The Melbourne Cinémathèque

The fact that Boris Barnet (1902–1965) worked largely in comedy only begins to explain the general neglect in the West of a filmmaker whom Jacques Rivette described as “the greatest Soviet director after Eisenstein”.

Barnet was a pioneer of Soviet cinema, studying in Lev Kuleshov’s film workshop (alongside the likes of Vsevolod Pudovkin) while also working as a boxer & sports teacher, a background that gave him the physicality & athleticism required to strive for Kuleshov’s vision of a cinema of action & movement. It was the popular success of Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, in which Barnet played a rambunctious cowboy, that inspired him to become a director. In his own films he married action & a much-debated “Americanism” to structural innovation in his images & editing. Following the “exhilarating surprise” (David Thomson) of his 1926 directorial debut, the serialised Miss Mend, Barnet made The Girl with the Hat Box, a comedy that depicts with remarkable frankness & intensity – like The House on Trubnaya – the crowded urban reality of the time. These films were some of the most popular Soviet comedies of the silent era. Barnet’s first sound film, Outskirts, is a masterpiece of world cinema that bears favourable comparison with Jean Renoir’s La Grande illusion. The highly regarded By the Bluest of Seas discarded its official script to show a wonderful lyrical impressionism and light-handed nonchalance.

This season of imported 35mm prints also includes Barnet’s “poem of movement” (Anna Kukulina), the musical Bountiful Summer, and the director’s penultimate film, Alenka. Barnet received late-career recognition with a Stalin Prize for the Hitchcockian spy movie Secret Agent (1959) before alcoholism eventually led to his suicide in 1965.

7:00 – OUTSKIRTS
Boris Barnet (1933) 98 mins

Barnet’s seminal film harnessed the expressionistic potential of early Soviet sound technique to conjure a gently comic & affecting anti-war masterpiece. Set in an isolated Russian provincial village during World War I, the film portrays the complex relationship that develops between a German prisoner, Hans Klering, & his (for the most part) benign Russian captors. An inventive, lyrical plea for tolerance, the film’s themes of divided loyalty & shared humanity are as relevant today as they were in 1933.

35mm print courtesy of the Austrian Film Museum.

8:50 – THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF MR. WEST IN THE LAND OF THE BOLSHEVIKS
Lev Kuleshov (1924) 94 mins

Montage pioneer Kuleshov’s silent comedy – made in the same year as Eisenstein’s debut feature Strike – disguises avant-garde principles under slapstick experimentation. The 1st openly anti-American Soviet film (ironically, Kuleshov was an open admirer of Griffith & Sennett) depicts Mr. West (Porfiri Podobed) as a hapless Harold Lloyd-like YMCA president intent on visiting Russia to proselytise. Misinformed that Bolsheviks are fur-wearing barbarians, he brings along his pistol-toting cowboy sidekick Jeddy (Boris Barnet). A string of mishaps leads to Mr. West’s enlightenment.

35mm print courtesy of the Austrian Film Museum.

7:00 – ALENKA
Boris Barnet (1961) 86 mins M

Referenced in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, Barnet’s penultimate film is set in 1955, when many migrated from Russia to settle in Kazakhstan. While on their journey travellers recount their memories, which are in turn light & dark, comic & romantic, even instructional. Alenka’s own story is about learning math. These tales are cinematically articulated through experiments in narration, style, temporality & animation. Barnet’s vibrant, physical work imaginatively blends gorgeous scenery & expressive lighting with a peppy, endearing score to create the most gorgeous looking Soviet colour film of its era.

35mm print courtesy of the Austrian Archive.

Followed by

Chess Fever

Vsevolod Pudovkin & Nikolai Shpikovsky (1925) 28 mins.

Barnet stars in Pudovkin’s 1st directorial effort, a comedy in which “chess fever” takes over Moscow. Print courtesy of the National Film & Sound Archive of Australia.

9:05 – BOUNTIFUL SUMMER
Boris Barnet (1951) 87 mins

A gifted artist & progressive filmmaker, Barnet’s lively 1st colour film features a predominantly female cast in a tale of gentle rivalry at work & in love. A lush, colourful, Soviet-era musical featuring peasants & pastoral vistas on a collective farm, it is inevitably overrun with the idealism that saturated the Eastern European musicals of the 1950s. Set immediately after World War II, it is also affected by the Stalinist control of propagandistic public entertainment. Music by German Zhukovsky. 35mm print courtesy of the Austrian Film Museum.

7:00 – BY THE BLUEST OF SEAS
Boris Barnet & Samed Mardanov (1936) 71 mins

Often considered Barnet’s masterpiece, this poetic musical depicts the desires & travails of a love quadrangle. On a remote island 2 young sailors compete for the affections of a beautiful young woman. However, she is faithful to a 3rd man, off fighting in the Pacific. Stunningly beautiful, in turns joyous & melancholy, Georgian filmmaker Otar Iosseliani has called the film a monument to “desire & fidelity”.

35mm print courtesy of the Austrian Film Museum.

8:25 – THE HOUSE ON TRUBNAYA
Boris Barnet (1928) 64 mins

A tenacious country girl arrives in Moscow with her pet goose in a bid to find her uncle & a new life. Unsuccessful, she becomes employed as the maid of a barber & his harridan wife, in a bustling tenement building on Trubnaya Square. Her predicament livens up after a young man encourages her to join a workers’ union. Dazzling & often comic feats of montage & camera movement give whimsical & surreal direction to a serious tale about emerging class-consciousness.

35mm print courtesy of the British Film Institute.

9:40 – THE GIRL WITH THE HAT BOX
Boris Barnet (1927) 68 mins

A girl (Anna Sten in an irresistable debut) is given a supposedly worthless lottery ticket instead of her wages. Clearly betraying the influences of filmmakers such as Lubitsch & Chaplin, Barnet’s 1st solo feature is a charming satire that draws upon the speed & effortless grace of silent era American romantic comedy. It reveals Barnet’s “genius for comedy high & low, a delight in the eccentricities of the Russian personality & a poetic touch with landscapes & cityscapes” (Michael Wilmington).

Print courtesy of the National Film & Sound Archive of Australia.