MOSKINO СOSMOS CINEMA
WIDE
FORMAT
FORMAT
The program was made in cooperation with Moskino Сosmos.
A 70 mm film screening is quite an event nowadays. It is because of the lack of film theaters that have the necessary equipment and the limited number of positive 70 mm copies available for viewing. The Gosfilmofond retains about 260 of them - not that many for the technology that existed from the late 1950s to the early 1990s. There are even fewer film theaters in which one can show a widescreen film. In Moscow, these are the Cosmos film theater and the screening room of the Scientific Research Film and Photo Institute (NIKFI).
A 70 mm film screening is quite an event nowadays. It is because of the lack of film theaters that have the necessary equipment and the limited number of positive 70 mm copies available for viewing. The Gosfilmofond retains about 260 of them - not that many for the technology that existed from the late 1950s to the early 1990s. There are even fewer film theaters in which one can show a widescreen film. In Moscow, these are the Cosmos film theater and the screening room of the Scientific Research Film and Photo Institute (NIKFI).
Watching such films can give the modern viewer more joy than it did the viewers of their premieres. At the time, these films were part of the film process and did not yet have a special "aura", as the film historian and curator Peter von Bagh rightly noted in the opening article of the catalog of the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival (von Bagh P. Formats as auteur: 70mm, Vistavision, Cinamascope // Il Cinema Ritrovato XVIII edizione Bologna 2004 P. 12.).
70 mm film is also a reminder of the rapid obsolescence of technology: on the one hand they give cinema creative energy and on the other hand, they become the reason for the further inaccessibility of many films.
The iconic films such as “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) by David Lean, “The Sound of Music” (1965) by Robert Wise, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) by Stanley Kubrick can now be seen at best in 35mm widescreen versions or digital copies... The same applies to the Soviet wide-format hit "The Brothers Karamazov" (1968) by Ivan Pyriev. The negative of the three-part film was shot on 35 mm film, and the positive copies were printed on 70 mm film using the blowup method (the wide-format positives, unfortunately, have not survived).
70 mm film is also a reminder of the rapid obsolescence of technology: on the one hand they give cinema creative energy and on the other hand, they become the reason for the further inaccessibility of many films.
The iconic films such as “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) by David Lean, “The Sound of Music” (1965) by Robert Wise, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) by Stanley Kubrick can now be seen at best in 35mm widescreen versions or digital copies... The same applies to the Soviet wide-format hit "The Brothers Karamazov" (1968) by Ivan Pyriev. The negative of the three-part film was shot on 35 mm film, and the positive copies were printed on 70 mm film using the blowup method (the wide-format positives, unfortunately, have not survived).
Read more...
Most often, a wide format was used for filming epics, westerns, peplums, adventure films: the scale and spectacular sets worked for for the artistic features of the genres. The most creative use of the wide format can be found in travelogues, where the rich diversity of the world is demonstrated through the prism of sociological and personal observation.
At the Belye Stolby festival in 2019, a four-part film by Sergey Bondarchuk "War and Peace" (1965-67) was screened. It aroused great interest: before that the 70 mm version had not been shown for many years, and a year later Muscovites were also able to see it in the Cosmos film theater. This screening planted the seeds for the regular cooperation between Gosfilmofond and Moskino Сosmos.
This year's program includes two wide-format films. The military epic "The Flaming Years" (1960) was made, based on the script by Aleksandr Dovzhenko, by his widow Yuliya Solntseva. This is the first successful Soviet wide-format film to be recognized abroad. At the Cannes Film Festival in 1961, it received an award for cinematography, and Yuliya Solntseva became the first woman to receive a directing prize. According to film critic Evgeny Margolit, the wide format turned out to be very appropriate for Dovzhenko's “planetary worldview”, which Solntseva represented on the screen with the help of new technologies.
We will also present a wide-format film travelogue "Dersu Uzala" (1975) - a Soviet-Japanese project by the classic of world cinema Akira Kurosawa, made at the Mosfilm studios. Long shots characteristic of Kurosawa, deep compositions, a combination of different types of movement in the frame are alll firmly connected with the travel plot. The use of the wide format is justified by the director’s desire to show the big world and man’s place in it. One of the main directorial tasks that Kurosawa had to solve during the filming was to highlight the person in the narrow horizontal space of the frame. It is “the human figure, small in this elemental landscape, that one remembers after having seen the film” (Richie D. Dersu Uzala. URL: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/880-dersu-uzala.) For “Dersu Uzala", Kurosawa won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Alisa Nasrtdinova
At the Belye Stolby festival in 2019, a four-part film by Sergey Bondarchuk "War and Peace" (1965-67) was screened. It aroused great interest: before that the 70 mm version had not been shown for many years, and a year later Muscovites were also able to see it in the Cosmos film theater. This screening planted the seeds for the regular cooperation between Gosfilmofond and Moskino Сosmos.
