Firstly I saw a film I haven't seen for over a decade, the 1940 Hollywood version of Pride and Prejudice. Now, Hollywood usually had an unhealthy contempt for most literary works they adapted and this one was actually an adaptation of a stage adaptation, but most of the overt departures (rather than necessary excisions) from the original source material weaken the film. Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier are fine in the lead roles but the show is stolen by Melville Cooper and Mary Boland as Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennet respectively. It is quite funny consistently, but the dramatic structure just doesn't work.
Garson's Lizzy expects "kindness, honour, generosity, truthfullness", yet as Olivier says she is determined to offend Darcy and is rude and spiteful to his face whilst criticising his "insolance and bad manners" and later claiming to be "not one of those females who takes pleasure in tormenting a respectable man". She's an incredible hypocrite. They cut from the 2nd proposal straight to the elopement which makes the final act a complete mess as she's gone from hating him one minute to him telling her about Wickham and offering to help and on that basis alone she's immediately in love with him? Bah. It remains watchable, it is entertaining, but they absolutely cut it off at the knees and prevented it from being as good as it could and should have been.
After that I unwittingly went on a Soviet spree. I randomly came across The Ascent, which is a beautifully shot war-film about a couple of men who get separated from their outfit whilst on a mission and what happens to them in a local town run by the Germans. It has religious overtones, the acting is uniformly solid (especially Boris Politnikov as the stubbornly loyal hero) but on occasion director Larisa Shepitko allows action (or lack of it) to go on too long and sometimes the tone slips too over the top in the many "arguments" in the second half. It is very well put together and I'd unreservedly recommend it (I found it on google video). Most of the articles I read about the film and the tragic director (who died in a road accident at the age of 40 just 2 years after winning the Golden Bear in Berlin for this film) paired it with Come and See by her husband Elem Klimov, but when I found it on youtube I discovered the same guy had uploaded Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala, so I checked that out first (having wanted to see it for some time).
It's a very simple film about a group of surveyors who are exploring a remote region of Russia by the Chinese border. They come across a guide (the eponymous character) who helps them a lot and despite his simplistic speech and appearance impresses them greatly with his knowledge and abilities. The cinematography is stunning and the performances all nice and natural, but the problem with the film is it's incredibly episodic and doesn't have any real narrative of sorts. That said it is interesting, there are some scenes and moments which are cinematically brilliant and it's quite accessible, albeit a tad on the slow side.
After that I moved on to Come and See and it is a bit of a mixed bag even though I admire it a great deal. The film starts off with two boys in a village looking for a gun so they can join the local partisans, but the tone is very strange and all over the place. Eventually when the one boy finds a weapon and leaves his mother the film really kicks in. The photography is exceptional (really a theme for the Soviet ones so far) and from the moment he joins the partisans the film flirts with brilliance. The sound design in particular is out of this world.
The problem is that it moves away from the perfectly cinematic story of the young boy (Alexei Kravchenko) and the girl left in the woods (Olga Mironova) and towards a point near the end where there is a half hour sequence which ushers in the "point" of the film, showing German atrocities in Belarus for a couple of reels. They drag and seem out of place with the rest of the film and are there to shock and appall - they feel inserted in on top of this story we've been following and as a result the effect is strangely detached. So some jaw-dropping imagery, a technical marvel at times but overcooks it ad nauseum. Well worth checking out this extremely harrowing film on the madness of war though.
So I was doing so well with these Soviet films that I felt in a sufficient place to finally tackle one of Russia's biggest "name" directors - Tarkovsky - for the first time and given a couple of possible choices I liked the sound of The Mirror the most (as I really liked Time Regained). All good things, it seems, must come to an end. He said that his wish was "to be able to speak out in my films, to say everything with total sincerity and without imposing my own point of view on others," yet that only highlights the monumental arrogance and condescention in that he wants to say something genuine but deliberately not allow the audience to know what that is. He said of this film that, "It is no more than a straightforward, simple story. It doesn't have to be made any more understandable", which would be absolutely fine if you didn't go completely out of your way to make it as impenetrable as possible. I've actually read a justification in one of those highbrow art-film magazines which claims that any impenetrability is rendered moot because of the visuals. That is utterly ridiculous and quite literally pretentious.
He lambasted critics (even if they liked his films) and wanted people to talk "about the film's direct, intimate effect on the audience." The only effect he had on me was letting me know what it's like to be a cinematographer - every single pan and zoom is so obvious, so present, the technique of the filmmaking is so at the forefront of your attention it feels like you're literally shooting it and prevents any emotional attachment to the film or involvement in it (not that that would be possible anyway because of the purposely obscure structure and imagery). It deserves none of my intellectual time, the film has killed what little interest I had in the man's work because it is such a staggering conceit. There was a fine performance from Margarita Terekhova, but that was the sole redeeming feature in this insult of a film, which hopefully hasn't put me off the Russian experience too much.