Khrustalyov, mashinu!
Russia / France,
1998, 137 min
Shown in 1999
CREDITS
- dir
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Alexei Gherman
- prod
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Guy Seligmann
- scr
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Alexei Gherman, Svetlana Karmalita
- cam
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Vladimir Ilyne
- editor
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Irina Gorokhovskaya
- cast
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Yuri Tsurilo, Nina Ruslanova, Juri Jarvet, Michael Demeniev, Alexander Bashirov
- source
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Flach Pyramide, 5, rue Richepanse, 75008 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-40-20-05-51
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COMMENTS
Alexei Gherman in person.
OTHER
Seven years in production, Alexei Gherman’s first film since My Friend Ivan Lapshin (SFIFF 1987) is a masterpiece of disorientation: Enigmatic gestures and events, elliptical phrases and sounds slip past us before we can make sense of them, and yet they do make perfect poetic sense. An odd mixture of jumpiness, exhaustion, giddiness and confusion permeates Gherman’s lustrous black-and-white images, adding up to an eye-opening representation of what it’s like to live in a totalitarian society where something monumental is taking place, although no one knows precisely what, nor when or how it will break. The time is the winter of 1953, the place is Moscow, the anti-Semitic purges are under way and Stalin is dying. There are signs that something is astir both in the country at large and in the household of General Yuri Glinsky, a military surgeon who resembles G.I. Gurdjieff. Glinsky is abducted and, after one of the most harrowing journeys ever depicted in cinema, deposited at the heart of the enigma. Profoundly personal, unrelentingly tough and oddly affirmative, Khrustaliov, My Car! is as brave as filmmaking gets. It is also an altogether towering achievement.
—Kent Jones
FACTOID #217
A sporadic SFIFF tradition, fashion shows are lighthearted affairs that help raise funds for the Festival. In 1968, Oakland designer Richard Tam mounted a show at the Fairmont Hotel that attracted high society; the Examiner commented that the show ’combined Tam’s simple daytime elegance with his almost theatrical evening gowns.’
