Yuliya VASILYEVA. Eisenstein: the political and the aesthetic aspects of work. A view from the 21st century

The article proposes to reconsider and problematize the relationships between the philosophic and aesthetic platforms of Eisenstein and the Soviet ideology. The author thinks that Eisenstein’s theory and practice are connected not as much with the outdated polemics about the Soviet ideology as with more global (and topical) problems faced by art and humanity. These are, for instance: how a human life can be understood and modeled in its historical development, how can we define the nature of the human being not severing the ties with his biological nature and the universe. And the most important question: how can we keep the direction towards freedom in this search.

 

Joan NEUBERGER. Eisenstein’s angel. (Translated by Natalia Ryabchikova)

The author analyzes Russian icons as a key to Eisenstein’s experiments with method and meaning in «Ivan the Terrible» and comes to the conclusion that in «Ivan» three lines of Eisenstein’s thinking converged: a dialectic dynamics of conflict and synthesis that dates back to his earliest works on montage; a search for universal models of human culture and fundamental belief in evolution in time, be that collective histori­cal time or individual time of human life. Together they create the portrait of Ivan as a man of irresolvable controversies.

 

 

Lev ATAMANOV: «Animation is anything plus something else» (Interviewed by Lyudviga Zakrzhevskaya)

 

[Autobiographical Sketches]

 

Lev Atamanov’s trip to China. From the history of production of an unmade film «Nachzha disturbs the calm of the sea», 1958

 

«Drawn by BFF», «Petrushka» and unrealized projects

 

This section is compiled of materials from the family archive of the animation director Lev Atamanov. In an interview from the middle of 1970s he talks at length about his work and family history and discusses the nature of animation and the films of his colleagues. In an autobiographical draft Atamanov gives evidence concerning the work on film illustrations for a report by V. Kuibyshev. There is no other written evidence of this collective work of almost all Moscow animation artists (quite a unique thing at the time). A cluster of documents about the abortive co-production of USSR and China includes correspondence between Atamanov, the officials of the Chinese studio and Soyuzmultfilm as well as Atamanov’s diary notes. The section about unrealized Atamanov’s projects includes his correspondence with Herluf Bidstrup, a proposal for a screen version of Igor Stravinsky’s opera and a letter from Atamanov to Soyuzmultfilm officials about his work in 1970s.

 

Alexei M. ORLOV. The fate of the drawn on film animation in USSR: Alexandr Gladyshev and Nadezhda Aslanova

An interview with animator Alexandr Gladyshev. The director talks about his life, his work at the Kishinev studio, about technical equipment invented for drawing on film, about the use of Norman McLaren’s experi­ments and about the fate of his own films.

 

Natalia GOLOVANOVA. Ancient Rome. Оpus 1

Natalia Evgenyevna GOLOVANOVA (Kotovschikova) is an animation director, scriptwriter and artist. For many years she has worked at the Soyuzmultfilm studio and her essay presents an allegorical account of the studio’s everyday life of 1970–1980s.

 

 

Tribute to Mikhail Yampolskiy

 

Sergei EISENSTEIN. Drafts of the «Memoirs». (Publication by Naum Kleiman)

In this section we publish a small part of the array of outlines and drafts for Eisenstein’s memoirs that are scattered among «autobiographic materials» as such as well as in other sections of the director’s archive, among «diary notes», «excerpts, citations, outlines» and among drafts of theoretical works. The section is dedicated to M.B. Yampolskiy who celebrates his 60th anniversary.

 

 

Konstantin BANDUROVSKIY. Sex without covers

In the modern day films the principles of differentiation between erotica and pornography established in European culture have often been broken. The author associates this with the cinema’s loss of sensual­ity. Taking several films of the recent years as examples he scrutinizes this problem from the standpoint of philosophy and the history of painting.

 

 

Archival finds. (Natalia Yakovleva)

About the new section of the Gosfilmofond festival «Belye Stolby» called «Archival Finds». One of the presentations made during the festival formed the basis of the article below.

 

Sergei KAPTEREV. From «A page from a biography» to «Their kingdom». (Notes for a research)

The author writes about his work with archival material which helped him to attribute a film stored at the Gosfilmofond archive (provisional title «A page from a biography», no intertitles) as the remained two reels of Mikhail Kalatozov’s film «Their kingdom» that had been thought lost.

