characters do not speak a common language, though are not discouraged and continue talking. Communications, or rather miscommunications, between characters lead to comic, and tragic, moments. Rogozhkin himself said that the
Complexity of the relationship or the heroes, where each of them speaks in their native language, was like solving a puzzle, not only for me as a director, but also for all the people working on the film. I wanted to create the effect for the audience of understanding the characters without knowing the language that they speak. This reflects my own feelings of the film as a kind of Tower of Babel that must be overcome by both the viewers, and the heroes.
However, on the surface, the puzzle isn’t as difficult as Rogozhkin says. Luckily for the audience, they are privileged viewers. Unlike the characters, they have subtitles. Not much is lost on the viewers who are able to follow the dialog through the subtitles, and laugh at appropriate moments. It is what the audience does with the text they are given, visual and verbal, that is important. The typical viewer will laugh, and maybe cry, but then forget. The educated observant viewer knows the director never does anything without reason. These viewers look more closely at the empty spaces and listen harder to the silences, reading between the lines of the text.
Looking closer at the communications between characters, one begins to see that they understanding one another on some level. If not, why continue taking? To assist in understanding what is going on beyond the words and the immediacy of natural language, one needs too look at some theory of communication. Roman Jakobson theories on linguistics and poetics, which looks at language in verbal communications, are applicable and very useful in looking at this film. Jakobson’s theory states that there are six different aspects of language, and each aspect has a specific function to perform in the course of communicating. The six aspects are context, addresser, addressee, message, contact, and code. The corresponding functions are referential, emotive, conative, poetic, phatic, and metalingual. The aspect and functions of language, described by Jakobson, all preformed a specific task in the relying of information. The addresser sends a message to the addressee. This message is understood through its context, code, and contact. All these factors are involved in some step of verbal communication. Schematically, Jakobson’s theory this looks like (353):
CONTEXT (referential)
MESSAGE (poetic)
ADDRESSER (emotive)---------------------------------ADDRESSEE (conative)
CONTACT (phatic)
CODE (metalingual)
These aspects, and their corresponding functions, work together to create a readable and understandable language of verbal communication. As explained by Jakobson, the six functions are not monopolistic, but rather hierarchical. The functions work together to produce understandable verbal communication. It is difficult to find a verbal message that fulfils only one of the six functions. Communication depends upon the cooperation and combination of multiple functions. According to Jakobson, the “verbal structure of a message depends primarily on the predominate function” (353). The other participant functions however, should not be neglected, but be recognized, noted, and analyzed for their roles in relaying the message. If one of the functions fail, or is absent, other functions just become all the more essential to the relaying of the message. The result is a message that might be more convoluted and interpretable, but not completely unreadable, uninterpretable, or impossible to understand.
Verbal communication obviously needs an addresser and addressee, a speaker and an audience. The addresser starts the chain of communication. The addresser fulfills a specific linguistic function. This function is the emotive, or expressive, function. The emotive function has more to do with how the addresser is relaying the message, than what is being relayed. The emotive function reveals the speaker’s attitude towards his subject. The emotive function depends upon the emotion and expressive nature of how the message is given, thereby diminishing the ability of the message to carry information. The role of the addresser in verbal communication, is one, whose the function can be seen as the least intrinsically “linguistic” of all the linguistic functions. The speaker communicates with an audience. This audience is the addressee aspect of language. They perform the conative function. This function refers to those aspects of communication that attempt to invoke certain responses in the speaker.
The first two functions concern the people involved in the relaying of a message. The remaining four aspects of language, context, message, contact, and code, are all concern the message sent. The context aspect of language has the referential function, also known as the denotative or cognitive function. This function defines the relationship between the message and the object it refers to. The context aspect, and its corresponding referential function, is the “leading task of numerous messages,” according to Jakobson (353). The context aspect of language and communication enables us to refer to the world independently of our different interpretations of this world. The referential function is about language’s power to communicate. The next aspect of language in the chain is that of the message. The message aspect has the poetic function. This function is about the formal elements of language, the decorative or aesthetic function of language. The poetic function is the message for its own sake. It de-emphasizes the referential function, but does not negate it. The third of these functions concerning the message is that of the contact aspect, the phatic function. The phatic function is the channel through which communication can be established, prolonged, or discontinued. The last of the four aspects and functions of language concerned with the message is the aspect of code. The aspect of code performs the metalingual function. This function is mostly simply understood as language, the verbal code. These six aspects of language, addresser, addressee, context, message, contact, and code, and their six corresponding functions, emotive, conative, referential, poetic, phatic, and metalingual, have different roles to play in the delivery of a message. Together, they give meaning and understanding to verbal communication.
