It is easy for me to expand this list to fifty or even a hundred paintings. Maybe more. But it is necessary to stop at ten, as I was asked. These are the rules of the game. I name these ten paintings in the order in which I saw them. That’s why Robert Bresson’s 1956 film, which I saw only in 2000, if I’m not mistaken, completes the list. During my time in the Soviet Union, this film was not released.
The Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor (1958) Nathan Juran
I watched this movie when I was five years old. It was the “Avangard” cinema, which was located not far from the “Arsenal” plant in Kyiv. And, of course, my mother took me to the cinema.
There was a giant cyclops with a horn in the tape, which seemed to me just inhumanly scary at the time. I remember that this cyclops moved with some jerks, as is appropriate in cheap puppet animation (I understand this now), but then I slipped out of the chair from fright. And so he sat under the chair until the end of the film. This was my first impression of cinema. Years later, in America, I found and watched the tape and was somewhat disappointed.
“Andrei Rublev” (1966) Andrei Tarkovsky
I had to see this movie before it was released. The screening was held at the Kyiv Cinema House, where my father took me. It was the first Big movie in my life. The first one is so difficult. The first is non-linear. The first one is so visually rich. The first one you keep thinking about a month after watching it. As a well-read teenager, I already knew “complex” literature, but I had never seen anything so complex and deep in cinema. Thanks to “Rublev”, I realized that cinematography can be equal to literature in the height and complexity of the task. This picture fundamentally influenced my attitude to cinema.
Profession: Reporter (1975) by Michelangelo Antonioni
I was mesmerized by the existential philosophy of this film: the thought of the impossibility of going beyond one’s own body and destiny, beyond one’s own self. As a first-year student of the film faculty, I was equally impressed by Jack Nicholson and the purely cinematic solutions of this picture. I always remember many shots. The finale of the film – one single long frame in which human life is lost, and at the same time nothing changes – I consider the most important cinematic achievement. Milestone Like steps of Odessa stairs. To this day, I am concerned about the dry asceticism of Antonioni’s films, where there is almost never any music and no emotional cue. Films that offer the viewer solitude of thought.
“Long Live the Songbird” (1970) Otar Ioseliani
A film of absolute restraint. I think this is one of the most perfect works of Soviet cinematography. This tape appealed to me personally, to my understanding of what and how my life consists, and what I strive for. The film had an impact on me and many of my peers.
“Mirror” (1974) Andrei Tarkovsky
I confess that I did not understand this film the first time. When I looked at it, it became clear to me that I was simply in love with the picture. Since then I have watched The Mirror many times. Today this picture seems both clear and transparent to me, I even wonder why I did not understand it then.
The uniqueness of the film, in my opinion, is that it for the first time affirmed the simultaneity of the present and the past, memories and imagination. All this is a single space of consciousness, which means a single space of cinematography. Such a non-linear connection of fragments, or fragments of consciousness, into one whole, I consider the most important cinematographic and aesthetic achievement. The most important milestone in the art of cinema.
“Mirror” is also a completely non-Soviet film. (Here it is important not to confuse with “anti-Soviet”, which is completely different). The entire Soviet narrative was built on the consistent – direct – observance of the chain of cause and effect. This is how Soviet thinking was arranged. The “mirror” was tearing her apart. The world turned out to be much more complicated.
By the way, I consider the first non-Soviet film to be “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” by Serhiy Parajanov.
“Viridiana” (1961) Luis Buñuel
Not my favorite Buñuel film. However, the first tape of his that I watched was still at the institute. “Viridiana” impressed me not only and not so much with the ease with which good turns into evil. It was the first time I saw a cinema where everything or almost everything on the screen was ambiguous. Here, probably, the English word subversive (from the English to subvert – to rebel, undermine) will be more accurate. When everything we see on the screen may or may not be real. And you never know if the author is doing all this seriously or ironically. Watching Buñuel is like walking on ice, you can slip or fall into the water at any moment. I adore this director. My idol.
My American Uncle (1980) Alain René
It was the first picture for me in which an intellectual game was part of the story. The game as a component of the story.
Director Alain René transferred Professor Henri Labory’s theory of rat behavior in stressful situations to people. There were actors and there were rats in the film. Equal partners on the screen. An extremely innovative and funny move. It was subversive again – is he serious?
Or is this a joke?
I was absolutely in love with this picture.
“Flight in dreams and waking life” (1982) Roman Balayan
The film had a huge emotional impact on me then. I saw the film at the premiere at the House of Cinema in Kyiv, and I remember how emotionally the whole hall perceived it. For me, it was a film about the senselessness – the futility – of living in the circumstances we all were in at the time. Anyway, that’s how I understood the film. Many things in it are wonderful – both Oleg Yankovsky and the music, but the finale of the picture is simply knockout. It was a deeply disturbing movie.
“Repentance” (1984) Tengiz Abuladze
I can’t say that I admire the aesthetics of this film today, but I have to give it credit. Then, in 1986, when we saw the film, it was an extremely important picture, both in my life and in the life of the country in which I and all of us lived then. And we lived then on the bones and corpses of innocently killed people.
A tape of enormous influence. I do not think that I owe anything to Gorbachev, but to “Repentance” and Tengiz Abuladze, I owe a lot.
By the way, when I showed “Repentance” to American students, the tape made a very strong impression on them.
“The condemned man escaped” (1956) Robert Bresson
In this film, I saw for the first time how succinctly and “dryly” it is possible to tell the story of human salvation. Bresson’s aesthetics in a detailed, documentary and exclusively “rhythmic” story. His films are mesmerizing. The local and, if you will, “small” story of one man – one fighter of the French Resistance – expands into a universal parable. Parables about the Salvation of Man.
Tempo-rhythm in Bresson is the most important formative component of the film. His paintings are hypnotizing. A director for directors, they often talk about Robert Bresson.
Anyone who has not been emotionally affected by his films hardly understands what filmmaking is. (And this is only almost a joke!)