Hatchlings was initially a slow-burner, but eventually did unusually well for an “Eastern” film in many Western countries. It continues to be listed as among the top twenty SF films. After two successful films, Vernilak was becoming a name to be reckoned with. The relative failure of his next release, Shambala (1973), was thus a surprise as well as a disappointment. It was repeatedly described as “shambolic”, while denunciations along the lines of “ intrinsically vacuous” and “an encyclopedia of hippy orientalist delusions” were commonplace. One reviewer said that “he only thing in its favor is that there is no sign of the Yeti”. While the film has its moments – not least the widescreen shots of towering mountains and close-ups of the verdant life that clings onto their foothills – it has not aged well. It was rediscovered by some “New Age” spokespeople around the turn of the century, but is now rarely included in retrospectives of Vernilak’s work. What seems to be less known is the inspiration that underlies the depiction of the main character and his adventures.
Walking along Ulitsa Volkhonka in Moscow a few years ago, more or less across the road from the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Savior, I spotted a tangle of signs in both English and Russian, on a piece of street furniture, directing walkers to various local attractions. Among the formal-looking points of interest – Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and so on – is a rather clumsy formulation that piqued my interest. I don’t have a photograph of this, but from memory there were words written in white on a blue background, saying something like “The Non-Governmental Museum Named after Nicholas Roerich”. Googling for information on this, I am alarmed to see that this museum was taken over by the Russian Ministry of Culture in 2017, and news reports suggest it was subsequently closed or at least denuded of much of its collection of Roerich’s art and the artefacts he had brought back from his journeys to the East. But travel guides still list it as among major off-the-beaten-track attractions in Moscow, and I shall investigate further on my next trip to Russia.
At the time I had heard of Roerich only through an article in Fortean Times, which featured him on its February 2015 cover as “Occult Agent of the East”. But a visit to the museum revealed that Roerich was the inspiration for the explorer in Shambala. A charismatic Russian painter/philosopher, he loved the Himalayas and believed them to be both the home of gurus possessing ancient wisdom, and themselves repositories of spiritual energy of some form. He may not have made his way to the hidden city revealed in the film (and based on Himalayan myth), but his paintings vividly demonstrate his deep fascination with the mountains, and with Tibetan and Nepalese culture more generally. Vernilak must have had contact with some of Roerich’s own disciples, who had somehow managed to preserve his work through Soviet times. He used the Roerich-as-spiritual-explorer theme to spin a story that is more Lobsang Rampa than Indiana Jones, but as fantastical as both of them. The main character in the film, Richter, is clearly modelled on Roerich (though his name is also that of a famous Russian pianist).
The orange-robed inhabitants of Shambala are not just gurus and sannyasins, but actually guardians of humanity. Though their speech is couched in metaphysical profundities, their mysterious powers – enabling them to conceal the city from the naked eye – are revealed to be based on an advanced technology. Possibly this derives from Atlantis, whose destruction is briefly mentioned as a result of human folly. Alternatively, extraterrestrial sources are hinted at by a glimpse of a portrait of a flying saucer in an ancient tapestry – though it is more likely that Shambala is itself the source of UFOs. The nature and modus operandi of this almost magical technology is never revealed, though one hint is the declaration that “Among your scientists only Nikolai Tesla has come close to these ideas.” (This film may have been the first recorded mention of “red mercury” in fiction, too…)
Though the guardians tend to speak in portentous and apparently paradoxical mystical tones, Richter gradually comes to learn of their role in averting disasters from space. There is a brief but impressive visualization of the Tunguska incident, where Richter is shown a stylized picture of the event, which morphs into an FX-heavy vision of the descending asteroid, the aerial explosion and the devastation caused in the forests below. Some contemporary Russian eyewitness accounts described lights streaming up into the sky before the near-impact, and this element is intrinsic to the visualization. The notion is advanced that the guardians have been preventing such major disasters befalling humanity for millennia. But the gurus forecast that they will be as unable to prevent nuclear conflagration in the future, as they were to save Atlantis from itself.
In and of itself, the plot is not unpromising, and the cinematography is excellent. But the ideas are handled clumsily, with much convoluted exposition. The characterization is insubstantial plot, and the depiction of the guardians is rightly dismissed as simplistic Orientalism. The acting is uninspired, and the culmination of the film (as the hidden city is transfigured to remove it further from invasive Western forces) is banal.
To the best of my knowledge, the Roerich connection was not made among Western critics, though Roerich was not entirely unknown among what became the “New Age” in the next decade. The general consensus was that Vernilak was a late convert to hippie ways of thinking, much as was claimed for Makavejev when W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) surprised audiences around the world. Perhaps there is some connection, but I cannot help but think that Vernilak’s visits to Moscow in the late 1960s must have had more to do with Shambala than did any encounters with the Western counterculture in the same period. His biographers do not seem to have unearthed anything of significance about the Russian visits – we do not even know whether the rumored meeting with Tarkovsky even took place. What a treasure it would be to see a transcript of their conversation, if it did happen! My correspondence with Roerich enthusiasts in New York, Russia and India has not yielded any hints of his interactions with the followers in Moscow.
Vernilak’s reputation took a big hit with Shambala, and he beat a quick retreat home after its initial showings in film festivals met with near-universal derision. Yet he rebounded from this disaster with his late masterpiece, the fittingly titled, as it turned out, Swansong (1978). While many reviewers saw this as overly freighted with the cod mysticism of Shambala, it is most often seen as an alternative take on the second half of Hatchlings, with even more of the flavor of Childhood’s End.
