I saw this movie at a women’s film festival in Portland Oregon in about 1974. Filmed in some Eastern European country, not Russia. Black and white. A post-apocalyptic, forested landscape through which a family is traveling; an elderly woman and her several adult daughters. Only the mother seems to have memories of civilization and her daughters are essentially feral and possibly don’t have much grasp of language (whatever language is spoken in the film). They drift along, camping in gutted buildings in what appears to be a world in which nearly everyone died in some violent way some time ago.
Scenes I remember include the daughters discovering a cache of explosives and learning how to detonate it (they delight in this), coming upon some horses, running them down and swinging up on their backs, one biting the head off a snake she finds . . . then they come upon an old man who lives alone in a large house, who is against all odds keeping together remnants of the past – he eats at a table with silver and dishes, etc. The mother is intensely relieved to meet the old man, while trying to keep her daughters in check (they eat with their hands and throw things like apes).
The mother grows ill and dies. Immediately the daughters kill the old man without the slightest compunction and run off laughing into the forest.
The dark fey mood of the film reminds me of the eastern European sci fi of the same period, such as Stanislaw Lem, and the Strugatsky brothers. Though it could have been made considerably earlier.
I have never even seen a mention anywhere of any film remotely like this one, but I have always wanted to know what it was called and who made it.
Oh, hey! I just finished Roadside Picnic. Can’t say I’m itching to see Stalker, though. Sounds like an artistic/minimalist representation of only one of the many themes of the book.
Roadside Picnic sticks with you. I read it thirty years ago and I remember it like a hallucination when so many other books have faded to white. This movie, which I saw nearly forty years ago, I also remember very vividly. Both convey a dreamlike amoral trauma that’s hard to shake.