Rogozhkin’s The Cuckoo uses these aspects and functions of language to further communication, and inspire miscommunication between the three main characters. Each function of language is represented in these communications. At times, each function succeeds and each fails. It is the failure of the functions, and the absence of others, that leads to miscommunications and misunderstandings. These misunderstandings are what drive the movie in terms of comedy and tragedy, as well as in terms of plot and character development. I will be focusing my attention to the latter, that of character development and evolution. To do this, I have found it most helpful to look at the conversations and verbal communications between the characters individually. What the characters talk about, and how they talk, vary depending upon with whom they are speaking. The conversations between all three characters, Anni and Veikko, Anni and Ivan, and Ivan and Veikko are unique in their form, use of Jakobsons’ functions, and their evolution, or lack of evolution, throughout the movie.
When all three characters are talking together, the conversations are short. These conversations are usually just one sentence long, and usually directions or commands. This is probably because to carry on a three sided conversation is near impossible when your audience cannot understand enough of what you are saying to respond, and that response wouldn’t be completely understood either. These communications are practical and function more than conversational. Anni dominates this category in how often she talks to Ivan and Veikko together. Out of the eleven times the three of them talk together, that I counted, Anni is the addresser in nine of these incidences. Veikko addresses Ivan and Anni only twice, and Ivan never.
These communications are rooted in the conative function. They are often commands such as “come and eat,” (47:20) “let’s go,” (1:02:33) and “come with me” (1:16:42). Throughout the film, these communications, between all three characters, do not drastically change or evolve in depth or understanding. The closest to change is when Veikko and Ivan leave, Anni does say more than just imperative “go,” but, what she does say is very similar to previous individual conversations between herself the two men. In these communications, very few of the functions fail. Both Ivan and Veikko receive Anni’s basic messages, through the conative function as well as the referential, emotive and phatic functions. Very rarely does any of these functions fail to such a degree that the message is rendered incomprehensible or impossible to understand.
The communications between all three of the characters are different than communication between just two characters. When only two characters are involved in a discussion or conversation, more of the functions are involved in relaying messages. Unlike the basic and simple messages that pass between Anni, Veikko, and Ivan when together, the messages between Anni and Veikko, Anni and Ivan, and Ivan and Veikko, are usually generally misread, but usually at least partially understood. These dialogs are misinterpreted due to the failure of certain functions, and the inability of other functions to carry the message to a successful conclusion. The relationship between the characters develops throughout the movie. This relationship is directly related to their conversations and the different levels of understanding that evolve.
Anni and Veikko’s relationship goes through a circular evolution. The first verbal communication is very typical of most real conversations. Contact between the characters is established when Veikko gets Anni’s attention by addressing her specifically, with a greeting (36:40). Veikko tests the code function by asking Anni if they share a common language, Finnish. When he doesn’t get a response, he checks the reception of his message by asking if she understood, and asks again louder. Anni, even if she doesn’t understand the code, she understands the message. She makes use of the referential and emotive functions. She understands from past experience and tradition that Veikko is addressing her with a greeting, and she understands what he wants through intonation, physical gestures, and recognizing the chain attached to Veikko and guessing at its purpose.
The conversations between Anni and Veikko depend heavily upon the referential and emotive functions. The high point in the level of understanding between Anni and Veikko is just before they have sex. This is when they seem to understand one another most completely. This is seen most clearly in the scene where Anni tells Veikko that she wouldn’t mind if he threw her down on the deerskins, and Veikko responds to her sexually suggestive advances by telling her not to kid around because he hasn’t seen a woman in two months (54:30). At this point in their relationship, the emotive and referential functions further the poetic, to create a partial understanding, in which most of message is transmitted and comprehended by the addressee.
