Once Upon a Night preceded by A Priceless Head

Director: Boris Barnet

1945 / 105min / 35mm

Shot at the Yerevan Film Studio in summer 1944 as the Red Army’s major counteroffensive against the Wehrmacht was underway, this moodily abstract wartime thriller stars the luminous Irina Radchenko, in her screen debut, as an orphaned girl who hides three wounded Russian soldiers in the attic of a bombed-out building next door to a Nazi headquarters. Working with Armenian cinematographer Sarkis Gevorkyan on a threadbare set, Barnet conjures a nightmarishly evacuated vision of collective resistance, whose stark chiaroscuro imagery of jagged shadows gliding over rubble or tears streaking a young woman’s face, owes much to Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. Preceded by Barnet’s equally excellent propaganda short A Priceless Head, a galvanic account of an immiserated Polish woman who must choose whether to hide a partisan on the lam or inform on him to collect the occupiers’ bounty.

A Priceless Head (Fighting Film Album No. 10) (Boris Barnet, 1942, 25 mins, Digital)

) Once Upon a Night (Boris Barnet, 1945, 80 mins, 35mm)

35mm print courtesy of Filmarchiv Austria

One screening only!

Introduction by The Theater of the Matters and Programmer Edo Choi on Sunday, March 29th

Part of Boris Barnet A Soviet Poet