Really good movie but.....

If you thought the film was philosophically cutting and harrowing, read the short story it was based on. Isostheneia to the ninth power.

Also, if you like this film, watch Tarkovsky's Stalker. Both films are parallel to each other (both were based on short stories by the Strugatsky brothers), both films are thematically and cinematically and visually overlapping.

There are many visual and sound moments in Gadkie Lebedi that are clearly reconstructed tributes to Stalker.

Here are a few excerpts from the short story The Ugly Swans:

If you're interested in the future, then invent it quickly, on the run, according to your reflexes and emotions."

"You see," he said, "by work for the good of mankind I have in mind transforming people into clean and pleasant types. And this wish of mine bears no relationship to my creative work. In my books I attempt to depict everything as it is, not to preach or show what should be done. At most I indicate the pressure point, draw attention to what it is we have to fight. I don't know how to change people—if I did I wouldn't be a writer. I'd be a superb pedagogue or an eminent psychoso-ciologist. Literature is not the place for teaching, for proposing specific paths or concrete methodologies. Look at our greatest writers. I bow down before Tolstoy, but only to the point where he remains an individual, uniquely reflective of reality. As soon as he starts teaching me to go barefoot and turn the other cheek, I'm seized with pity and boredom. The writer is an instrument which indicates the condition of society, and is only to an infinitesimal degree a weapon for transforming it. History shows that society is not transformed by literature, but by reforms and machine guns, or, recently, by science as well. At best, literature shows whom to shoot at or what needs changing." He paused, thinking that he'd forgotten about Dostoevsky and Faulkner. But while he was figuring out how to bring in literature as a tool for studying the individual psyche, a voice came from the back of the hall.

"Excuse me, but all this is rather trivial. This isn't the point. The point is that the objects you have depicted in no way desire to be changed. And then they're so unpleasant, so neglected, so hopeless, that one doesn't even want to change them. You understand, they're not worth it. Let them rot away by themselves, they don't have any role to play. So for whose good are we to work, in your opinion?"

"Now I'm beginning to see," said Victor slowly.

It had suddenly dawned on him: "My G-d, these wet-nosed kids really think I only write about the scum of the earth, that I think everyone belongs there. But they haven't understood a thing, and how could they have, anyway— they're only children, strange children, sure, intelligent to the point of sickness, but with a child's experience in life and a child's understanding of people plus whatever they've gotten from all their books. With a child's idealism and a child's desire to put everything into pigeonholes with the labels 'bad' and 'good.' Just like my pen-wielding colleagues."

"I've been deceived by your way of talking like grown-ups," he said. "I even forgot that you weren't grown-ups. I understand that it's pedagogically bad to talk this way, but I'm afraid it's necessary, or we'll never find our way out of this. The whole problem is that you, apparently, can't understand how a man who is unshaven, unstable, and eternally drunk can be an excellent person, a person it's impossible not to love, someone you'd bow before and whose hand you'd be honored to shake, because this man has been through an unimaginable hell, and yet remained a human being. You consider the heroes of my novels to be dirty bastards, but that's half-forgivable. You consider that I relate to them the same way as you do. And that's unforgivable. Unforgivable in the sense that we'll never understand each other."

G-d only knows what kind of a reaction he expected from his well-intended lecture. Either that they'd start exchanging embarrassed glances, or that their faces would light up with understanding, or that a sigh of relief would flood through the hall as a sign that the misunderstanding had passed and they could begin again on a new, more realistic basis. In any event, none of this occurred. In the back of the hall, the boy with the biblical eyes stood up and asked, "Would you mind telling us how you define progress?"

Victor felt insulted. "Of course," he thought. "And then they'll ask if a machine can think and whether there's life on Mars. Everything."

"Progress," he said, "is the movement of society toward a state in which people don't kill, trample, and torment one another."

"And what about your heroes, the ones you're so fond of. Would a future like that suit them?"

"Of course. They'd get the peace they deserve."

Bol-Kunats sat down, but the pimply-faced boy stood up and shook his head sadly.

"This is the whole problem. The problem is not whether we understand real life or not, but that for you and your heroes a future like that would be completely acceptable, while for us it would be death. The end of hope. The end of humanity. A dead end. That's why we say that we don't want to waste our strength working for the good of those types, your types, who are longing for peace and up to their ears in filth. It's no longer possible to instill in them the energy for real life. And whatever you might have intended, Mr. Banev, still, in your books—in your interesting books, I'm all for them—you didn't show us any pressure point in the human race, you showed us rather that no such pressure point exists, at least in your generation. You've fed on one another—excuse the expression—you've exhausted yourselves with your infighting and your lying and the war against lying which you carry out by thinking up new lies. It's like your song: Truth and lies, you aren't so far apart, yesterday's truth becomes a lie, yesterday's lie becomes tomorrow's purest truth, tomorrow's ordinary truth.' So you swing from lie to lie. You simply can't get it into your heads that you're already dead men, that by your own hands you've created a world which has become your headstone. You've rotted in the trenches, you've thrown yourselves under tanks, and who has it helped? You've criticized the government and criticized law and order as if you didn't know that your generation is, well, simply unworthy of anything better. You've been beaten on the head, excuse the expression, and you persist in repeating that man by nature is good, or, even worse, that the name 'man' has a proud ring. And think of the people you've called 'men'!"

The pimply-faced orator waved his hand and sat down. Silence reigned. Then he stood up again. "When I said 'you,' I did not mean you personally, Mr. Banev."

"Thank you," snapped Victor.

