Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the screen: 6 main movies

Cinema – the art of slow view, Solzhenitsyn didn’t catch. The movie just didn’t keep up with him, though always longed to be extremely relevant medium splash adaptations occurred at the beginning of the 1970s, coincided with the awarding the writer the Nobel prize. What you can see on the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and about him in our list.

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Contradictions, which concealed and continues to conceal the image of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – first of all for others, strangers, friends, enemies, colleagues, authorities, readers – written so many that to discuss them separately, probably pretty meaningless. He was a great (but capable of weakness) writer and an extraordinary person (sometimes it even seems that Superman), who was able to tell the country and the world about the Gulag; it was a lump, standing on her in spite of everything, looked a fragment of some former world. And yet… Varlam Shalamov had their reasons to accuse Solzhenitsyn that he became a “weapon in the cold war”.

And Solzhenitsyn himself as if there was little to see yourself as only a writer and thinker. He had a modernist swing, which in the sixties was not honored (already required a certain self-irony) to go to something more than just to be an author. And he was, time didn’t catch up with him, twisting the shaft, each time seeing it as someone new, someone that was easy to see: the 1970s saw a victim of the regime, 1980s – Savior of Russia (even in a comical twist, like Voinovich “Moscow 2042”), the leaders of Perestroika and Yeltsin was considered a monarchist and a dedicated anti-Communist, Putin’s era was welcomed as a patriot-statesman. But Solzhenitsyn himself always was something not quite perceptible, naked ambition, is too big for a brief description of the animal. Like the elephant in the parable about the blind wise men.

It is no coincidence that cinema is the art of slow view, Solzhenitsyn didn’t catch. The movie just didn’t keep up with him, though always longed to be extremely relevant medium splash adaptations occurred at the beginning of the 1970s, coincided with the awarding the writer the Nobel prize. In 1970, the year: Swedish TV version of “the Case at station Krechetovka” (in the USSR the story put young Gleb Panfilov as an academic work) and the Swedish-British “One day of Ivan Denisovich” (starring Tom Courtenay), a spectacle, though touching in its attempt to describe the cinematic language of the day Shukhov, but vulnerable to criticism.

In 1972, follows a Danish adaptation of “the first circle”, the film acts as Polish classic Alexander Ford, who left the Polish people’s Republic during the anti-Semitic campaign of the late 1960s. In 1973, the British TV show Play Of the Month is taken for Solzhenitsyn’s play “the Deer and shalashovka” and French television, puts on a play “candle in the wind”. The next wave of interest in the works of Solzhenitsyn and the author rises in the early 1990s. Finally there is a version of “the first circle”, conceived in the early 1970s (then it was assumed that the Director will be the author of the great Western “high noon” Fred Zinnemann), but is now filmed for French TV channel Antenne 2, and to the writer arrives in America, Stanislav Govorukhin (his two-part telecommuting is simply called “Alexander Solzhenitsyn”, 1992), and then in Russia – Aleksandr Sokurov (“Node”, 1998).

Main movies

“One day of Ivan Denisovich”, 1963

The first foreign production blasts in the USSR debut novel Solzhenitsyn was done in the framework of the popular television format “Bob hope presents” (TV show sponsored by Chrysler). Today this program is made in a trendy format for color television can be viewed on YouTube. By TV standards, this 45-minute film made you can even say big costumes, huts, icicles and blowing snow made of papier-mache. The audience today and say that frost in the show Bob hope felt much sharper than in the following, a much more famous film adaptation of 1970. Perhaps the secret is that the Director of the movie was made by a native of Canada, Daniel Petri, who later glorified the next, the most sentimental of the existing version of “lassie”.

“One day of Ivan Denisovich”, 1970

Perhaps the most izvestna of adaptations of works by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And all thanks to the brilliant British actor starring Shukhov – Tom Courtney. The author watched this movie, after the expulsion from the Soviet Union, will speak about the picture cautiously and very politely, thank the crew for a sincere desire to understand the content of the book and transfer it to the Western viewer, who may not adequately understand is described in his novel troubles. To the production of the film is really treated with care and devotion. Great British playwright Ronald Harwood – later will work with it Roman Polanski and Istvan Szabo has tried to accurately move to the screen the essence of the work (sometimes, however, ignoring the heroes of the second plan), and the producers postponed the shooting in the snowy Norway, to achieve a certain realism and found a consultant, former prisoner of war who worked on Soviet logging.

“Deer and shalashovka”, 1973

Another interesting statement by Solzhenitsyn on television. This time in the framework of the traditional for the British TV format “the Play of the month” was filmed his play “the Deer and shalashovka”, which after the success of “One day of Ivan Denisovich” almost put Moscow “Contemporary”. In the framework of the “Plays of the month” worked very strong British filmmakers of the 1960-80th, but even among these professionals Alan Clark, who acted as the film’s Solzhenitsyn, occupies a special position. Underrated but extremely heavily influenced the movie (without it there would be Gus van Sant and Paul Greengrass) Clark ate dog, studying the British state practice of oppression – he was filming a movie about troubled Teens and special schools, about soulless barracks and Irish fighters, about the daily terror and the injustice system. His temperament is anonymous moralist who understood the vocabulary of everyday violence, amazingly accurate fit, if not the spirit, the letter pieces to which Solzhenitsyn at the time, even made a “brief Glossary of the camp language.”

“Alexander Solzhenitsyn”, 1992

A great documentary Stanislav Govorukhin, who came to Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Vermont – already a living classic, the prophet. Govorukhin, it seems, seeks to dispel the Shrouding writer myths (“the Vermont Savernake” did not say just lazy) – to show his house, work and family (wife, mother, children) in daily routine – but it almost aggravates them. For Govorukhin Solzhenitsyn figure of planetary scale, and a movie about it fits well in the nonfiction trilogy begun with the movie “can’t live” and completed “the Russia we lost”.

“Node”, 1998

“Node” Elegy Alexander Sokurov reminiscent Govorukhin, but not the tone, of course, and circumstances. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, not-Vermont, here, too, leading his guest-Director for the forest. Some of its private path. Before the viewer has recently watched every day in the news how train Solzhenitsyn inexorably approaching Moscow, and had seen the angry Mitiga particularly radical Communists, appears to be not a writer and social thinker, but rather the hermit, the last exile, which was meant while still living back home. The film was shot for the anniversary of the eightieth birthday of the writer – but this theme in the dialogues Sokurov and Solzhenitsyn is not particularly raised. Except that one time the Director asks who is older: Solzhenitsyn himself or his soul, and confused classic finds the best answer to your question.

“The first circle”, 2006

The scale at the moment and again the TV attempt transcriptions of prose Solzhenitsyn. (But not the first case when I started “the first circle”). Important features there are two. First, the Director was Gleb Panfilov , one of the first korotkometrazhnyh, films which were postalen “the Case at station Krechetovka”. Panfilov is now completing a new film version of “One day of Ivan Denisovich”, which will turn it into the main ekranizator Solzhenitsyn. Second, the text of the author in the film voiced by the writer who took a very active part in the creation of the film, wrote the script and actually approved on the main role of Yevgeny Mironov.

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