Envisioning Russia
Russian Film Series
Thursday, November 6th, 2008 through Thursday, November 20th, 2008
The Museum of Russian Art is pleased to bring you a select group of four titles from this program, which has played at Lincoln Center in New York and is touring the U.S. for the remainder of 2008. These films, in freshly struck 35mm prints and featuring new English subtitle translations, were rarely seen if at all in North America at the time of their release. Most of them are not available on DVD.
The historic Heights Theater in Columbia Heights (3951 Central Ave., NE) will once again be the venue for our screenings. Enjoy the show!
Alexander Nevsky (1938)
d: Sergei Eisenstein – 70th anniversary screening!
Sergei Eisenstein, the protean genius of Soviet cinema whose 1925 Battleship Potemkin still echoes in film history, mounts a compelling depiction of Prince Nevsky's 13th-century defeat of the invading Germans just a few years before the world witnessed history repeating itself.
Eisenstein chafed at the constraints of socialist realism in the 1930s, but here he is allowed to give free rein to his imagination in recreating Nevsky's legendary rout of the Teutonic interlopers. A triumph of both art and propaganda, Eisenstein's work calls into question the commonly held notion at least in the West that those two concepts are mutually exclusive. The bold, original score for the film was written by composer Sergei Prokofiev.
Carnival Night (1956)
d: Eldar Ryazanov – In Color!
The film of all films to counter the Western stereotype of Russian culture as uniformly somber and joyless, this uproarious musical will have you singing and saluting the New Year months ahead of schedule.
Young workers try to organize a night of merriment on New Year's Eve, but must constantly stay one step ahead of the wet-blanket Party official who wants to ruin all the fun. Noteworthy for its relentless satire of political clich s, Carnival Night's breezy insouciance recalls MGM musicals of the same period, with star Lyudmila Gurchenko as its Soviet Debbie Reynolds.
The Russian Question (1948)
d: Mikhail Romm – Cold War Drama!
Made by one of the most respected figures in Soviet cinema, The Russian Question presents Cold War dilemmas from a Russian perspective.
As tensions between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. tighten in the years after World War II, a New York newspaper reporter (Garry Smith) is given an ultimatum by his editor: write a negative book about the Soviet Union or else. But Smith is torn; he developed a knowledge of and affection for the U.S.S.R. during his years as a wartime correspondent stationed there. His task a hatchet job would necessarily be full of lies and distortions that he can't countenance. Will he choose his integrity or his career?
Although the ideology of Romm's film is very much a staple of the Stalinist era, the director's exploration of the conflicts of interest that arise even in a "free" country like the U.S. is nuanced, intelligent, and still provocative 60 years later.
Walking the Streets of Moscow (1963)
d: Georgi Daneliya – The Sixties!
A Soviet version of the youth films that were becoming popular in the West in the 1960s, Walking the Streets of Moscow follows four young adults as they negotiate universal rites of passage and attempt to find their place in the world.
A startlingly fresh-faced Nikita Mikhalkov (Burnt By the Sun, 1994) plays Kolya, a construction worker, who guides his Siberian friend Volodya through the big city. Meanwhile, Alena, the object of Kolya's affections, is entranced by Kolya's boyhood pal Sasha. Noted writer Gennadi Shpalikov penned the delightful screenplay, and Vadim Yusov, whose luminous images haunt Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Ivan's Childhood (1963), served as cinematographer. The film as a whole forcefully exhibits the Khrushchev-era notion of "socialism with a human face".