Out of competition
SUMMER EUPHORIA
Mood Films “Kinotavr” has, in any event, the ability to create a euphoric mood through the sea, the sun and cinema, but our purpose here is to keep that mood going till late at night. This is the optimal time for watching a special kind of films, with a genre that is difficult to define, and emerging from the friction between enactment and documentation, between poetry and plot. This year’s “Summer Euphoria” includes the new works of Sergei Soloviev, which are connected with the Russian classics; Vitali Mansky’s dacha elegy; and some works of lesser known, but promising directors. We hope that the audience of “Kinotavr” will come to our screenings not for the sake of competition passions, but for the most altruistic pleasure in art.Andrei Plakhov
Programme curator
ANNA KARENINA
Director Sergei Soloviev
Russia, 2009
2-ASSA-2
Director Sergei Soloviev
Russia, 2009
LA PALOMA (The Last Summer of the USSR)
Director Sergei Oldenburg-Svintsov
Russia, 2008
CINETRAIN
Directors: Nikita Sutyrin, Jochem de Vries, Denes Nagy, Monica Baptista, Andrei Tanase, Iris Olsson
Russia/France/Germany/Hungary/Netherlands/Romania/
Finland/Bulgaria/Greece/Poland/Great Britain, 2009
VERSE
Director Peter Shepotinnik
Russia, 2008
NICHOLAS'S HILL (Nikolina Gora). EPILOGUE
Director Vitali Mansky
Russia, 2009
CINEMA ON THE SQUARE
ADMIRAL
Director Andrei Kravchuk
Russia, 2008
NEWSMAKERS
Director Anders Banke
Russia/Sweden, 2009
LOVEY-DOVEY 2
Director Maxim Pezhemsky
Russia, 2008
THE INHABITED ISLAND
Director Fedor Bondarchuk
Russia, 2008
THE INHABITED ISLAND. THE FINAL BATTLE
Director Fedor Bondarchuk
Russia, 2009
PLATON
Director Vartan Akopian
Russia, 2008
HIPSTERS
Director Valeri Todorovsky
Russia, 2008
TARAS BULBA
Director Vladimir Bortko
Russia, 2009
NEW YEAR TARIFF
Director Evgeni Bedarev
Russia, 2008
Director Marius Weisberg
Russia, 2009
RUSSIA OUTSIDE RUSSIA
Retrospective of films by Russian émigrés This small retrospective presents for the first time at “Kinotavr” the theme of Russian cinema abroad, which is little-known to Russian audiences.
The programme presents the leading film directors of Russian emigration to Europe of the “first wave”: Yakov Protazanov (Jacob Protazanoff), Alexander Volkov (Alexandre Volkoff), Viacheslav (in emigration – Victor) Turzhansky (Tourjansky), the animator Wladyslaw Starewicz( Ladislas Starévitch), the actor and director Ivan Mozzhukhin (Mosjoukine). Russian Hollywood is shown through the film of Grigori Ratov (Gregory Ratoff) and starring Michael Chekhov.
Angoissante aventure (“The Agonizing Adventure”) is considered to be Yakov Protazanov’s first émigré film. He worked on it from winter to summer of 1920, all along the way of Joseph Ermoliev’s studio into cinematic exile. The shooting locations specified in the credits (Yalta, Constantinople, Marseilles, Paris) make this film a “logbook” and a diary of the “Ermolieff Studios”. It is an archetypal film, which contains important motives of pre-Revolutionary cinema (cards, card-shaping and the fate from “The Queen of Spades”, 1916) and which defined the system of recurrent motives in films by émigrés (the ship as a symbol of travel, the film in a film, the unrealizable dream of prosperity), and also the main principles of the poetics of émigré cinema (eclectic style, change of the tragic ending to a happy one: the “awful adventures” that befall the hero and his creators, which are only a nightmare).
Enfant du carnaval (“The Carnival Child”) is Ivan Mozzhukhin’s directorial debut. The theme of carnival, of living under a mask, expresses the feeling of Russian refugees who frequently compared themselves to lost children. The emblematic view of the hero, in the film’s finale looking at his wife leaving him with his adopted son, revives in emigration the myth about the hypnotic force of Mozzhukhin’s gaze, which becomes the cornerstone of the aesthetics and the parody in his next film, Brasier ardent ( “The Burning Brazier”).
“Kean”, a classical melodrama with elements of comedy, is not only one of Ivan Mozzhukhin’s best roles, but also Alexandre Volkoff’s masterpiece: he stunned his contemporaries with his skill in applying repeated exposure, his virtuoso editing, the use of the subjective camera, or the inclusion into the frame of scenic space in the scenes where the actor Kean appears in Shakespeare’s productions.
The Russian myth was frequently created by émigrés, and this was not always done with taste. In order to meet the demands of western distribution, cinematographers adapted the Russian classics and changed their plots, especially the endings of the works of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev. One such example is Turzhansky’s film with the telling title “Nostalgia”, where the artificially added happy ending transforms “The Station Master” into a sentimental tale about the mysteries of the Russian soul.
