Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.


January 2006 activity

Total Log Entries: 67

Total Comments: 30


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The First Teacher / Pervyy uchitel / USSR / 1965

This is, I think, Andrei Konchalovsky-Mikhalkov’s first film and of middling interest, principally for its setting in what I guess is now Kirghizstan. But ideologically it’s the kind of film that will never be made again: an attack on the sexist/classist inequalities of ethnic minority culture; my sympathies are all the way with the Party ideologue hero. Interestingly, the basis narrative set-up is close that of Yellow Earth – I wonder if Chen Kaige ever saw it.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 16mm print
02 Jan 2006 8:45 PM | Comments (2)


Comments / 2 total / Submit Comment

  1. leo / 3 January 2006 / 9:15 AM / URL

    It’s possible that Chen saw this, but I’d bet he was responding to the many similar films in China at the same time. There were a lot of these very odd, simplistic “ethnic” films that explored various Chinese provinces and their minority cultures and how they could be made to fit in with CCP ideologies, etc. And contemporary with Yellow Earth were a number of films that responded to this same genre. Sacrificed Youth is, I think, a better film than Chen’s in many respects.

    I have not seen many Russian examples of this type of film, but your description reminds me a little of Boris Barnet’s Alyonka about the settling of the steppes in Kazakhstan. It also makes me think, by way of counterexample, of Paradzhanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and the problems that film caused for its director.

  2. Jack Irvine / 31 March 2006 / 1:06 PM

    Does anyone know where I could buy a DVD or vudeo of Pervyy uchitel?

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