However, after Anni and Veikko do have sex, their level of communication, while they still talk about the same things, they never communicate at the same level of understanding. The functions begin to fail them. The emotive function fails which leads to a context failure, thereby rendering the message irrelevant and inconsequential. Veikko becomes less helpful to Anni. When she is trying to fix the barn, he takes the logs from her, and takes them away (1:12:30). He doesn’t understand her protests, anger, or her. He has stopped listening. He does not hear her anger and frustration, rejecting the emotive function, leading to a referential function failure. Their relationship regresses. In the scene when Ivan and Veikko go off to see the plane crash, Veikko tells her to say behind (1:20:05). He tells her verbally, but also with the same hand gesture she gave him at the beginning of the film, subconsciously, acknowledging the diminished level of understanding. In the same scene, as they walk off to investigate the plane crash, Anni talks about Ivan, and not about Veikko (1:20:12). Ivan has replaced Veikko.
Anni’s relationship with Ivan is more representative of an evolving and changing relationship. The understanding between the two increases and grows throughout the movie. Ivan understands Anni better, and on deeper levels, than Veikko. The beginning of Anni and Ivan’s relationship begins with an unconscious Ivan. At first he doesn’t try to make Anni understand him. His initial conversations with Anni are brief, with purpose, and polite. He asks where he is, and lets her know that he has to go to the bathroom (29:30). Anni does not understand the first, but does understand the latter. Ivan is very polite and follows rules of etiquette at meals, thanking her for dinner and telling her it was tasty. Ivan does not attempt extraneous conversation with Anni, everything he says has a purpose, and in his mind it is reasonable to assume that Anni understands. Because he assumes this, he never asks her if she has understood him.
Ivan begins to grow and his conversations with Anni change after he notices that Anni is attracted to Veikko. Ivan understands Anni better than Veikko does. He is able to listen to her and read her words more clearly. He knows when Anni is “smitten” with Veikko (52:40). He hears it in her tone. Despite the fact that he doesn’t understand her words, he can still hear the emotion behind them. He gives up on the metalingual function well before Veikko does, and beings to try to reassemble messages by using other functions available to him. Ivan’s problem is that he is able to understand the emotive function, but misreads it. Anni also has trouble reading Ivan’s comments. She doesn’t have the same understanding of the world as he does. Her world is much different and smaller. Her world revolves around work, food, and sex. When Ivan shows her the picture of Yesenin and tells her Yesenin himself told Ivan to write poetry, Anni sees instead, a picture of Ivan’s beautiful wife (58:00). This misreading of the emotive and referential functions lead to a miscommunication. Neither Anni nor Ivan can understand the context, so the message incomplete and lost.
Similar to sex being central to the relationship between Anni and Veikko, it is also important in the Anni and Ivan’s relationship. However, the connection between Anni and Ivan isn’t as strong as the one between Anni and Veikko’s. When Anni tells him to come to her, Ivan doesn’t understand the context, and is unable to understand the emotive. He thinks he understands her. He thinks she is tired and need to rest. Instead, she tells him her real name, Kaki, cuckoo. Throughout the movie Ivan becomes more connected to his emotions through Anni. This scene, where Ivan and the audience learn her true name, the linguistic connection between her and Veikko, a condemned sniper was called kukushka, cuckoo, is realized. However, it is Ivan that she chooses. She repeats her very conative statement of “Gerlost, come to me” (1:36:20). He understands when she pats the bed. He needed the physical to reinforce the verbal. Their goodbye is also representative of the evolution of their relationship. In the beginning, Ivan called Anni a “stupid woman,” (48:50) but later he tells her that she took his “heart straightaway” (1:07:02). In their final farewell, Ivan says “Thank you, my dear, for everything…you’re a good woman” (1:37:35). He thanks this woman who helped him heal and grow as a human being. Veikko on the other hand is very brief in his thanks and goodbyes. All he says is “Thank you, Anni” (1:37:48). Ivan offers no physical affection to Anni upon their leaving, but Veikko tries to kiss her, a kiss she rejects. The emotive function, the context, and the message, the verbal expression was more important than the physical representation of a kiss.
