Fridrikh Ermler’s Balzac in Russia: an eccentric chapter of Soviet film history
20 February 2023, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

A SSEES Russian Cinema Research Group seminar with Peter Bagrov (George Eastman Museum)
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
SSEES
Location
-
Masaryk RoomUCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies16 Taviton streetLondonWC1H 0BW
Balzac in Russia (1940) was an anomaly in Soviet cinema of the Stalinist era. Fridrikh Ermler, one of the most politicised filmmakers in the USSR, had just completed his dark and controversial epic The Great Citizen, when, all of a sudden, he indulged in this project – a historical comedy which was to be shot in colour, with music by Dmitry Shostakovich.
The fact that Honoré de Balzac married a Polish countess in Berdychiv, a Ukrainian town with a predominantly Jewish population, was eccentric enough. An anecdote about one of Balzac’s earlier visits to Odesa, when the great French writer was confused for a French hairdresser, became widely known and added to the whimsicality of the plot.
And yet, while the subject called for a comedy, it would be a rather dark one. The screenplay, influenced by Yuri Tynianov’s historical prose, portrayed Russian high society sarcastically, with seductive women shown as secret police agents, and the visit of a well-known foreign author anticipated as an ideological victory of a police state over European values. Whether intentional or not, the analogies between the 1830s and the 1930s were evident, and the project was doomed.
Filming had to be stopped. Fortunately, the footage was later edited into an experimental film titled Autumn, an incomplete colour print of which has been recently rediscovered. Along with the existing screenplay and photo tests, this allows us to reconstruct this fascinating oddity – yet another proof of the unpredictability of Soviet cinema.
SPEAKER