Wladyslaw Starewicz’s original magic contrasts with this artificially created myths about Russia. The German version of his film of “Reineke Fuchs” was the second (after Alexander Ptushko’s “New Gulliver”) full-length film in the history of three-dimensional animation.
According to Michael Chekhov, the studio MGM described as a “tall tale” the film “Songs of Russia” by Gregory Ratoff: this film is “not for Russian, but for Americans”, although the film had basically been made by Russian émigrés. Such pro-Soviet propaganda, pushed to the limits of kitsch and self-parody, is typical for the wave of films which were released in Hollywood during the war (“Mission to Moscow” by Michael Curtiz, “Three Russian Girls” by Fyodor Otsep (Ozep), “The North Star” by Lewis Milestone, all made in 1943). As paradoxical as it may be, the stereotype of such pro-Soviet propaganda has been incorporated in Ernest Lubitsch’s brilliant comedy “Ninotchka” (1939), which is considered to be a model of anti-Soviet attitudes.
The films of Russian émigrés develop – from an attempt at preserving the style of Russian pre-Revolutionary cinema to the gradual assimilation of a new cultural context, but also from the creation of a Russian, and later Soviet myth, at times far removed from real life.
Natalia Nusinova,
Programme Curator
ANGOISSANTE AVENTURE
Director Jacob Protozanoff
France, 1920
L’ENFANT DU CARNAVAL
Director Ivan Mosjoukine
France, 1921
KEAN OU DESORDRE ET GENIE
Director Alexandre Volkoff
France, 1923
NOSTALGIE
Director Victor Tourjansky
France, 1937
REINEKE FUCHS
Director Wladislaw Starewicz
Germany, 1936-1937
SONG OF RUSSIA
Director Gregory Ratoff
USA, 1944
Russians may love cinema or hate it, they may be indifferent toward it or even, say, hold it in despise, but when the hear the word “Mosfilm”, they invariably smile. The smile of joy and happiness – thinking of Gaidai and Riazanov, remembering “True Friends” and “The Girls”, “Mimino” and “Winter Evening in Gagry”. Everyone shares that. The smile is ironic and sad. That goes for all those, who were first called revisionists, then dissidents, and now are supporters of the liberal-Atlantic dictatorship. The second series of “Ivan the Terrible”, “Andrei Rublev” and “Stalker”, Shveitser’s “The Tight Knot”, Panfilov’s “The Theme”, Abdrashitov’s “Fox Hunt”, Shakhnazarov’s “Ward No. 6”... Gaidai, by the way, too. “It doesn’t matter to us, it doesn’t matter,We may be afraid of the wolf and the owl...” The smile is broad, proud, and majestically patriotic. Sergei Fedorovich, comrades Ozerov, Gostev and Matveev. The front without flanks. The front behind the front line. The front in the back of the enemy. How many great and small, colour and black-and-white, wide-screen and large-format films about THEIR artful spies and OUR valorous scouts! The four-part serial “The Shield and the Sword”, I hope, everybody remembers. Without the right to be oneself. The order is to survive. There is no room for appeal. The last frontier. Children and adults, fools and intellectuals, Westerners and Slavophiles, physicists and lyricists, inveterate communists and notorious anti-Soviets find the meaning of life and its value in the films made at Mosfilm. It may well be that the convictions and beliefs (or their absence) of the citizens of our great Fatherland were formed under the direct influence of the films created at the country’s main film studio. It has been said that recently some malicious old folks wanted to close the studio and construct elite apartments on its territory. Thanks to a stranger, Comrade Crisis – the elite has been somewhat impoverished.Our film-empire has not yet vanished!
Sergei Lavrentev
Programme curator
SPRING
Director Grigori Alexandrov
USSR, 1947
TRUE FRIENDS
Director Mikhail Kalatozov
USSR, 1954
A GROOM FROM THE RIGHT SOCIETY
Director Leonid Gaidaj
USSR, 1958
DOG BARBOS AND THE UNUSUAL RACE
Director Leonid Gaidaj
USSR, 1961
THE GIRLS
Director Yuri Chuliukin
USSR, 1961
BOOTLEGGERS
Director Leonid Gaidaj
USSR, 1961
BALZAMINOV'S MARRIAGE
Director Konstantin Voinov
USSR, 1964
GENTLEMEN OF LUCK
Director Alexander Sery
USSR, 1971
THE UNBELIEVABLE ADVENTURES OF ITALIANS IN RUSSIA
Director Eldar Riazanov
USSR/Italy, 1973
MIMINO
Director Georgi Daneliya
USSR, 1977
WE ARE FROM JAZZ/WE PLAY IN JAZZ BAND
Director Karen Shakhnazarov
USSR, 1983