One hundred - twelve - sixty

The XII Archival Film Festival will be held in White Pillars

The current festival (which true cinephiles from among critics and film experts traditionally look forward to almost with more impatience than category A screenings), which opens on Monday, will become a doubly anniversary event - in 2008, Russian cinema will celebrate its centenary (a special program is dedicated to this date , consisting, among other things, of the very first films of 1908, from the canonical “Ponizovaya Volnitsa” to “Drama in a Camp of Gypsies near Moscow”) and sixty Gosfilmofond (the program of the latest acquisitions of the Russian film archive is dated to this date, here films received in exchange by Coppola, Vaida , Cavani, Fassbinder...). As in all past times without exception, healthy conservatism will reign in White Pillars - surprises and surprises should be expected exclusively within the programs themselves, while their grid itself remains unchanged. There will be no “Great Centuries” - this year they will be celebrated by cameraman Sergei Urusevsky (The Forty-First, 1963, by Grigory Chukhrai will be shown), actresses Bette Davis (What Happened to Baby Jane, 1962, by Robert Aldrich), Anna Magnani (Hell in the City, 1958, Renato Castellano) and Kira Andronikashvili (In the Black Mountains, 1941, Nikolai Shengelai), actors Leonid Kmit (Once Upon a Summer, 1936, Igor Ilyinsky) and Rostislav Plyatt (A Defenseless Creature ", 1960, Mikhail Volodarsky), directors Alexander Ford (Border Street, 1948), Helmut Keutner (The Devil's General, 1955), Alexander Zarkhi (My Little Brother, 1962), Jacques Tati (Mr. Hulot's Vacation ", 1952) and David Lean ("Hobson's Choice", 1954). Of course, the masters of world cinema who passed away last year will not be forgotten either - in the In Memoriam cycle the memory of Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Kirill Lavrov, Mikhail Ulyanov will be honored.

“Confrontation,” which has become almost a cult over the years, again focusing on the calendar, is dedicated to the Prague spring of 1968 - documentaries of those years and film magazines specially brought from the Czech People's Film Archive will be shown. The favorite thesis of program compilers is also valid: nothing fundamentally new in the art of moving images can be invented under any guise - every innovation will certainly have a predecessor. Last year, with the help of Drankov’s “Sonka the Golden Hand” (1908) and “Mephisto” (1930), Henri Debin debunked the belief that TV series are a product of recent times. Now they are going to do the same with video clips: it turns out that back in the 40s in the USSR there was a genre of “films-songs” - participants and guests of the festival will be able to see, hear, and, if desired, sing along to “The Song of Brinko” and “Moscow May", "Song of the Motherland" and "Cossack Duma about Stalin", "It was in the East" and "Into battle, sons of the people", "Anthem of the Bolshevik Party" and "Tula Rifle"...

Kirill Razlogov will hold a round table on the topical (especially in light of the latest decision of the American Film Academy) topic “Russian cinema and the world film process: integration, interaction or parallel existence?” And on the last day of the festival, February 1, the best film critic, film theorist and creator of a television program dedicated to cinema of the year will be named by a general vote of all participants and guests.

Stanislav F. ROSTOTSKY