The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 27

REVIEWSCREEN 27 At home Ronald Bergan reports on a Russian filmmaking partnership that transcended death Birth through reincarnation without the stars THE GUARDIAN Thursday July 11 1991 THE late 1940s, Alexander Dovzhenko, the great Simon Hattenstone lie i''J 'JiW 111 if "fyr ing the flooding of a village, is remarkable for its confidence, grandeur and glowing beauty. Solntseva won the best director award at Cannes in 1962 for The Flaming Years, a series of fluid, imaginative and affecting images, which focus on the wartime odyssey of a gallant Ukranian soldier who survives the war to return to his brave schoolteacher sweetheart. The Enchanted Desna (1964) depicts the Ukraine of Dovzhenko's youth, an indelible image of a rural paradise. There is further proof of Solntseva's supreme mastery of the wide screen in The Unforgettable, despite a truncated and faded print. There is never a dead space, never a camera movement that doesn't make dramatic sense, whether she is depicting a poignant, almost heraldic love-scene, a fight between two men on either side of a barbed wire fence, or hundreds of soldiers marching like matchstick men into the distance.

Although there is nothing more calculated to scare British audiences away from certain East European films one wishes to recommend than to mention that their subjects are collectivisation or the Five Year Plan, it does the films a disservice to ignore the ideology that informed and inspired them. They are, however, passionate patriotic panegyrics to the life, culture and history of the Ukraine, and are no more idealistic visions of the Soviet Union than John Ford's are of the USA. Solntseva's films, which were based on her husband's screenplays written some years before, hark back to an ideology and aes Henry, mirror image of a serial killer and this is about as The serial killer's brute reality Tim Pulleine on the unsettling JL Soviet film director of such prewar classics as Earth and Aerograd, wrote in his diary: "I often think how my life has been wasted." This pessimism, unlike the unbounded optimism of his films, derived from his having directed only seven major features in 20 years, due to bureaucratic interference from Stalin's minions. Thus, much of his time was spent writing screenplays for imaginary films. Then came Khrushchev's famous speech at the 20th Party Congress, in which he denounced the personality cult and other aspects of Stalinism.

The speech had a liberalising effect on Soviet cinema, and Dovzhenko, who had been planning a Ukranian trilogy for many years, finally saw it becoming a reality. But the night before he was to start shooting his first film for nearly a decade, Poem Of The Sea, he died of a heart attack aged 62 in 1956. End of tragic story However, like an allegorical hero of one of his films, Dovzhenko was miraculously rein carnated in the body of his widow, Julia Solntseva. Working from detailed scripts, she was able to fulfil her husband's dreams of bringing them to the screen. "If Dovzhenko had lived, I would never have become a director; all that I do I consider as propaganda, defence and illustration of Dovzhenko," proclaimed Solntseva.

Yet, despite this modesty, Solntseva, who died aged 88 a couple of years ago, was an artist in her own right, copious evidence of which is given in the season of seven of her rarely-seen films at the National Film Theatre this month. The 29-year-old Solntseva met the 36-year-old Dovzhenko in 1930, and became his assistant on his subsequent films, co-directing a number of them. After his death, she shot The Ukrainian Triptych in Sovco-lor, 70mm and stereophonic sound. This approximated to the way Dovzhenko had seen them in his mind's eye. "I have enjoyed planning my future work for the panoramic screen," he wrote.

"In 1930, 1 saw such a giant screen in Paris and it made a profound impression on me. The long horizontal shape suits the ele ments in my next film: broad and monochrome steppes, stretching waters of a sea, airplanes, the idea of great spaces." Poem Ot The sea (1958), which tells of the construction of an artificial sea, necessitat art of John McNaughton, and the Blanche (Cannon Piccadilly, 15) tells the old, old story, not rejuvenated to the least extent, of a middle-aged schoolmaster brought low by infatuation for a sexy pupil (pop singer Vanessa Paradis). it is symptomatic of Jean-Claude Bris-seau's poverty-stricken script and direction not only that emotional crises should be signalled by smashing up the furniture, but that the couple should celebrate the consummation of their affair by gambolling through the countryside as if preparing to advertise some new brand of deodorant. On a different level altogether, readers may like to be reminded that Tarkovsky's Andrei Roublev is being revived (cert 12) at the Renoir. Derek Malcolm writes: those who lament the acute possibility of going into a video shop and finding huge stocks of films they don't want to look at, will be mightily relieved that Artificial Eye, Britain's premier specialist distributor, has started a video collection in liaison with FoxVideo.

The first batch include Jean Vigo's classic L'Atalante, Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table, Bertrand Blier's Trop Belle Pour Toi and Michel De-ville's Death In A French Garden (all at 15.99). plex yet unshowy camerawork, the director gives the proceedings a startling illusion of independent life. Neither this nor the immediacy of the pefor-mances can, however, cover up the lack of psychological grounding in Callie Khouri's screenplay, with its hints at an undisclosed trauma in Sarandon's past and its recourse to rhetoric of the "I've never felt this awake before" variety. In consequence, the apocalyptic ending seems more fabricated than inevitable. All the same, sheer command lifts Thelma amd Louise well clear of the commercial norm, and makes it a suitably inventive curtain-raiser for tonight's start of this year's Cambridge Film Festival.