This year's program includes two wide-format films. The military epic "The Flaming Years" (1960) was made, based on the script by Aleksandr Dovzhenko, by his widow Yuliya Solntseva. This is the first successful Soviet wide-format film to be recognized abroad. At the Cannes Film Festival in 1961, it received an award for cinematography, and Yuliya Solntseva became the first woman to receive a directing prize. According to film critic Evgeny Margolit, the wide format turned out to be very appropriate for Dovzhenko's “planetary worldview”, which Solntseva represented on the screen with the help of new technologies.
We will also present a wide-format film travelogue "Dersu Uzala" (1975) - a Soviet-Japanese project by the classic of world cinema Akira Kurosawa, made at the Mosfilm studios. Long shots characteristic of Kurosawa, deep compositions, a combination of different types of movement in the frame are alll firmly connected with the travel plot. The use of the wide format is justified by the director’s desire to show the big world and man’s place in it. One of the main directorial tasks that Kurosawa had to solve during the filming was to highlight the person in the narrow horizontal space of the frame. It is “the human figure, small in this elemental landscape, that one remembers after having seen the film” (Richie D. Dersu Uzala. URL: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/880-dersu-uzala.) For “Dersu Uzala", Kurosawa won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Alisa Nasrtdinova
Read more...
Most often, a wide format was used for filming epics, westerns, peplums, adventure films: the scale and spectacular sets worked for for the artistic features of the genres. The most creative use of the wide format can be found in travelogues, where the rich diversity of the world is demonstrated through the prism of sociological and personal observation.
At the Belye Stolby festival in 2019, a four-part film by Sergey Bondarchuk "War and Peace" (1965-67) was screened. It aroused great interest: before that the 70 mm version had not been shown for many years, and a year later Muscovites were also able to see it in the Cosmos film theater. This screening planted the seeds for the regular cooperation between Gosfilmofond and Moskino Сosmos.
This year's program includes two wide-format films. The military epic "The Flaming Years" (1960) was made, based on the script by Aleksandr Dovzhenko, by his widow Yuliya Solntseva. This is the first successful Soviet wide-format film to be recognized abroad. At the Cannes Film Festival in 1961, it received an award for cinematography, and Yuliya Solntseva became the first woman to receive a directing prize. According to film critic Evgeny Margolit, the wide format turned out to be very appropriate for Dovzhenko's “planetary worldview”, which Solntseva represented on the screen with the help of new technologies.
We will also present a wide-format film travelogue "Dersu Uzala" (1975) - a Soviet-Japanese project by the classic of world cinema Akira Kurosawa, made at the Mosfilm studios. Long shots characteristic of Kurosawa, deep compositions, a combination of different types of movement in the frame are alll firmly connected with the travel plot. The use of the wide format is justified by the director’s desire to show the big world and man’s place in it. One of the main directorial tasks that Kurosawa had to solve during the filming was to highlight the person in the narrow horizontal space of the frame. It is “the human figure, small in this elemental landscape, that one remembers after having seen the film” (Richie D. Dersu Uzala. URL: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/880-dersu-uzala.) For “Dersu Uzala", Kurosawa won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Alisa Nasrtdinova
At the Belye Stolby festival in 2019, a four-part film by Sergey Bondarchuk "War and Peace" (1965-67) was screened. It aroused great interest: before that the 70 mm version had not been shown for many years, and a year later Muscovites were also able to see it in the Cosmos film theater. This screening planted the seeds for the regular cooperation between Gosfilmofond and Moskino Сosmos.
This year's program includes two wide-format films. The military epic "The Flaming Years" (1960) was made, based on the script by Aleksandr Dovzhenko, by his widow Yuliya Solntseva. This is the first successful Soviet wide-format film to be recognized abroad. At the Cannes Film Festival in 1961, it received an award for cinematography, and Yuliya Solntseva became the first woman to receive a directing prize. According to film critic Evgeny Margolit, the wide format turned out to be very appropriate for Dovzhenko's “planetary worldview”, which Solntseva represented on the screen with the help of new technologies.
We will also present a wide-format film travelogue "Dersu Uzala" (1975) - a Soviet-Japanese project by the classic of world cinema Akira Kurosawa, made at the Mosfilm studios. Long shots characteristic of Kurosawa, deep compositions, a combination of different types of movement in the frame are alll firmly connected with the travel plot. The use of the wide format is justified by the director’s desire to show the big world and man’s place in it. One of the main directorial tasks that Kurosawa had to solve during the filming was to highlight the person in the narrow horizontal space of the frame. It is “the human figure, small in this elemental landscape, that one remembers after having seen the film” (Richie D. Dersu Uzala. URL: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/880-dersu-uzala.) For “Dersu Uzala", Kurosawa won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Alisa Nasrtdinova
USSR-Japan, Mosfilm, Atelier-41
1975, 144 minutes
1975, 144 minutes
USSR, Mosfilm
1960, 105 minutes
1960, 105 minutes
II MOSCOW
INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL
OF ARCHIVAL FILMS