Boris Barnet, A Soviet Poet

The major yet still inconspicuous career of Soviet director Boris Barnet (1902–1965), spanning nearly four decades from the late silent era to the Khrushchev Thaw, stands as a miraculously paradoxical legacy in the history of cinema. A lodestar for the French New Wave, a professed influence upon the younger generation of Soviet filmmakers, including the Georgians Otar Iosseliani and Marlen Khutsiev, the Uzbek Ali Khamraev, and, of course, the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky, as well as a perpetual cause célèbre for critics from Serge Daney to Gilbert Adair, Barnet nonetheless remains a figure today more rumored than recognized within international film culture. This 12-film retrospective, the first substantial survey of Barnet’s work to be presented in New York City in over 20 years, aims to put a modest dent in this enduring state of affairs. Often compared to both his contemporary Jean Renoir, for his embrace of chance and improvisation in his mise en scène, and to Chekhov’s plays, for his lyrically modulated tragicomic tone and persistent focus on the quotidian lives of ordinary people, Barnet’s cinema remains too strangely singular and varied to encapsulate by way of one aesthetic analog or another. His two acknowledged, back-to-back masterpieces, Outskirts (1933) and By the Bluest of Seas (1935), occupy divergent poetic registers—the former earthbound, the latter otherworldly—suggesting an artist accustomed to smuggling his most deeply held thoughts and feelings within, rather than against, the confines of popular forms. In short, he was perhaps the quintessential studio filmmaker of Soviet cinema, like John Ford at 20th Century Fox, an unofficial poet laureate hiding in plain sight.

“‘Who are you?’ I said: ‘A director.’ … ‘Soviet,’ [Barnet] corrected, ‘you must always say Soviet director. It is a very special profession.’ ‘In what way?’ I asked. ‘Because if you ever manage to become honest… you can remove the word Soviet.’” —Otar Iosseliani

Special Thanks to Peter Bagrov (George Eastman Museum), Florian Haag (Austrian Filmmuseum), Hannah Yang (Doc Films), Edward McCarry (The Theater of the Matters), Maria Belodubrovskaya (University of Chicago) and Christopher Small