Transatlantic rumour had it that the Bruce Willis vehicle Hudson Hawk (Odeon West End, 15) was pretty much of a dud. Rumour, alas, proves to have been understating the case. This entertainment about a singing (sic) cat burglar seems able to provide little more than maladroit slapstick, mainly entailing graphic injuries, and reams of repartee whose sole distinction is to prove definitively that actors are incapable of dying from embarrassment. On the sub-titled front, Noce unremitting style CONSIDERING the film's subject matter, it might be understandable if Henry Portrait Of A Serial Killer (Gate, Metro, etc, 18) were to meet some sales resistance. Understandable, but a pity.

For even though the meagre ($120,000) budget of this independent feature may have been provided in expectation of what parts of the US press are pleased to call a "grind house the result far transcends such a formula. It amounts to a work of genuine imaginative power. John McNaughton turn, co- scripted with Richard Fire, was made in Chicago, using unfamiliar and admirable players from local theatre com panies. The screenplay's starting point is the confessions, since retracted, of a man charged with multiple murder, but the chain of situations too spare and distanced in effect to be termed a story is of the writers' invention. Amid surroundings of worka day seediness, we are introduced to Henry (Michael Rooker), a matricide who now randomly takes the lives of strangers; Otis (Tom Towles), who shares his flat and be comes his protege; and the lat ter sister Becky (Tracy Ar nold), who moves in with them after her marriage collapses.

thetic out of key with the post- "thaw" pictures represented by Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying (1957) and Chukrai's Ballad Of A Soldier (1959). But within the restrictions of a Utopian philosophy, there is plenty of scope for humour and humanist values, and the pantheism of How High Are The Mountains is irresistible a girl pirouetting in the rain, beautiful blonde children walking barefoot over the ploughed earth, listening to the grass and bathing in a pure stream. (How heart-rending to realise that Chernobyl has made this now impossible!) Solntseva undertaking has been one of the most compelling and courageous in the history of cinema, and this season is the kind of programming that justifies the NFT's existence. reflective as it gets brute reality and our capacity to comprehend it, this sequence functions as a microcosm of the whole film. No ready-made explanation is provided for the aberrant behaviour we witness, and though the ending may imply the impending retribution of the law, it could hardly be called cathartic.

What makes Henry chilling, rather than just is its capacity to leave the viewer at a loss. Art does not come much less reassuring than this. With its opulent production values, star names (Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon), and extensive location shooting, Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise (Cannon Shaftesbury Ave, 15) is stylistically the antithesis of Henry. But this film also harks back in format some 20 years, to the era of the road -movie. The switch is that the male bonding of that genre has here undergone a sex change.

This is the story of two women friends who take off for a brief holiday, run into trouble in the shape of a rapacious redneck, and settle his hash but ultimately their own too by blowing him away. As they kiss goodbye to their unfulfilled lives Davis's husband is a boor, Sarandon's boyfriend a dead loss and head south for the border, the action barrels forward with a rhythm that manages to combine inexorabil ity using cross-cutting to the counter-efforts of police and FBI with a constant undertow of the unpredictable. Technically, Scott mm is ex- mlaraungly accomplished, and aided by Adrian Biddle's com- prison he lived in Mexico for 11 years, only returning to the States in 1962 when he saw the film for the first time. Meanwhile Blankfort had gone before the committee as a "friendly witness" in 1952, naming his former wife and his cousin as members of the Communist party. Matz never spoke to his old friend again.

Perhaps out of remorse or in a quest for redemption, Blankfort decided in 1981 to go public with his Broken Arrow secret. He wrote a letter to the Guild acknowledging Matz's authorship but decided to wait 12 months before posting it. The letter was never mailed, for within the year Blankfort collapsed and died, aged 74. In 1985, at the age of 76, Matz also died. The case was taken up by Larry Ceplair, author of a book on the blacklist.

At next year's Writers' Guild Awards ceremony, Matz's widow Esther will receive on her late husband's behalf the Guild's best screenplay prize, originally presented to Blankfort in 1950. A BIG Hello to the National Lsk Film Commission. You XL remember the NFC, her alded back in May with a fanfare of trumpets and the Govern ment's promise to magic London into the Hollywood of Well, I look expectantly out ot my window but, alas, see no sign ot Tinseltown, so what nap-pened? Ah, there's been a hitch. Teething troubles, you know. The story currently circulating is that appointed commissioner Sydney Samuelson was eager to start building Hollywood, London, but the Government dithered.

