The Century of cinema: Russia and Poland

Episode of Series “The Century of cinema”.
The Russian Idea (Producers, Leonid Vereschagin, Valery Ruzin, director, Sergei Selyanov): Philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev asserted that the Russian cinema consisted of a series of opposing forces - despotism and anarchy, cruelty and kindness, mysticism and atheism, servitude and riot. In an attempt to reach beyond their contradictory nature, the Russian people would create perfect worlds attainable only through the destruction of dissonant reality. The desire for revolution has been termed ‘The Russian Idea’. In this controversial documentary, Sergei Selyanov seeks evidence of this ‘idea’ in Russian cinema. Beginning with an extensive depiction of the social Utopianism of Twenties Russia, fragments of films are juxtaposed alongside each other in order to reflect hopeful and fantastic pictures of a bright new future. In contrast to this is the realistic atmosphere of Moscow depicted in Boris Barnet’s films and their images of the struggles that people were willing to endure in order to realise their utopian ideals. Selyanov believes that in the Thirties ‘The Russian Idea’ degenerated on the screen into the ugly official Utopia of Stalinism - a theme which permeated everything until Krushchev came to power, when cinema gradually returned to the sources and depths of the national character. “100 years of Polish cinema” (Producers, Ryszard Sraszewski, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Irena Strzalkowska, director, Pawel Lozinski): Based on an original idea by Krzysztof Kieslowski, Pawel Lozinski’s documentary differs from other films in the Century of Cinema series in its unique approach to cinema as perceived by the audience. In interviews with a dramatic range of individuals - children, the elderly, the visually impaired - Lozinski attempts to evoke the magic and power of Polish cinema through collective memory. Through these personal monologues it is possible to see what has moved a Polish audience over the past century. There are no filmmakers interviewed in this documentary, no technicians or critics or financiers - simply those for whom the movies are made. In Polish in with English subtitles.