Soviet Silent Cinema: Peter Bagrov on Treasures from the BAMPFA Collection

November 6–10, 2019

Film archivist Peter Bagrov joins us to share his deep expertise on Soviet cinema with this series of silent classics and rarities from the BAMPFA collection.

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My Grandmother
Two-Buldi-Two
Wings of a Serf
Don Diego and Pelageya
A Familiar Face

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Past Films

Cain and Artem
- Sunday, November 10 3:30 PM
Pavel Petrov-Bytov
USSR, 1929
BAMPFA Collection

A burly boatman forms an unlikely bond with a Jewish shoemaker in this hallucinatory melodrama, an expressionistic wake-up call to the Russian people to overcome alcoholism and religious factionalism.

Lecture by Peter Bagrov; Judith Rosenberg on Piano
A Familiar Face
- Saturday, November 9 2:30 PM
Nikolai Shpikovsky
USSR, 1929
BAMPFA Collection

An enterprising Ukrainian schemer plots his way out of the Russian Civil War in this adventure movie with touches of the absurd, “one of the best examples of early Ukrainian comedy” (Giornate del Cinema Muto).

Lecture by Peter Bagrov; Judith Rosenberg on Piano
Don Diego and Pelageya
- Saturday, November 9 7:30 PM
Yakov Protazanov
USSR, 1928
BAMPFA Collection

An old woman blindly walks into the path of a tyrannical station master, creating an escalating struggle, in this satire on power and Soviet society, “the finest Soviet comedy of the 1920s” (Ian Christie). With Protazanov’s bitter love story The Forty-First.

Lecture by Peter Bagrov; Judith Rosenberg on Piano
Two-Buldi-Two
- Friday, November 8 3:10 PM
Lev Kuleshov
USSR, 1929
BAMPFA Collection

A father-and-son clown act are separated during the Russian Civil War in this little-seen, energetic blur of Hollywood action and Soviet kineticism by the great Lev Kuleshov.

Lecture by Peter Bagrov; Judith Rosenberg on Piano
Wings of a Serf
- Thursday, November 7 7 PM
Yuri Tarich
USSR, 1926
BAMPFA Collection

Set in the sixteenth century during the reign of Ivan IV, this fascinating feature involves the unhappy fate of a serf who tries to fly. With an extraordinary cast and crew, including the great Russian actor Leonid Leonidov, the film influenced Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.

Lecture by Peter Bagrov; Judith Rosenberg on Piano
Katka’s Reinette Apples
- Thursday, November 7 3:10 PM
Fridrikh Ermler, Eduard Ioganson
USSR, 1926
BAMPFA Collection

In this comedy-melodrama, a young peasant woman in the big city finds her attempts at apple selling lead to encounters with the underworld.

Lecture by Peter Bagrov; Judith Rosenberg on Piano
My Grandmother
- Wednesday, November 6 3:10 PM
Kote Mikaberidze
USSR, 1929
BAMPFA Collection

Gogol meets Chaplin in this riotously inventive, scathingly antibureaucratic satire, one of the eccentric high points of Soviet silent cinema. With Vsevolod Pudovkin and Nikolai Shpikovsky’s satiric short Chess Fever.

Lecture by Peter Bagrov

Soviet Silent Cinema: Peter Bagrov on Treasures from the BAMPFA Collection

Lecture/Screening Series

November 6–10, 2019

When Peter Bagrov was our guest at BAMPFA’s Sergei Eisenstein retrospective in 2018, he enthralled audiences with his mastery of Russian and Soviet film history and his enthusiasm for his work as a film archivist. At that time, we hatched the plan for his return visit to Berkeley to present a series of lectures on a selection of rare treasures held in BAMPFA’s Soviet film collection. Bagrov has since migrated from Moscow to Rochester, New York, and been appointed curator of the moving image department at the George Eastman Museum. For a week in November, he will join us to shed light on a range of Soviet silents, including two collaboratively directed films, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Nikolai Shpikovsky’s clever short Chess Fever and Fridrikh Ermler and Eduard Ioganson’s melodrama Katka’s Reinette Apples; Yuri Tarich’s exceptional Wings of a Serf, which influenced Eisenstein’s epic Ivan the Terrible, made twenty years later; and Lev Kuleshov’s marvelous Two-Buldi-Two, which displays all the sophistication of a late-era silent production. Bagrov has also chosen a pair of films by the talented Yakov Protazanov, his powerful film adaptation The Forty-First and the endearing comedy Don Diego and Pelageya. Exceedingly rare selections include Shpikovsky’s A Familiar Face and Pavel Petrov-Bytov’s resonant Cain and Artem, one of the few significant silent films about antisemitism. We begin with a perennial favorite, the satirical masterpiece My Grandmother, directed by the Soviet Georgian filmmaker Kote Mikaberidze.

— Susan Oxtoby, Senior Film Curator

Special Admission
General: $15
BAMPFA members: $11
UC Berkeley students: $7
UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non–UC Berkeley students, disabled persons, ages 65+ and 18 & under: $12

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Series copresented with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and made possible in part by generous funding from the National Endowment for the Arts in support of BAMPFA’s Out of the Vault project. Thanks also to the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the Slavic and Film and Media departments at UC Berkeley for their assistance.