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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My Friend Ivan Lapshin / Moy drug Ivan Lapshin / USSR / 1984

I was somehow under the impression that this was more of an oppositional film than it turned out to be. Some critics have read a deep critique of the Stalinist state here along the lines of “absence is presence”, i.e. because we don’t know the fate of Lapshin subsequent to the main setting of 1935 we should read the worst. But Ivan Lapshin doesn’t seem so far from an upright Soviet hero, the handsome defeater of vile criminal elements even if he misses out on the girl. In fact the dominant tone set by the present-day frame narrator’s voice-over is one of nostalgia. For all that, German gives a superb evocation of a provincial town of the time, the cold, the mud, the cramped living conditions; and the warmth, vitality, and idealism of the people of the day.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
23 Jan 2006 11:46 AM | Submit Comment

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