A bold, uncompromising filmmaker of uncommon gifts, Alexei Gherman is one of Russian cinema's reigning masters. Gherman-whose name is often transliterated as German, but also as Guerman and Gherman, to emphasize its hard "g" pronunciation-first came to wide international attention in the 1980s, as one of the major cinematic discoveries of glasnost. In the 1970s, he had been one of most distinctive and decidedly nonconformist directors working at Leningrad's famed Lenfilm Studios, where, away from Moscow's prying eyes, Soviet filmmakers had traditionally enjoyed more freedom than their colleagues elsewhere. But if Gherman stands as something of a symbol for the independent "Lenfilm spirit," he is also a significant example of the heavy price often paid by iconoclastic artists in the pre-glasnost Soviet Union: Gherman's career was repeatedly interrupted by official disapproval, censorship, and the shelving of his all-too-few films.

Featured Works:

This touring exhibition, which originated at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York in March, offers the first complete North American retrospective of Gherman's directorial work. Made up of the five features films Gherman has completed to date, it includes new 35mm prints of the rarely-seen The Seventh Companion (1967) and the long-banned masterpiece Trial on the Road (1971), and also includes Kazakh director Ardak Amirkulov's magnificent epic The Fall of Otrar (1990), a film produced and co-written by Gherman (and released in North America under Martin Scorsese's imprimatur).

Program information:

Alexei the Great: The Films of Alexei Gherman, Russian Master

Film Society of Lincoln Center

War and Remembrance: The Films of Aleksei Guerman

March 14-20, 2012

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

War and Remembrance: The Films of Aleksei Guerman

May 17-31, 2012

Harvard Film Archives

History Through the Wrong End of the Telescope: The Films of Aleksei Guerman

June 22-25, 2012

Related Articles:
Hard to Be a God by Michael Atkinson posted May. 29, 2012