Cinema criticism. Michael Blekhman (Montreal, Canada). Sergei Nazarov’s Revelation Movie

Michael Blekhman, a Montreal-based author, was born in 1951 in Kharkov, Ukraine, the USSR, into a lower middle-class family.

I am a professional linguist and hold a PhD degree in computer linguistics. I write prose in Russian, English, and Ukrainian. My stories are published all over the world. I am a member of the International Guild for Russian Literary Art, IGRULITA. IGRULITA Press has published my 4 Russian books. I have translated into Russian Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The latter has just been issued in Ukraine as an audio CD. I head the Canadian branch of the International Association of Literary Authors and Publicists, and I am a member of Canadian Authors' Association as well as Quebec Writers' Federation.

I consider myself a professional writer. Why? Because my attitude to writing is professional: it's one of the most important parts of my life, and I am trying to make a serious, professional contribution to literature


Sergei Nazarov’s Revelation Movie

The situation in Egypt makes headlines again. For this article, though, the critically important date is January 25, 2010.
We, the journalists, are often called “pen sharks”. We, just like those predators, have to prowl in the information ocean in search of new prey. As to historic events, especially those full of real blood are dainty bits for all and sundry, including all kinds of analysts and experts. The “Arab Spring” struck like a tsunami, being as sudden and destructive as a natural disaster. Almost all the publications discuss two main issues, “whether it was possible to predict it” and “whether it was possible to avoid it”. We are going to tell the authors and the readers an incredible story. It is now getting more and more popular throughout the world and is probably the “key” to many closed “doors”…
Judge for yourselves. In the summer of 2009, Sergei Nazarov, an independent Russian journalist, suddenly stops writing articles and appearing on television, and begins to study carefully the historical documents pertaining to the decline of the so-called Ancient Egyptian Kingdom. Then he studies textbooks for filmmakers (both Russian and American), and writes the screenplay of a feature film about the end of the Cheops era. Why? He himself cannot answer this question, although he claims that he has never had any cinema ambitions. Maybe because life resembles the events that took place thousands of years ago?
But studying historical documents and photographs of excavations, and talking to Egyptologists, Sergei noticed a strange thing: before the Cheops era, the Pyramids had been made of rough-hewn stones, but suddenly…
Well, the author of the screenplay asks you not to call him the founder of a so-called “alternative historiography”. In this work, he simply made use of his many years of civil engineering experience as well as his university degree in technology. He also read numerous stories by enthusiasts describing their unsuccessful attempts to polish and lay multi-ton blocks of stone in the presently existing form. Nazarov came to the conclusion that the fantastic technological breakthrough in the Cheops times can only be explained by the influence of a different civilization, and a very advanced one. The www.forwardblack.com site has photos of modern quarries as well as the ones from which building materials were taken several thousand years ago. It can be seen that the blocks are cut, and then ground at the factory. But why is the Cheops era stones so carefully polished? The only logical explanation is a plasma or laser cutting technology. Why is it different now? Because it’s awfully expensive! After a couple of thousand years, ancient Greeks would come, not willing to save money, but ready to pay any price for the mysterious technology. However, the Egyptians after Alexander the Great could not even understand the characters left by their own ancestors. More than that, their construction technology had no trace of the previous experience.
Herodotus was the first one to suppose that the carved (?) Egyptian hieroglyphs had a secret of their own. The hard work of several generations of Egyptologists, who did a huge deciphering job, didn’t, unfortunately, open the curtain: the papyri tell us of rampant corruption, unfair trial, law enforcement brutality, humiliation, and heavy drinking. Nothing new. But Nazarov is the first person to say that he sees the same things in our present life, namely, that computers and mobile phones coexist with common people’s terrible life. It will not be a mystery to the future historians (or aliens?) that all the achievements of civilization have been exchanged either for raw materials, or for the money that has nothing behind it. It only remained to apply this logic to Ancient Egypt and summarize it in a screenplay. In the key issues, it matches the history textbooks. At the same time, the white (or rather black) spots are highlighted in a new way, and the Pharaoh is overthrown by people using mobile phones. Now you understand it, don’t you? The author stretched the action of his future movie over a year (the Egyptians used to measure it by flooding of the Nile), strung the sheets together, and registered them at the notary on January 25, 2010, solely to protect his rights (as he then thought). Then, for a long time, he had to hear producers laughing at him.
‘Will there be a revolution in Egypt soon?’ a reporter put a straightforward question to Amar Musa, the chairman of the Arab League, in summer of 2010. ‘ Definitely not in the next few years. The situation is quite stable here!’ the Egyptian politician replied confidently. But then January 25, 2011 came…
When Nazarov saw a report from Tahrir Square, he started immediately to calculate the probability of a random coincidence. There is no need to repeat the mathematical calculations. Perhaps serious scientific papers will be published on the subject soon. But if the probability to “guess” an event in a particular country at a particular date and year can be calculated, the revolution of mobile phones has happened before our eyes for the first time in history. Further on, the events described in the screenplay continued to happen in different countries. There have been no such “coincidences” (please keep in mind that we are talking about a country of 50 million people) since the Lumiere brothers times. Based on the work by film historians on the total number of the scripts written over 120 years, the probability of a “chance to guess” is no more than 1/13,000,000. However, probability theory requires multiplying the probability of the so-called “independent events”. Therefore, there is no need to write a long series of zeros lest we should be mistaken in their total number. We’ve learned that when it comes to predictors, we talk of Nostradamus, whose name has become a household name. Even across the centuries, his works are published and read, and people try to decipher his verses written in the Old French, where the dates and understandable descriptions of events are simply not available. But the number of indirect coincidences is so great that talking about random coincidences and free interpretation is possible, though difficult. In the “Go, Black!” screenplay, everything is absolutely exact, and requires no interpretation.
Nazarov believes that these phenomenal circumstances are just a sign from above that confirms the unique (and very obvious!) idea which is clearly visible in every frame of the so-called author’s screenplay. The latter has received the annual award for the best 2011 screenplay in the live television broadcast. Nazarov received the prize on the stage of the “Ukraina” palace in Kiev, Ukraine, from the author of the music for the legendary “Santa Barbara” TV series.
Many of those who hear the name of the movie, “Go, Black,” are surprised to learn that it was the name of the country ruled by Cheops. The typical question is, “But where is the fertile land?” This is what the future movie is about. The “professionals”, whose studies of the “Arab Spring” overflowed the world press like the Nile, refuse to comment on Nazarov’s work. They have nothing to oppose against the fact that the work of art exceeds all of their “researches” in terms of accuracy, depth of analysis, and even ideal prediction of the date.