Russian Film Recommendations

I have been inspired to post to this old blog by a friend from work who has become obsessed with Night Watch. He asked me to recommend some other Russian movies. So here is a list of some of my favorite Russian films to start with (I'm sure I'm forgetting some at the moment):


Comedies:
Operation Y (1965, directed by Leonid Gaidai)
Kidnapping Caucasian Style (1996, also by Leonid Gaidai)
Peculiarities of the National Fishing (1998, Aleksandr Rogozhkin)
Khochu v tyurmu* (1999, Alla Surikova)

Contemporary Dramas:
The Return (2003, Andrei Zvyagintsev)
Burnt by the Sun (1994, Nikita Mikhalkov)
The Cuckoo (2002, Aleksandr Rogozhkin)
Of Freaks and Men (1998, Aleksei Balabanov)

Classic Dramas:
My Name is Ivan (or Ivan's Childhood) (1962, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Ballad of a Soldier (1959, Grigori Chukhrai)
Kalina Krasnaya* (aka The Red Snowball Tree) (1973, Vasilii Shukshin)

Experimental:
The Man with a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov)

*I don't think this is available subtitled, but if anyone can find it, Ryan can.


Discussion of other contemporary Russian films can be found at Kino Kultura and Images Journal.

NY Times: A Prize Novel Full of Truths That Stretch Believability

Boris Fishman writes about Ruben David Gonzalez Gallego's White on Black, which won the Russian Booker prize last year.

Russian Film Index

Obviously, I haven't been updating this lately (I've been focused on work). But here is a new link:
The Russian Film Index. The host of this page also moderates a Yahoo group dedicated to Russian cinema (you can find the link on the main page).

The Return review

Stanley Kauffmann reviews "The Return" in this week's New Republic (scroll down). He says the film unfairly leaves too much unexplained, but that the young actors Vladimir Garin (who died shortly after the film's completion) and Ivan Dobronravov carry the film. Kauffmann calls their performances "further instances of phenomenal acting by very young people."

New York, New York

I was lucky to catch the New York Public Library's "Russia Engages the World, 1453 - 1825" exhibit on its final day. Some of the highlights included a first edition of Pushkin's Prisoner of the Caucauses (Kavkazkii Plenik), a large wall map of Russia from Napoleon's invasion, numerous illuminated manuscripts and a pornographic pop-up book featuring Catherine the Great.

Also, the Russian film "The Return" ("Vozvrashchenie" ) opens in New York on Friday (check out the trailer). The film, the first directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev, has received wide praise. It won the Golden Lion at the 2003 Venice International Film Festival (Zvyagintsev was awarded the "Lion of the Future award" as best first-time director) and was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Foreign Language Film. Is this part of a widespread revival in Russian film? The real question is will "The Return" make it to DC, or will I have to go back to New York?

Solzhenitsyn gossip
(link via ALD)

The San Francisco Chronicle relays the details of the continuing literary feud between Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Olga Andreyev Carlisle, the woman who helped smuggle out, translate and publish The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago.

The relationship between Carlisle, granddaughter of the writer Leonid Andreyev, and Solzhenitsyn dissolved in the 1970s, when he began to criticize her handling of the books. Carlisle has decided to publish her account of the relationship, Solzhenitsyn and the Secret Circle, in Russia for the first time after becoming aware of Solzhenitsyn's continuing criticism of her.

Irina Ratushinskaia

This past weekend at a local used bookstore I found a bilingual copy of A Tale of Three Heads by Irina Ratushinskaia, an Odessa-born Russian poet. The book is comprised of a couple dozen proze poems in the same vein as Ludmila Petrushevskaia's "fairy tales for adults," but more directly political. The stories are short and clever, mixing the banal and the fantastic. The title story is about a three-headed dragon. The heads agree to collectivize but then, in the resulting paranoid power struggle, one head eats the others. Other stories concern political arrests, blat (the Soviet system of bartering and influence peddling), and the difficulty of living honestly in a dishonest political system.

A dissident, Ratushinskaia was arrested in 1982 and sentenced to seven years in prison for charges related to her political activities. When A Tale of Three Heads was published in 1986, Ratushinskaia was still in prison, but she was released soon afterwords. She came to the United States in 1987 and her memoir, Grey is the Color of Hope, was published that year.

Ratushinskaia is often refered to as a Christian poet, but religion doesn't mark A Tale of Three Heads, perhaps because she became a devout Christian only in prison, and these stories were written before her arrest.

Some links:
short bio
essay on her Christianity
review of her novel Fiction and Lies
Publishers page for Wind of the Journey