Russian Ark will be screened tomorrow, 7:30, at Page Hall.
J. Hoberman, former film guru at the Village Voice, who visited the Writers Institute in December 2012, reviews Russian Ark as one of the key films of the dawning 21st century in his influential book, The Future of Film.
"The ultimate trip, a post-2001 space odyssey, Alexander Sokurov’s "Russian Ark" is the longest continuous take in the annals of motion pictures, a single ninety-six-minute tracking shot in which the invis- ible narrator (Sokurov) and a historical figure, the nineteenth-century French Marquis de Custine (Sergey Dreiden), accompany a lively group of dead souls across several centuries and through thirty-three rooms of the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg."
Larger excerpt here: http://www.indiewire.com/article/exclusive-excerpts-j-hobermans-film-after-film-or-what-became-of-21st-century-cinema?page=3
NYS Writers Institute Classic Film Series here: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#russian
Thursday, November 7, 2013
The Longest Shot in Motion Picture History
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Silent Film, "Bed and Sofa," Friday April 20, 7:30, Page Hall
"Liuda, a bored housewife who could not be more unlike the prototypical Bolshevik “New Woman,” lives in a one-room basement apartment on Third Meshchanskaia Street (the literal translation of the film’s original title), a petty-bourgeois neighborhood in Moscow. She spends her days idly, mainly reading magazines, notably the popular movie fan magazine Soviet Screen (Sovetskii ekran). Her husband, Kolia, is a charming and good-natured but dictatorial and egocentric stonemason."
"The couple is soon joined by Kolia’s old war buddy, Volodia, a printer who cannot find an apartment in Moscow due to the severe housing shortage that was still a major social problem ten years after the revolution. Liuda is quite understandably annoyed by the addition of yet another person to their cramped apartment; of course she has not been consulted. Yet Volodia, ingratiating and helpful, quickly wins her over by proving the perfect lodger. The sexual tension between Liuda and Volodia is palpable from the beginning, so when Kolia is called to a job out of town, it is scarcely surprising that Volodia takes advantage of the opportunity to woo Liuda openly."
Read more of the article on filmreference.com by Denise J. Youngblood, Professor of Russian and Soviet History at the University of Vermont.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Humor and Brutality in Moscow's Red Square
Masha Gessen, Russian investigative journalist who visited us March 8th, is back in Moscow (against the advice of her friends, family and readers).
Here's a recent post from the "Latitudes" blog of the New York Times / International Herald Tribune.
MOSCOW — We spent most of April Fool’s Day laughing. My friends and I started right around midnight on Saturday when, sitting around my kitchen table, we began talking about the protest scheduled for the next day, April 1: Strolling in Red Square while wearing white ribbons....
More.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Writers Institute on C-SPAN This Weekend
C-SPAN came to Albany to film our evening event with Russian journalist Masha Gessen on Thursday, March 8th.
The show will be broadcast over the weekend on C-SPAN 2/BookTV.
Saturday evening, March 17th at 7pm (ET)
Sunday morning, March 18th at 4am (ET)
We don't expect too many of you to be watching at 4am on Sunday morning, but please tell us about it if you do!
Link to the C-SPAN website.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Masha Gessen on Charlie Rose, See the Video
Masha Gessen, Moscow-based journalist who visits the Writers Institute today 3/8, appeared on Charlie Rose yesterday. The 23-minute video has been posted online.
Her schedule today is as follows:
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus.
The events are free and open to the general public.
The show with Charlie Rose will be rebroadcast today at 1 p.m. on Albany's PBS affiliate WMHT.
One of Newsweek's "150 Fearless Women"
Masha Gessen, Moscow-based investigative journalist who visits today 3/8, was recently named one of "150 Fearless Women" by Newsweek/The Daily Beast.
She's the fourth face down in the leftmost column in a mosaic of faces on the Daily Beast webpage.
The text makes note of the fact that "she's been subjected to robberies, threats and intimidation" and that a number of her fellow journalists have been assassinated.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Two Soviet Jewish Grandmothers
Katha Pollitt reviews Ester and Ruzya, a dual biography of two Soviet Jewish women and their harrowing stories, told by their granddaughter, Masha Gessen (who visits Thursday) in 2005 in the New York Times:
"Reviewers sometimes call a work of nonfiction ''as exciting as a novel,'' but that would be an understatement applied to this extraordinary family memoir. Masha Gessen, a gifted Russian-American journalist, narrates the intertwined lives of her two Soviet Jewish grandmothers, best friends for over 50 years, as they confront some of the 20th century's worst ordeals: Stalin's terror, Hitler's mass murder of the Jews, World War II, the bewildering twists and turns of the post-Stalin era. If your idea of a memoir runs to family dysfunction and authorial disgruntlement, or to people going on about their houses and travels, ''Ester and Ruzya'' will remind you how much life, history and emotional and moral complexity the genre can convey in the hands of a wonderful writer. " More.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Russia: What Happens Now?
"[T]here is the habit that revolutions have of turning on their own. I have first-hand experience of this. Our revolution has not yet won, and fellow organizers have already on occasion asked me to keep my lesbian, Jewish, and American-passported self off the front pages."
"I realize that in throwing myself headfirst into organizing protests, as I have done in the last couple of months, I have given up the rarefied environment of a certain subset of Moscow intelligentsia, with its cultivated air of tolerance. In the worst-case scenario, the new Russia will be a xenophobic society that will have no place for someone like me. In the best-case scenario, I and others like me will have to come out of our shells and use a newly created public space to educate people about our differences." More.