 

The prologue. (Vladimir Dmitriev)

This section is related to the screening of the film «Pervorossiyane» (1966, directed by A. Ivanov and E. Shiffers based on a script by O. Berggolts) at the XIII «Belye Stolby» film festival. The deputy director of the Gosfilmfond archive Vladimir Dmitriev writes about the process of transferring the widescreen copy of the film to 35 mm. For many years the film could not be screened due to the absence of the needed equipment in Russia.

 

Yakov BUTOVSKIY. «Pervorossiyane» (1966–2009)

The author compares his impressions from the first viewing of the film 40 years ago on the big screen (in widescreen variant) to the new DVD of the film restored to 35 mm in HD format. He notes the inevitable loss in image quality and remembers his trip to a shooting location of the film.

 

Larisa DANILINA: «Meeting with Shiffers was the smile of fortune for me». (Interviewed by Tamara Sergeeva)

The actress Larisa Danilina, the wife of director Evgeniy Shiffers, remembers how she joined the crew of «Pervorossiyane» and how the filming went. She reflects on Shiffers’s style of work on the set and speaks about the director’s life after the film when he was banned from working in theater or film and turned to writing religious and philosophic treatises.

 

Yulian PANICH. A sorrowful afterword

The text is about the filming of «Pervorossiyane» in which the author took part as an actor and about his own documentary «You see, I’m not forgetting…» dedicated to the production of «Pervorossiyane».

 

Ivan KRASKO: «For Shiffers his whole life was an experiment». (Interviewed by Petr Bagrov)

The actor remembers the beginning of his career, the meeting with Evgeniy Shiffers and the making of «Pervorossiyane».

 

Larisa LONGINA-SOKOLOVA. The crucified jester. A chapter from the book

The text centers around the figure of the theatre designer Mikhail Shcheglov and around his work on «Pervorossiyane» as an art director. The author writes about the history of the film’s reception, about its visual principles, as well as about the atmosphere on the set.

 

Evgeniy MARGOLIT. Such a film. (In the context of the film process)

The texts puts «Pervorossiyane» in the context of cinema of the 1960s, and specifically in the context of poetical films of that period that inherit some principles of the Ukrainian poetical cinema of the sec­ond half of 1920s (Dovzhenko, Kavaleridze). The author defines the film as an example of the «anti-cinema» that dates back to the genre of miracle. He pays special attention to such things as the fundamental static nature of the film, its emphasized placard style, expressive details, the ornamental nature of screen space (which is a sign of its sanctification), and consistent play with the flat surface of the film image.

 

Alexandr Ivanov. Diary

Notes from the journal the director Alexandr Ivanov kept on the set of the film «Pervorossiyane» in the summer of 1966 as well as his letters to his wife from that period.

 

«There’s no Pervorossiysk — a Commune is Ripening». Joint session of the artistic counsel of the film studio and the Second creative association, 1967

We publish a transcript of the session of the artistic counsel of «Lenfilm» (April 4, 1967). Among its par­ticipants were E.S. Dobin, V.Ya. Vengerov, S.S. Orlov, N.N. Kosheverova, L.G. Muratov, I.I. Shneiderman, G.M. Kozintsev, A.Ya. Vitol, L.N. Rakhmanov, M.A. Gukovskiy, N.I. Lebedev, M.A. Dudin, O.F. Berggolts, D.M. Moldavskiy and others. The speakers noted the courage of the authors’ artistic search, the tragic note of the film, its expressive camera work.

 

 

Natalia KRIVULYA. Amazing adventures, or Intellectual games of Andrei Khrzhanovskiy

The author talks about the films of the classical Russian animator not only from the standpoint of a researcher but from inside the film production process as well, having worked as an artist on several of Khrzhanovskiy’s films. This synthetic method gives a three-dimensional picture of the multi-layered work of the master.

 

 

Oleg ZASLAVSKIY. Between the God and the Minotaur. Analysis of M. Antonioni’s «Beyond the Clouds»

The article examines the key images for understanding the film as well as their relationship to the general characteristics of Antonioni’s poetics. The author analyses the transformation of scriptural and mythological plots. In the context of the Minotaur myth he goes on to examine the conflict between the divine Creator and an artist. Revealing semiotic oppositions in the plot of the film, the author speculates about the problem of authenticity of the work of fiction and/or the problem of its authorship. He writes specifically about the author­ship of «Beyond the Clouds» which was made by Antonioni with Wim Wenders as an assistant.

