Kinofest celebrates a century's worth of Russian films

Marcella Veneziale Assistant A&E Editor

Come celebrate the outstanding Russian cinema with Russian Kinofest, the department-sponsored film festival. Beginning on Wednesday, Jan. 26 at 8 p.m. in Blodgett Hall and running each Wednesday at the same time and place until the end of April, one hundred years and a broad spectrum of film genres will be showcased through 12 carefully selected productions.

The festival hopes to increase students’ exposure to Russian film, as this nation’s cinema may be something of which many are unaware. The festival will not only showcase box-office hits, but more off-beat films. The series will be shown in chronological order to demonstrate the progression of various film styles throughout Russia’s modern film history. Russian professors Nikolai Firtich and Dan Ungurianu called the festival a collection of films that show “Russia’s great cinematic tradition.”

Although the first of Russia’s modern films were created in 1908 and 1909, the festival will commence with Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with the Movie Camera “an avant-garde masterpiece of the Golden Age of Soviet cinema,” as described by Firtich. The second film of the series jumps to Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1956 piece The Cranes Are Flying, which was the first Soviet film to win a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival in the year it was released, and marked the return of Russian cinema to the international community after interruptions from World War II and the Stalin era.

Russian productions with familiar genres such as Westerns and Scorsese-like gangster films will also be screened. Vladimir Motyl’s White Sun of the Desert (1969) is both a sophisticated and mainstream view of the situation after the central Asian wars of its era, which the professors described as a “Soviet response to spaghetti Westerns.” Brother, Aleksei Balabanov’s 1997 film, captures the essence of the classic American mob movie with an artsy and stylish edge. Science fiction and the metaphysical is also explored in Andrei Takovsky’s 1972 work Solaris, which was recently re-made in the US with George Clooney in the lead role.

Pre-dating the 1980s British film trend of literary adaptations, My Tender Beast (1978) by Emil Lotianu cinematically re-tells a classic Chekhov story of love and crime. Many war films have also been produced, including the aforementioned The Creanes Are Flying, and also Elem Klimov’s 1985 film Come and See, which describes the pre-perestroika Soviet Union. War is not treated bombastically, however, but on a much more personal level in these films. Finally, the series will conclude with Alexander Sokurov’s 2003 international hit Russian Ark, which is a single take 96-minute film spanning 300 years of Russian history at the Hermitage, Russia’s state museum.

These 12 films were chosen by Firtich and Ungurianu, and they will provide the audience with a brief summary of the context of film before each screening. Students majoring in Russian Studies collaborated with the professors to organize this series, which is the first of its kind on campus that either professor can recall. However, due to the so-called DVD revolution, many Russian films are becoming readily available in the US with English subtitles, which will certainly expand the number of people the films reach. Thus, the film series will serve as an introduction to an ever-expanding genre. Firtich promises the film festival will provide “guaranteed fun.”