Eventually, Samuelson, a little worried about his future, asked a senior minister to confirm his appointment. And he received this encouraging response: "Syd, you're definitely the right man for the job, the only man for the job, and we want you to start as soon as possible. Only one thing. Could you work from home for a while?" Of course, the Diary totally and utterly refuses to believe that Mr Major's culturally voracious Cabinet would quibble over a few quid and an office for Sydney. ON THE MAKE: A little tost Which short, bespectacled, self consciously neurotic film-maker says that he hates hearth foods, has never been into a supermarket and that commercials "go hi one ear and out the Answer: Woody Allen.

Now for a Httle competitive test: Which short, bespectacled, selfconsciously neurotic film-direc tor has Just been paid $2 million for making a series of commer cials promoting an Italian super market's health foods? First cor rect answer wins a free session with Allen's analyst. ROCKY GROUND: Thought for the day (No 0001). Sylvester Stallone on Shakespeare: "No, I don't like his stuff." DEft TRUTH: A strange woman recently phoned up German magazine Der Spiegel, claimed she was Marlene Dietrich and asked for the private number of arts critic Hellmuth Karasek. Well, Der Spiegel isn't daft you know. Karasek is a very popular chappie, the public will go to any length to get hold of him at home, even masquerade as a reclusive fibn goddess.

Naturally, they didnt give out the number, and told the woman to ring back In half an hour's time. So who needs an exclusive with a has-been anyway? MUSCLE BOUND: Arnold Schwarzenegger is flying over next month to launch his gym chain with a Fight British Flab campaign. He believes the British are a bunch of fatties and that he's just the man to svelt them into shape. Arnold Schwarzenegger heads George Bush's Health And Fitness Council and is the man responsible for making the President into the fine figure of a man he is today. CASH RIDDLE: Why do so few British film-makers qualify for the top tax bracket, I bear you asking.

A due may lie in this discreet ad from industry magazine Moving Pictures. Stylishly headlined "Do you do it and bill it continues "If so then you would gain positive tax benefits through the anonymous beneficial ownership of an offshore company paying 450 per annum. No other Income tax no matter how much profit Is made." Got that? Just ring Phillip Wallace (Isle of Man, 0624-624623) and one highly respectable offshore company will be wending Hs way to you. The world's No. 1 entertainment weekly is now available every Tuesday through quality newsagents in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, and Glasgow.

In case of difficulty, call Andy Douglas on 071-261 6745. mmn 'SB FROM tHOHl lOOKINBH of Ridley Scott She, like Henry, has been sexually abused in childhood, and the action progresses on parallel planes. On the one hand, the murders perpetrated by Henry and the other, the emotional complicity between Becky and Henry, complicated eventually by her brother's incestuous desires. In some respects, especially the legend of doom inscribed within the meeting of Henry and Becky, the material offers reminders of the heyday of film noir; and the abstraction of the concluding passages might even prompt association with the work of Fritz Lang. But the manner is far from pastiche.

Rather, the stylistic model is that of cineverite documentary and its fictional counterpart in the "underground" features of (particularly) the 1960s. Camerawork and soundtrack are grainy and seemingly un-mediated, and however precisely scripted the dialogue may be, the performances convey a quality of improvisation. In the most indelible sequence, this matter-of-factness is turned inside out by showing a multiple murder through the lens of the camcorder that Henry and Otis have brought with them and discarded: the tilted, "acci dental" images create their own aura of expressionistic horror. By blurring the line between the latest episode in Michael Blankfort. He received an Oscar nomination and the Writer's Guild award for the work, and went on to enjoy Hollywood prosperity and recognition.

The credit on Broken Arrow should have gone to his close friend Albert Matz, the real writer, but Blankfort agreed to be his a ploy to evade the blacklist in Hollywood at the time. Matz never received public recognition, and although Blankfort has a 20-line entry in Ephraim Katz's Film Encyclopaedia there is no entry for Matz at all. Albert Matz, novelist, playwright and Academy-award winning documentary film maker, was one of the Hollywood 10 sent to prison for refusing to co-operate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities that investigated Communist sympathisers. The sentence broke Matz's film career. After release from A writer's broken silence Christopher Reed on Hollywood's reclamation of blacklist victims The night belongs to Micheloh.

mmsm it's been a great evening. Now it's (timing into a night (o remember. A night special enough for an exceptionally smooth imported beer, braved since 189b in St Louis, Missuuri. Micheub belongs to the night. And the night belongs lo Micheob.

HOLLYWOOD'S blacklist continues to reach out from the past to change the film careers of its victims even posthumously. The latest episode does not involve any big stars, but is worthy of a script itself: a story oi friendship and betrayal, fame and obscurity, and a wrong put right 41 years later. The 19-member board of the Writers' Guild has voted unanimously to change the credits on the 1950 film Broken Arrow, starring Jeff Chandler and James Stewart. Film historians recognise it as the first Holly wood movie to treat American Indians in a sympathetic, mature fashion (despite recent claims that the multi-Oscar winner Dances With Wolves was the breakthrough). All reierence books and mu seums will be asked to delete the name of Broken Arrow's purported screenwriter, FRIDAY 0BGMUWN TARKOVSKY'S EPIC MASTERPIECE ANDREI RUB With ANATOLY SOLONITSYN.