In looking at the functions used by the characters to make sense of messages, one big function I have not mentioned much is the metalingal function of the code aspect. This is because, as the trailer for the movies states, this is a film about “three different people, three different cultures, three different languages.” The metalingual function is completely absent through most of the time the three characters are together. However, upon closer study, when looking at the conversations and communications between Ivan and Veikko, looking at the code becomes more important. Ivan and Veikko each try to find a common code of language. Veikko tries to open the lines of communication with Ivan in German, but Ivan’s knowledge of German, at least that which he is willing to admit to, is limited (38:50). Ivan, like Veikko, uses German only once. He asks Veikko if he has a cigarette in German, as that is the only avenue of expression that he currently felt was available to him (49:10). Ivan and Veikko are more acutely aware of the language barrier. This barrier prompts them to always second guess the successful reception of their messages. Veikko is always asking Ivan if he has understood, and Ivan unknowingly answers Veikko’s question with side comments about how he doesn’t understand. Veikko even apologizes to Ivan for not knowing Russian. The absence of the metalingual function hinders the evolution of communication, and ultimately, the growth of a relationship, between Ivan and Veikko.
When Ivan and Veikko admit the absence of common language, at least one they both knew sufficiently to communicate, they being to explore the uses of other functions. When Veikko introduced himself to Anni and Ivan, Ivan tells him to “go away” (39:45). Veikko takes what Ivan says at face value. Expecting that in context to the conversation, it is his name, Veikko begins to call Ivan “Gerlost.” Veikko ignored Ivan’s tone, the emotive function, causing him to misread Ivan’s statement of general hatred of fascists, which he assumed Veikko to be. Similarly, Veikko cannot get Ivan to see that he doesn’t want to fight in the war anymore—that he has given up. Veikko repeats that his war is over, but Ivan doesn’t understand. Ivan sees a man in a German SS uniform with a gun. No matter how loudly Veikko proclaims he wants no further part of the war, and that the gun has no bullets, Ivan cannot understand.
Ivan cannot see beyond the physical gestures and representations of Veikko and his attempted communications. To try to make Ivan understand him, Veikko tries to explain through literary examples. He brings up Tolstoy and War and Peace. Tolstoy is the same in Russian as in Finnish, so Ivan understands due to the metalingual function. However, War and Peace is different in Finnish than in Russian, so Ivan doesn’t understand the title (44:40). Ivan associates Tolstoy not with the novel, but with Iasnaia Poliana, Tolstoy’s home, that during World War II the Germans occupied and burnt. In trying to get Ivan to understand that his gun has no bullets, and the words in the title of War and Peace, the emotive function of Veikko’s messages, unintentionally and unbeknownst to Veikko, become more and more physically hostile to Ivan. The continued failure of the metalingual function leads to a context failure.
Despite the failure of functions, the two continue to talk. Veikko talks to Ivan, not to Anni, about his life before the war, and what he hopes his life will be after. He tells Ivan who really doesn’t care or understand, about his time at the University in Stockholm, and how he escaped from the rock. He also tells Ivan that he want to go home and write poetry or music, though he doesn’t know how to do either (1:16:20). Ivan, the poet condemned for expressing anti-soviet sentiments, listens, with the occasional comment about Veikko being a fascist. The level of understanding in their communications, and how Ivan responds to Veikko changes in the sauna. Ivan mistakenly thinks Veikko is talking about Anni when Veikko tells him he prefers Turkic baths to saunas (1:00:18). Ivan misreads the physical gestures Veikko gives. This misreading prompts Ivan to talk about Anni, and the women in his life. This misunderstanding begins a relationship between Ivan and Veikko that is not based upon perceived ideological differences.
This misunderstanding leads to a brief relationship that resembles friendship between the two men. They are torn apart again when Ivan finds the three Germans in the wood, and wants Veikko’s help in capturing them (1:14:00). Veikko doesn’t understand what Ivan wants. Ivan’s message is one full of emotion, not directed to Veikko, but at the real Germans, the real “fascists.” Veikko, not knowing the context of Ivan’s communication, misreads the emotive function as hostility directed at him, thereby creating a miscommunication and misunderstanding. This is the point where their tentative and strained relationship, based upon women and Anni, crumbles. The culminating moment in the final decent of their relationship is when Ivan shoots Veikko (1:22:30). Ivan doesn’t understand what was written in Finnish on the leaflets or Veikko’s words of joy for Finland’s surrender, through the referential or emotive functions. Veikko being shot is the ultimate consequence of language failure.