 

Boris REIFMAN. Structure vs. structure. One of the many possible interpretations of J.-L. Godard’s «À bout de souffle»

The author gives a detailed analysis of the characters’ actions and their motives and talks about the possible viewers’ perception of these actions that can be one of parody or absurd. At the same time the author writes about the viewers’ perception of the director’s cinematic language and about his behavior in the film with respect to viewers’ perception. Comparing actions, words and gestures of the characters with philosophic arguments of Camus, Derrida, Lacan and Godard the author reveals the discourses that intersect in the narrative and the levels of the narrative itself.

 

Irina MELNIKOVA. (Re)presentation of «Metamorphosis». Fokin, Kafka, Magritt and the problem of cinema adaptation

Valeriy Fokin’s film based on Franz Kafka’s «Metamorphosis» serves as the starting point for the author’s reflections about literature and cinema as two different modes of writing. The author employs a structural analysis of Fokin’s cinematic text and pays special attention to quoting of Magritt’s paintings that plays an important part in understanding the director’s message.

 

 

Natalia RYABCHIKOVA. Film set: «Proletkino»

 

Documents concerning the film «Atonement», 1926. (Publication and text preparation by Lyudmila Kiryakevich, commentary by Natalia Ryabchikova)

In this issue we present an archival find — documents concerning the functioning of the non-governmental film studio «Proletkino» (1923–1927). Some of the documents have been classified up to this day. The first part of the documents published deals with the production history of the film «Atonement», now lost. The article preceding the documents section describes the state of affairs at the studio during the production of the film which was Valeriy Inkizhinov’s directorial debut, where the actress Ada (Yadviga) Voitsik played her first major part and where Ivan Pyriev worked as an assistant director.

 

 

Larisa BEREZOVCHUK. Concerning the use of mass culture genres by art-house directors

For the past several years several film directors traditionally ranked among the members of the art-house movement have turned to the genre cinema. The author scrutinized the state of the genre canon in Lars von Trier’s «Dancer in the Dark», comes to the conclusion that the film is an «anti-musical» and then tries to find out the aims of such genre «games».

 

 

«Nevertheless, it will be!» Letters of S.M. Eisenstein to Leon Mussinac (Publication, text preparation and commentary by Vladimir Zabrodin)

Three letters and several postcards from S.M. Eisenstein to Leon Mussinac were removed (due to censorial reasons) from Moussinac’s «Selected Works» (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1981) where almost all correspondence between the Soviet director and the French critic was published.

 

 

Main directions for viewing cinematographic films. Petrograd, 1915 (Publication, introduction and commentary by Anna Kovalova)

Censorial instructions that inspectors had to follow in examining films. They were compiled in 1915 and sanctioned by the governor of Petrograd.

 

 

Ekaterina SALNIKOVA. Manifesto of an analyst-synthesizer. (N.A. Khrenov. Images of the great rupture. Cinema in the context of changing cultural cycles. Moscow: Progress-Traditsiya, 2008)

The new book by N.A. Khrenov, «Images of the great rupture. Cinema in the context of changing cultural cycles», is an important stage in the development of the author’s ideas about humanities. As such, the reviewer argues, the book becomes a manifesto of a whole new school in cultural studies.

 

Sergei KAPTEREV. Two books about the most important. (Peter Rollberg. Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 2009 ; Birgit Beumers. A History of Russian Cinema. Oxford–New York: Berg, 2009)

This year two fundamental books about the Soviet and Russian film have been published abroad. The author analyses them from a point of view of different categories of foreign readers as well as from the standpoint of importance of these works for Russian film scholars.

 

Dmitriy SALYNSKIY: «Metaphorically speaking, all harmonious systems can be considered temples». (The author talks about his book (Dmitriy Salynskiy. Cinemahermeneutics of Takovsky. Moscow: Kvadriga, 2009) with Tamara Sergeeva)

The author argues that in Tarkovskiy’s films one can see many meanings on different levels if one reads these films using the language of «the archeology of culture». With the help of hermeneutics which draws attention primarily to the vertical, to the value scale one is able to analyze not only mythologems but other semantic fields as well, the fields that relate to other types of consciousness. Moreover, each new layer doesn’t negate the previous one, but it reconsiders its material. Salynskiy uses St. Augustine’s four-level structure of text and, without disputing the affinity of hermeneutics to psychoanalysis, he notes that the former relates to the spiritual sphere.

 

 

Correcting an error

Conclusions drawn from Larisa Berezovchuk’s article «The Phenomenon of Film Narrative (Towards the Preliminary Definition of the Notion’s Semantic Field)» (KZ, № 89/90).