Smile, Ermler!

New Neskuchny Film about the history of cinema

At the Tarkovsky International Film Festival opening on July 28, they will show the film by Marianne Kireeva “Smile!”

When they say the “Experimental Film”, I immediately want to sleep. The authors of the new film choose a rare genre-a documentary and game drama. Following the through dashing experimenters of the cinema and theater of the 20s, which conquered their space, created synthetic art, they mix the theater and chronicle, dumb cinema, investigation and reconstruction. Students of the acting course play the biography of the talented Soviet film director Friedrich Ermler, plunging into the abyss of history, into the pool of one individual fate. In a similar design, the film “Smayakovsky” by Alexander Shein was made, in which the actors were looking for “their Mayakovsky”.

Together with Kinovad Marianna Kireeva, this journey was composed:

• Evgeny Yakovlevich Margolit , until recently - the main art critic of the State Film Fund, a brilliant connoisseur of the history of domestic cinema and narrator,

• Sitor Aliyev - the producer of the film, a film, a festival selection.

Like -minded people.

Margolit - both a consultant and the narrator. And also a gray -haired gentleman, suitable for the mirror in which he sees ... the history of the cinema.

This story is spinning, around the life and fate of Friedrich Ermler-four times laureates of Stalin's prizes, film classics, avant-garde and realist, creating massive folk hits and masterpieces for all times, such as the “Empire’s Club”-one of the last “Masterpeace” of a dumb cinema, a masterpiece that closes the film awovengard 20s.

"Smile!" -Film-game. Margolith’s velvet voice broadcasts on Ermler’s face (for some reason she remembered Gerdt's enveloping voice). You absolutely believe this voice, it seems, the frantic Friedrich Markovich himself speaks with us, recalling the Bosyatsk childhood in the town, recalling a trip to Hollywood, arguing with the “official sources” varnishing his biography. The "sources" have an official voice and round formulations. And then students of the acting faculty play sketches - bright moments of life, the first meeting with cinema, war, work in the Cheka, the first film ...

And in the summer of 1935, “People's Commissar of Cinema” Boris Shumyatsky took Ermler on a business trip to America: Shumyatsky fell ill with the idea of ​​building Soviet Hollywood.

Among the iconic meetings of that trip is the acquaintance with the god Cinema Charles Spencer Chaplin, the films of which Ermler raved. God knew about the existence of Ermler: the USA recently rolled the “fragment of the empire” in the USA, the film made a great impression on Chaplin. But God was very busy, he finished his masterpiece "New Times", and with difficulty found time for a short audience. Showed a fragment of the new film - the famous stage of the conveyor. And then another fragment. And then the whole picture. In the final, the heroine became a nun, abandoning love and tramps. Ermler, admiring the picture, rebelled against such a finale. So you can’t do with the viewer, you deprive his tears of joy! And they argued ... five hours.

... Three years later, Shumyatsky will be arrested and shot.

Composer Alexander Tchaikovsky transforms here into Ludwiga Van Beethoven - throughout his life, Ermler dreamed of making a picture of a genius who had lost his hearing. But each time the highest organs gave other “tasks” for which he received Stalin's prizes. And then again and again he tried to “break through” the film about the tragedy of the composer, which he translated into the language of music.

Ermler will not put his main film - about Beethoven. And the main meeting will be remembered for a long time and will even describe it in a newspaper note. He dreamed of entering the screen as a dream, but “new times” came in which the conveyor grinded people.

He was close to despair “The Creator has the right to despair,” says the director in the film, “Eisenstein was taken out of the loop. But he is not entitled to broadcast him to his viewer. ” He is obliged to discover the path to the light, like Beethoven in clothes "to joy." Like the music of the Chaplinsky "new times", the famous Smile theme is a smile ... through tears.

Yes, the final of the “new times” Chaplin will still change what the Soviet director will learn about much later.

There is another topic in this artistic investigation. The theme of mutual enrichment, the interchange of creative energy of large artists. The entire cinema of Ermler (great and terrible) is saturated with the spirit of Beethoven music. Chaplin remade the final of “new times” after a meeting with a daring Soviet director. And the brilliant apocalyptic prologue of his “fragment of the Empire ...” was reached on the advice of Eisenstein. There is a roll call of views filled with compassion: a convertus turned into a hero’s plant and a dog's nursing puppies, to the nipples of which a Red Army, a dying of a typhoid.

"Smile!" - A film about cinema as a great comforter, sprinkled with quotes from famous and forgotten films, a feast for film experts and joy for cinema lovers,

In which the time and Friedrich Ermler himself appear without screening, in all his passionate contradiction. Like the hero of Ermler’s main film “The Great Citizen”, who returned from the war, the shell-shocked non-commissioned officer, who becomes into the ranks of the builders of the bright new world ... But the result of his choice turns out to be dramatic. Now it seems that in this picture there are many autobiographical motifs.

Cinema is not able to change the trajectory of not only the historical process, but also one fate. But we agree with Ermler and the authors of the picture “Smile!”, Almost the last property of a living being outside the social level, at the natural level, remains the ability to compassion.

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