So writes Masha Gessen today in her blog for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. The Russian journalist visits Albany on Thursday 3/8.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Masha Gessen: The Death of Litvinenko
From The Man Without a Face by Russian journalist Masha Gessen, who visits March 8:
"On November 23 2006 a man named Alexander Litvinenko died in a London hospital. He was 41 years old, he was an FSB [Russian secret police] officer, and his final days had been broadcast virtually live by the British and some of the Russian media. 'Just three weeks ago he was a happy, healthy man with a full head of hair who regularly jogged five miles a day,' the Daily Mail reported on November 21. Accompanying the piece was a picture of Litvinenko, gaunt and bald, a hospital gown opened at his chest, which was covered with electrodes. 'Mr Litvinenko can barely lift his head, so weak are his neck muscles. He has difficulty speaking and can only talk in short, painful bursts.'" Read more in the Daily Telegraph.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Killing People for Their Moscow Apartments
Masha Gessen, who visits Thursday, March 8, writes on the New York Times blog about Russian "raiders" who seize valuable Moscow real estate by force and intimidation.
MOSCOW — A text message woke me up Friday morning: “Masha, Michael Shulman has had his head bashed in. He is in intensive care. Three attackers in view of a video camera — Kashin-style. A neurosurgeon is needed.”
More.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Apologizing to Syria
Masha Gessen, who visits from Moscow on 3/8, apologizes to the people of Syria on behalf of the people of Russia in the New York Times.
She also talks about what it's like to attend a Moscow protest in temperatures of minus 5 degrees Fahrenheit.
"I cannot speak for all Russian citizens, but I can tell you this much: the government that on Saturday blocked the U.N. Security Council’s resolution on Syria does not represent the people of Russia. It holds power in my country because it has rigged elections and has used money and fear to keep tens of millions of people in line for years — you know how that goes. Russians were far too complacent for far too long, and for that I am sorry." More.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Brilliant? Yes. Crazy? Yes.
Masha Gessen, who visits from Moscow on 3/8, answers questions on the Amazon website about her 2009 biography of Grigori Perelman, the eccentric Russian genius who solved the Poincare Conjecture, perhaps the most important mathematical achievement of the last century.
Q: So he is as crazy as they say?
A: I think crazy generally means that a person has an internally consistent view of the world that is entirely different from the view most people consider normal. I think this is true of Perelman. The interesting thing, of course, was to figure out what this internally consistent view of the world was.
Q: And did you manage to figure it out?
A: I think so. I concluded that this view, and the rigidity with which he holds to it, is actually directly related to the reason he was able to solve the hardest mathematical problem ever solved. He has a mind that is capable of taking in more information, and embracing more-complex systems, than any mind that has come before. His mind is like a universal math compactor. He grasps hugely complex problems and reduces them to their solvable essence. The problem is, he expects the world of humans to be similarly subject to reduction. He expects the world to function in accordance with a set of strictly laid out rules, and he absolutely cannot take in anything that does not conform to those rules. The world of humans is unruly, though, so Perelman has had to cut off successive chunks of it until all that was left was the apartment he shares with his mother.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
On the Front Lines with Her 10-Year-Old Daughter
Masha Gessen, who visits March 8, sends a dispatch from Moscow, where she participated in an unusual protest of the current Russian government on the highways that ring the city, with her ten-year-old daughter in the back seat.
"The occasion was a protest against the Russian government staged on the Garden Ring, the 16-kilometer-long road that circles central Moscow."
"As we turned onto the Garden Ring, we placed ourselves behind a compact Citroën while a Lexus SUV got behind us. Both were adorned with white ribbons, which have become the symbol of Russia’s protest movement. As more cars joined in the drive, our speed decreased, until we had white-ribboned cars in lanes on either side of us and the traffic had slowed to a standstill." More in the New York Times.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Russia's Peculiar "Internal Passports"
Masha Gessen, who visits March 8, writes in the NYT about the peculiar institution of "internal passports" in her native Russia:
MOSCOW — As of last Friday, I am an undocumented person in my own country. I cannot open or close a bank account, receive medical care at a state clinic, buy a cellphone, return a purchase to a store or enter into a contract, which my job requires me to do several times a day. All of these operations and many more require a valid internal passport, a peculiar document that may be the most significant vestige of the U.S.S.R. in modern Russian society. More.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
You Tubing the Revolution
Masha Gessen, Russian journalist who visits on March 8th, writes about a Russian filmmaker, Pavel Bardin (pictured here), who is creating a compilation of filmed statements by ordinary Russians for publication on YouTube. Article.
MOSCOW — Every night last week, writers, artists, actors, ad men, office managers and assorted others climbed the stairs to the fifth floor of a converted factory building in Moscow to make a statement. Pavel Bardin, a well-known young film director, had set up a camera in a conference room there. Everyone who came in — some by invitation, some having found out about the filming from friends or Facebook — wrote his or her name and vocation on a length of masking tape, and named his or her reason for planning to attend what would be a giant protest on Saturday, the 24th.
Each person followed a simple formula: make an I-statement consisting of just the subject and verb, then expand in a sentence or two. “I love.” “I know.” “I fear.” “I want.” “I can.”
As in, “I love my children…” “I know how to talk to people…” “I fear violence…” “I want to be proud of my country…” “I can imagine a different future…” More.