Le dernier Bolchevik, ou Le tombeau d’Alexandre
France,
1993, 120 min
Shown in 1993
CREDITS
- dir
-
Chris Marker
- prod
-
Michael Kustow
- cam
-
Chris Marker, Andrei Pashkevich
- source
-
Les Films de l’Astrophore
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Chris Marker in person.
OTHER
In an interview recorded in 1984, the Russian filmmaker Alexander Ivanovitch Medvedkin turns to the camera to affectionately berate an old friend: "Chris, you lazy bastard you, why don't you ever write?" Eight years later—and five years after Medvedkin's death—the friend, Chris Krazykatovitch Marker, finally gets around to it. These six "letters" by Marker, the cinema's premier essayist (Sans Soleil, SFIFF 1983; The Owl's Legacy, SFIFF 1990) explore the little-known career of a man who was the driving force behind the "film trains" of the early years of the October Revolution and a perennially censored pioneer of early Soviet cinema. (The remarkably inventive 1934 silent Happiness, his only film now well known in the West, didn't receive its American premiere until the 1972 SFIFF). In this filmmaker of rare artistic integrity, Marker finds the figure of a "pure communist in the land where all communists faked being communists." A superb and profound film, arguably one of Marker's best, full of documents rescued from the Russian film archives and testimonials of people who knew Medvedkin, including film critic Victor Dyomin, filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya, (whose The Shattered Mirror will also be shown during the Festival) and Antonina Pirojkova, widow of another close friend of Medvedkin's, the great writer Isaac Babel. The Last Bolshevik is stamped with Marker's idiosyncratic editing and a voice-over which blends humor and a sense of the tragic dimension of history.
—Jean-Pierre Gorin
FACTOID #130
Spike Lee has attended the San Francisco International several times. He came, film reels in hand, for the world premiere of She’s Gotta Have It in 1986. He returned in 1994 with Crooklyn, which starred Oakland’s own Delroy Lindo. And in 2007 he received the Festival’s Film Society Directing Award.
