On the Centenary of Marlen Khutsiev

I wrote this poem for one of my heroes, the great film director Marlen Khutsiev (1925-2019), way back in 2009. Today, he would have turned 100. I always wished I would have sent this to him when he was alive.

The Author, Open Source
To Marlen Khutsiev

You promised yourself to certain principles—
A probing awe of the present,
Humility before the past and future.

You promised yourself that when you turned your head,
Or craned your neck,
Or just held still,
You would try to see in things all that they give you to see,
Neither stopping at the surface
Nor injecting the image with alien fashion and fad
And making of it a symbol of something else,
Some popular present
Or politically preferable past.

You promised yourself to capture the image
In all its integrity,
To make its present into a past
And send it on
To those who would use it
In ways you would not have imagined.

It’s no small task to release the catalogue
Of one’s sight
To the busy minds
Of a new and otherly-comprehending generation.
But maybe, if you were there to see,
Their use of your awe
Would gladden your soul.

—Greg Blake Miller