Film Screenings
Feature, historic and
documentary films and video
FREE with museum admission.
December 10 @ 6pm;
11th @ 4pm; 19 and 20 @ 12:15, 2, 4pm
January 8 @1 and 4pm; January
17 @ 4pm
Russian Ark
2002. Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov. A 19th century
French aristocrat, notorious for his scathing memoirs about
life in Russia, travels through the Russian State Hermitage Museum
and encounters historical figures. The film, staged among
some
of the
Western Art tradition's greatest masterpieces, climaxes in
a pageant of color, motion, and music. For Sokurov, the Hermitage--home
to
generations of Romanovs and repository of so much Russian
history--is the ark of the Russian soul, guarding it affectionately
until
the world sees better days. (In Russian with English subtitles;
96
minutes.)
December 12, 18 @ 12:15pm
January 16 @ 1pm
October
(also known as "Ten Days that Shook the World"),
1927.
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein. In documentary style, events
in Petrograd are re-enacted from the end of the monarchy in
February of 1917 to the end of the provisional government and the
decrees
of peace and of land in November of that year. Lenin returns
in April. In July, counter-revolutionaries put down a spontaneous
revolt, and
Lenin's arrest is ordered. By late October, the Bolsheviks
are ready to strike: ten days will shake the world. While the Mensheviks
vacillate,
an advance guard infiltrates the palace. (English subtitles;
95
minutes.)
December 12, 18 @ 2pm
January 10 and 16 @ 4pm
The End of St. Petersburg
1927. Directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin.
This is a docu-drama about the tense period between the February
Revolution
(when Czar Nicholas II abdicated) and the October Revolution,
when the Bolsheviks took power, as told through the eyes
of a peasant
coming to St. Petersburg. (English subtitles; 80 minutes.)
December 13, 17 @ 1pm, 3pm
Mother and Son
1997. Director: Alexander Sokurov
Germany /Russia 1997, 35mm, color, 73 min.
With Alexei Ananishnov, Gudrun Geyer
Russian with English subtitles
Director
Alexander Sokurov has been hailed as the heir of Tarkovsky, and
is responsible for some of the most astonishing luminous, metaphysical,
mystical, meditative, painterly and poetic cinema of recent years.
In a recent piece on the film for Film Comment, American director
Paul Schrader, author of Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson,
Dreyer, championed Sokurov as the new master of transcendental
cinema.
A delicate, deliberate, daunting work of great emotional amplitude
and visual purity, Mother and Son unfolds in an isolated country
cabin, where a dying woman and her attentive adult son enact a
final, familial pas-de-deux. Using precious little dialogue, Sokurov
conjures
up a unique twilit world of overwhelming melancholy and strange
ethereal beauty, a world which seems to capture the immanent. "To
a certain extent the mother and the son are one single creature
plunged into the strange and beautiful world of eternal Nature,
the world
which either has never been visited by Man (and thus nothing has
been spoilt) or was forever abandoned by Man long-long ago"
Alexander Sokurov (from the author's annotation)
Sokurov
has
described Mother and Son as "two different pictures, one a
visual film, the other a sound film," and his achievement
on both levels is singular and startling. The meticulously designed
score resonates
with murmuring voices, ominous distant thunder, chirping birds.
The transfixing visuals evoke the brooding landscapes of 19th-century
German painter Caspar David Friedrich, while shimmering with hallucinatory,
never-before seen distortion effects (including deliberately misused
anamorphic lenses). "Sokurov proves himself to be the cinema's
supreme landscape artist" (Phillip Lopate, Film Comment). "Astonishing
. . . Mother and Son evokes overwhelming solitude amid creation
. . . Watching it is like watching the last sunset" (J.Hoberman,
Village Voice). "Some films defy description . . . Mother
and Son comes as close as any to falling into that category . .
. Truly
an original masterpiece of contemporary cinema, made by one of
cinema's most uncompromising filmmakers" (Dimitri Eipides,
Toronto I.F.F.). Colour, 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles.
73 mins.
Saturday, December 13
1pm, 3pm:
A gallery talk by curator, Natasha Kolodzei, including introduction
of St. Petersburg video artist, Anna Frants and overview of current
trends in St. Petersburg.
Sponsors of Film and Video program: Jean Fazzinga and Roger Chookazian.
Part of 300th ANNIVERSARY
OF ST.PETERSBURG |