However, Anni is able to repair the damage the miscommunication caused, and Veikko’s death is avoided. Like Anni, Ivan never gave his real name. But, at the end of the movie, just after the men leave Anni’s to go their separate ways Ivan does tell Veikko his name is Ivan (1:38:43). Veikko doesn’t understand that the name Gerlost is not part of Ivan’s whole name, so he calls him Gerlost Ivan. Ivan understands Veikko’s words better than Veikko himself. Ivan laughs and tells Veikko to get lost too, and the two men part as friends, not enemies—men who share the commonality that is human existence. The functions of language and the resulting miscommunications both tear the two men apart, and assist in the development of a relationship of mutual friendship and understanding between them.
The communications between the characters give us insight into how they are forming their messages, on what levels, and through which functions these messages are failing. However, these communications look at how the functions involved with the message fail. What of the people involved? At times in the film the role of the addresser and addressee are not clear. The movie is in some ways a look at the binary opposition between talking and silence. The silence in the film, specifically during the times when all three characters are together, is an interesting study of the role of both the addresser and the addressee. After all three have come together, there are only two moments of prolonged silence. The first is just before the plane crashes (1:25:58). This part of the movie is compromised of all three characters alone in their environment and the frame. They begin to come back together again in the frame when we see a reflection of Anni in the mirror Ivan is looking in while shaving. All three are comfortable in the silence, and in one another’s company. This silence is peaceful, yet ominous, and almost reminiscent of the calm before the storm.
The other instance of silence is during the Land of the Dead scene (1:25:59-1:35:35). Inside the Land of the Dead we hear nothing. No one speaks. Ever so gradually we start to hear Anni. We hear the wind she blows, and the howling. The silence from verbal communication is broken just before Veikko returns from the Land of the Dead. We hear Anni’s voice say not to Veikko himself, but his spirit, “Spirit, return to your body!” (1:35:13). Verbal communication saves Veikko from the silence of death. In this film, silence is broken. In silence there is little misunderstanding, but for this understanding, the price is very high, for there is very little communication. Silence can be very meaningful, and Rogozhkin uses it to his advantage in this film. He uses it well to say a lot, not only in his camera work, but also in the stark comparison between the silence and the verbal communications between his characters.
Through the course of the movie the characters adapt to their setting and situation. However, only Ivan truly is changed by the experience. The communications between the characters is a representative of their growth. For Anni, her communications with Veikko and Ivan do not evolve to any great discernable extent. She is basically the same. Her world has not changed in the time from when the two men first arrived to when they leave. Her world is still one of basic necessities, food, work, and sex. It remains almost untouched and unaffected. However, Ivan and Veikko do leave Anni something to forever remind her of them, they leave her twin boys. Veikko also doesn’t change much in the time between his arrival and his departure. His attitudes and views are not questioned, challenged, or changed by his experiences and interactions with Anni and Ivan. His communications with Anni are about the same things and on the same level when he leaves as when he came. We do not really see how his communications with Ivan change, as they do not talk from the time when Ivan shoots Veikko, until they part as friends on the hill. We do know the relationship between the two evolves due to this last conversation.
Ivan on the other hand, does change. He comes to Anni’s a soldier, injured and rejected by his country. During his stay at Anni’s he heals, physically, from his initial wound, and emotionally. At his departure, he is no longer “out of touch with life,” and his soul does not feel empty (1:12:22). Being able to vocalize his inner monologue without fear of rejection or scorn provided Ivan with a nonjudgmental sympathetic audience during his time of introspection. The time with Anni and Veikko was a time of self-reflection and self-evaluation. It was a time for Ivan to evaluate and re-evaluate his life and the role he played in it.
Looking closer at the communications between the characters helps the educated viewer to further understand their relationships. The absence, or failure, of functions to accurately and completely relay messages leads to miscommunication. Communication, miscommunication, and the relationships between the characters are what drive the film. To look closer at these communications one needs to know more about how language and communication work, and the different parts of language that make communication possible. To do this, the theories of Roman Jakobson are very relevant. Knowing how the six aspects, and six functions, work together to create communication is essential in understanding the miscommunications between Anni, Veikko, and Ivan. By looking at the communications between the characters one notices that the message is delivered. Even if in a disfigured, distorted, and convoluted form, there is still some part of the message that remains readable and recognizable. Verbal communication is not isolated or completely separate from physical communication. That becomes evident in this film. There is much more than words being exchanged. However, those words are still there. That makes the verbal communication of Rogozhkin’s The Cuckoo, his Tower of Babel, worth taking a closer look at.
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