BORIS VASSILIEVITCH BARNET — Bernard Eisenschitz

By Bernard Eisenschitz

17 x 25,5 cm / 448 pages / February 2024

isbn 978-2-35137-359-0

In French only

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‘The truth is often overlooked: that apart from Eisenstein, Boris Barnet must be considered the best Soviet filmmaker’. Jacques Rivette

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Born just in time to be enthusiastic about the revolution, Boris Barnet made his first film, La Jeune Fille au carton à chapeau, a few months after Battleship Potemkin. Although he was not unaware of the avant-gardes, he was attached to a major trend in cinema, one that focused on the actor and the freedom to tell stories. Okraïna and Au bord de la mer bleue, admired by film-makers and film-lovers everywhere, are the most brilliant pearls of his cinema, which contrasts the heaviness of bodies with the desire to fly, and always tenderly observes men and even more so women: the Barnetian heroines dance, want to escape gravity, catch objects that have fallen from the sky, climb unstable staircases, parachute...

When he died, the new generation of the 1960s had just emerged.

It had experienced wartime communism, the blossoming of the 1920s, dictatorship and bureaucratic terror, the fight against Nazism, the war years, the ice age, the hope of a new thaw...

The imagination of the USSR is expressed through cinema, through its cinema.

‘Where did the freedom come from in his films? He used to say: every man must invent at least one thing. This is what he invented: he kept nothing of the original script. He would write: such and such a shot, such and such a shot, and he would glue little pieces, images, together, making a long list, which he would roll up. He'd put the roll on the floor and unroll it, and on his knees he'd look to see what image was going to be made. And finally, he would shoot something completely different, he would decide on the spot’. Elena Kouzmina