The origin of the children is never clearly specified, but the film begins with shots of groups of children aged between 8 and 12, brought together in various locations by various authorities. The locations and authorities are never explicitly named, but evidently encompass all regions of the world. In some cases, military institutions are clearly involved (there is even a fort-like prison displayed, though now I am inclined to see this as a concentration camp). In other cases, they appear to be more like social or health services, and in some they are rather sinister if overtly (over) friendly “men in black” types. There is a religious (Islamic?) organization in one case, and what might be a New Age cult or a mad billionaire’s (or rock star’s) coterie in another. The film switches from one scene to another, as (subtitled) explanations, instructions, and questions are directed at the children. We are able to piece together the background – the children were all born within a few years of each other, as a result of some unspecified event (the Earth passing through “a particular phase” or “region of space”). They have begun to manifest powers that have led to their being removed from their communities and sequestered from the rest of society “for their own good”, or “in the national interest”, or so that scientists or the military could have a chance to assess them.
Most of the children escape their captivity in various ingenious ways, while some are rescued by those who have escaped earlier. In one case they are assisted by Dontae, the biological father of one of the group, and in the second main section of the film he is shown travelling with one of the groups of children, who are evidently able to communicate telepathically among themselves. They do not have powerful mind control capabilities, but can gain the sympathy of many receptive humans by evoking strong empathy for their predicament. They mean no harm, they are simply trying to fulfil their destiny, and they need support to do so. By this means they are able to enlist some of their captors, and later border guards, airline pilots, coach drivers and many others to help them. In many cases, they could simply be eliciting people’s natural solidarity: some viewers interpret this element of Swansong as signifying human resilience and willingness to act against oppressive regimes. Vernilak’s life and times should have deprived him of starry-eyed views of individual resistance to authoritarian power, even when children are concerned. But he may have hoped that by depicting such examples he would help them to become more common reflexes.
The thousands of special children congregate in a strange rocky environment (filmed in one of the volcanic lava-strewn zones, called malpais, of the Canary Isles), where they create a tent city with the aid of Dontae and a number of other adult helpers (some are parents, others may or may not be). There is a striking episode where an effort is made to communicate telepathically between the children and a large group of these adults. The psychedelic scenes that ensure have a rare beauty, speaking of far more than the era’s “light shows” that accompanied some rock concerts were ever able to. Parallels have been drawn with the films of Ed Emshwiller and Oskar Fischinger, with parts of Godard’s A Woman is a Woman. The sequence is echoed in the later work of numerous creators of music videos and films to accompany concerts of rock, jazz and experimental music (many of the latter deserve to be circulated more widely than they currently are). There is no doubt that this imagery is vastly more sophisticated than that of Kubrik’s 2001, and indeed of practically all subsequent efforts to capture psychedelic, spiritual and similar states of consciousness and exotic journeys. Recently several efforts have been made to create 3-dimensional versions of this episode, both for display in IMAX cinemas and for use in Virtual Reality environments. These are rather impressive, but the context of the film is needed to really grasp the emotional depth and significance of the imagery.
In the final parts of Swansong, we witness the children ascending to their destiny. Huge channels of light, like luminous veins and arteries along which blood cells move (in both directions) become manifest. The children fuse with these, transmitting themselves into signal that flow up the channels. The adults who have made connection with them are able to choose whether to join them or not, and Dontae is one whose Earthly ties are strong enough to make him remain. When the columns, and the children, have gone, he is left apparently forlorn, but illuminated by a pulsing light that descends from one of the columns. In a final scene, set in an unspecified future, the malpais is blossoming with new flowers and there is birdsong in the air. We see a number of people, including small children, apparently working and celebrating in the reborn environment.
The interpretation of these sequences continues to be controversial, with political and religious factions claiming Vernilak for their own. The power of the narrative, and the very tangible evocation of intense emotions in the conclusion, make the ambiguity more telling. While many films that initially confound their audiences turn out to have quite straightforward meanings, Swansong has resisted this trajectory. Vernilak’s disappearance soon after its release means that he has never been able to demystify things for us. Indeed, voluntarily or otherwise, he added his own mystery into the equation. The 1978 special issue of Journal of Second World Cinema (now Central and Eastern European Cinematic Arts) devoted to Vernilak features three essays that present differing accounts of the film, as well as a transcription of an interview with him conducted before the production of Swansong. (We have drawn on this interview at several points during this essay.)
What can we say about Vernilak’s disappearance that has not already been recycled endlessly in the more sensationalistic media? The only thing that is universally agreed is that he ceased to appear in any official engagements – including several in which he had been billed to feature – from 1980 on. Most of the numerous claimed sightings of him can be put into the bin used for disposal of tales of having seen Elvis, Hendrix, or deceased members of the Kennedy clan. The passing resemblance of bit players to Vernilak, in a number of films from Hollywood and its echoes in Bombay, Lagos, Singapore and so on, has been demonstrated, to the best of my knowledge, to be no more than a matter of mistaken identity. The probability is that Vernilak is dead, not a prisoner nor someone who has gone undercover.
One version of events is that Vernilak was murdered by a gay pick-up, or a homophobic attack, echoing the killing of Pasolini by a teenager in Italy in 1975. A local newspaper story in 1980 is reported to have told of a body being found in a car park known to insiders as close to a favored holiday home of Vernilak. The theory goes that the story was covered up, perhaps because of the identity of the murderer (ties to high city authorities are alleged), or perhaps to protect Vernilak’s own reputation at a time of much homophobia. More lurid accounts speculate about a revenge killing on the part of security services or those victimized by them in the wake of the country’s liberation. These stories all depend upon memories of the newspaper story, an actual copy of which has proved extremely elusive. The main reason to believe that there is more than just speculation in these stories of Vernilak’s death is simply that his last works demonstrate that he was in his prime, and enjoying his own achievements. The tales of his going underground (again?) and using a random murder as an opportunity to reboot his life, simply do not accord with this expanding talent.
Otherwise 