Reimagining History: The Films of Evgeny Tsymbal
Starts: November 5, 2009 at 5:00 PM
Ends: November 9, 2009
Summary
A two film series by Russian historical documentary maker Evgeny Tsymbal, capped with a talk by the filmmaker
Full Description
November 5, 5 pm., Washington 201 Red Zion (Dir. Evgeny Tsymbal 2006)
To discourage Jews from immigrating to Palestine during the 1920s, the USSR established agricultural collectives in the fertile lands north of the Black Sea. Director Evgeny Tsymbal returns with a compelling documentary about the rise and fall of the Soviet Jewish Autonomous Region in Crimea, featuring newly released archival newsreels.
November 8, 6 pm., Washington 201 Dziga and his Brothers (Dir. Evgeny Tsymbal 2003)
The fascinating and tumultuous lives of Mikhail, Boris and Denis Kaufman (better known as Dziga Vertov) are the focus of this powerful documentary. Using rare archival footage from Russian state film archives and private collections, the brothers' lives and art are traced from Bialystok to Moscow, Paris, and Hollywood.
From the Philadephia Weekly: The Coppola clan has nothing on the Kaufmans, a family of geniuses to rival the Tenenbaums, even if their names may not immediately click in your head. Practitioners of impossible shots, editing/camera tricks and improvisation in general, brothers David, Moisey and Boris get highlighted in Yevgeni Tsymbal's succinct Russian doc. David Kaufman became Dziga Vertov, a last name he chose because it was Polish for "spinning top"-which is a perfectly apt description of his 1929 opus Man With the Movie Camera. If Movie Camera's not the best documentary ever made, it's at least the most visually ravishing. (As pointed out frequently enough to diminish its merits, the post-MTV filmmaker generation-and Leni Riefenstahl-would be nowhere without it.) The other two brothers went in different directions, though Moisey worked alongside Dziga on Movie Camera before their estrangement turned him into one of Dziga's doc-making rivals. (From the clips we see, he's just about his equal, too.) Boris, meanwhile, spread the style westward, first to France to work with Jean Vigo (L'Atalante), then to America, garnering him both an Oscar for shooting On the Waterfront and frequent employment by Sidney Lumet.
November 9, 5 pm., Blow Hall 332 Lecture: The Myth of Andrey Tarkovsky
Russian Filmmaker and Historian Evgeny Tsymbal
Evgeny Tsymbal, a renowned filmmaker who started his career working as director's assistant on Andrey Tarkovsky’s The Stalker, challenges the notion of Tarkovsky as a Romantic, spiritual genius-prophet and offers his own iterpretation of the filmmaker’s identity-- a collaborative, process-based, slightly conceptual artist more amenable to an age of relational aesthetics.
Evgeny Tsymbal began work at the Mosfilm Studios in Moscow in the 1970's and worked in production and as an assistant director in films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Nikita Mikhalkov, Larisa Shepitko and Eldar Rizanov amongst others. Commencing his own film career with a variety of short films, Tsymbal acheived critical acclaim with the prize-winning short Defence Council Sedov (46 mins) and continued this success with The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon (1990). Subsequent work continued in the sphere of documentary film, with works such as Roads of Commonwealth (1995), Ways of Agricultural Reform (1995), Homeland (1996), In Memory: Alexander Kaidanovskyi (1996), 1001 Stories About Cinema: Vladimir Naumov (1998) and the award-winning Stalker's Dreams (1998), His second film about Kaidanovskyi, who played the leading role in Tarkovsky's film Stalker. Recent work includes the documentary films Ordinary Bolshevism (1999) and Dziga and his Brothers (2002). In addition to directing, Tsymbal has continued his work as a scriptwriter, historian and journalist publishing articles in journals including Art of Cinema, Museum, Russian Literature, Sight and Sound, Premier, Artes, New Statesman and Chaplin.
Sponsored by the Film and Russian Studies Programs and the College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Lecture Fund