He felt irritated—this pimply-faced puppy had no right to talk with such finality, it was sheer insolence ... give him a shove and throw him out of the room. He felt awkward—much of what was said was true, and he himself felt the same way, and now he found himself in the position of defending something that he hated. He felt himself at a loss. He didn't know what to do next, how to continue the conversation and whether it was worth continuing. He glanced around the auditorium and saw that they were waiting for his answer, that Irma was waiting for his answer, that all these rosy-cheeked, freckled monsters shared the same thoughts, and the insolent kid with the pimples had merely expressed the general consensus. And he had expressed it sincerely, with deep conviction, not because he had just read some forbidden pamphlet. They really didn't feel the tiniest bit of gratitude or the most elementary respect for him, Victor Banev, for having enlisted in the hussars and attacked tanks on horseback, for having nearly died of dysentery when they were surrounded or for having cut down a guard with a homemade knife. Or for what he did later on, when he got home—for slapping a security recruiter in the face and refusing to sign a denunciation. And then wandering around with a hole in his lung and without work, dealing in black-market fruit even though he'd been offered the most lucrative positions. "And when you come down to it, why should that make them respect me? Because I moved on a column of tanks with a bared saber? You have to be an idiot in order to have a government that would get the army into such a mess." He shuddered, imagining the huge labor of thought these fledglings must have gone through in order to arrive, completely independently, at the same conclusions that adults reach after laying bare their very skins, shattering their souls, and ruining their own lives and most of the lives around them. And not even all adults, but only some of them. The majority to this day believes that everything was right, everything was just terrific, and if the need should arise they'd be ready to start in all over again. Has a new age really dawned? He glanced at the audience with something approaching fright. It seemed that the future had really managed to extend its feelers into the very heart of the present, and that that futurewas cold and pitiless. It couldn't care less about the virtues of the past, both the real ones and the imaginary ones.

"Look," said Victor. "You young people probably haven't noticed it, but you're cruel. You're cruel out of the best possible motives, but it's cruelty just the same. And it can't bring anything except fresh grief, fresh tears, and fresh baseness. That's what you have in mind. And don't think that you're saying something very new. To destroy the old world and build up a new one on its bones is a very old idea. And never once has it brought the desired results. The same thing that calls forth the desire for merciless destruction in the old world quickly adapts itself to the process of destruction, to cruelty and mercilessness. It becomes essential to this process and always gets retained. It becomes the master of the new world and, in the final analysis, kills the bold destroyers themselves. A crow won't peck out the eye of its brother; you can't fight cruelty with cruelty. Irony and pity, my young friends. Irony and pity!"

"Humanity is bankrupt in the biological sense. The birthrate is falling, cancer is spreading along with feeblemindedness and neuroses of all sorts, people are turning into drug addicts. Every day they consume hundreds of tons of alcohol, nicotine, or simply narcotics, they started with hashish and cocaine and ended with LSD. We're degenerating. We've ruined the natural world and the man-made one is ruining us. And we've bankrupted ourselves ideologically. We've gone through all philosophical systems and discredited every one, we've tried all possible ethical systems and we've stayed the same amoral louts we always were, no better than troglodytes. And that's the worst of it, that this whole ignorant human mass is not going to improve, it started out as trash and that's the way it's going to stay. It thirsts after G-ds and leaders, law and order, it demands them. And every time it gets its G-ds, its leaders, and its order, it becomes dissatisfied because in fact it doesn't need any of it. It doesn't need G-ds and it doesn't need order, what it needs is chaos and anarchy, bread and circuses. Right now the iron will of necessity has forced it into dependence on a weekly paycheck. But it's sick of this necessity, and it escapes from it every evening into alcohol and narcotics. But the hell with it, the hell with this rotting pile of sh---t it's been stinking for ten thousand years and that's all it's good for. There's something more frightening—that this process of disintegration has seized us as well, the real people, the individuals. We see this disintegration and we imagine that it doesn't affect us. But it's mastering us through hopelessness, it's eating away at our will, swallowing us up. And then this damned democratic upbringing: egalite, fraternite, all men are brothers, we're all made the same. We're constantly identifying with the common herd and we blame ourselves if we happen to find that we're smarter, that we have different needs and different goals in life. It's time we understood this and drew some conclusions from it. It's time to save ourselves."

"Stop your shouting," said the Voice. "Stop waving your hands and making threats. Is it really so difficult for you to drop this nonsense and think calmly for a few minutes? You are perfectly well aware that your children left you of their own will, nobody forced them and nobody dragged them by the collar. They left because you had become totally disagreeable to them. They no longer wish to live the way you live and the way your forebears lived. You love to imitate your forebears and consider this a human virtue, and they don't. They don't want to turn into drunkards and debauchers, into petty slaves and conformists. They don't want you to turn them into criminals; they don't want your families and they don't want your government."

"You think that if a person cites Zurzmansor or Hegel, then, oh, boy. But a person like that looks at you and sees a pile of sh---t, and he doesn't feel sorry for you, because Hegel says that you're sh---t and so does Zurzmansor. Sh---t by definition. And what lies beyond that definition doesn't interest him. Mr. President, by the very nature of his limitations, may bark at you; if worst comes to worst, he'll even stick you in prison. And then when some holiday comes around he'll get emotional and grant you amnesty; he'll even invite you for dinner. But Zurzmansor will look at you through a magnifying glass and classify you: dogsh----t, good for nothing. And thoughtfully, on the grounds of his great intelligence and general philosophical principles, he'll wipe you away with a dirty rag, throw you into the garbage can, and forget that you ever existed."

"Life is a disease of matter, thought is a disease of life. Ocularis ringus," he thought.