Boris Barnet
The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. Barnet in the Land of the Bolsheviks

January 28 to February 9, 2005
 
The boxer, actor and director Boris Barnet (1902-1965) was one of the greatest geniuses in Russian film. Even so, his name and his works are still considered something of an inside tip in the West. For the first time in Austria, the Film Museum is now presenting a representative selection of Barnet's unique oeuvre, which is both deeply lyrical and comedic.
 
Barnet was "discovered" in the early 1920s as a prizefighter, with Lew Kuleschow the man responsible for training him as an actor. Shortly thereafter he made his début as a (co-)director, with a delightful three-part adventure serial (Miss Mend). This series was followed by two further highly inventive silent movies, fashioned in the vein of high-speed American comedies: The Girl with the Hatbox and The House on Trubnaya. Barnet's gifts to early sound cinema were Okraina/Outskirts and By the Bluest of Seas; both films hold a special place of their own in world cinema.
 
Barnet's idiom, which hovers between satire and lyricism, has drawn comparison with Lubitsch, Hawks and Chekhov. This only does partial justice, however, to the slightly eccentric magic of his works. He was able to envelop so-called "mundane matters" with wit, beauty and charm. He invented protagonists who pass through this world with an inexplicable elegance – "as if he had brought them from an enchanted island", as one Russian critic put it.
 
Boris Barnet's cinematography is an enchanted island in its own right, and one to which access is only granted from time to time. His popular and dreamy films did not fit in with 1930s Soviet doctrine. He was discredited politically, and his subsequent projects could only be realized with great effort and various “adjustments". Although these included such outstanding films as Alyonka and the huge box office hit Secret Agent, Barnet was convinced he was a failure. He committed suicide in 1965.
 
He wasn't discovered in the West until very late. Barnet's works are too far removed from the film historical clichés of Soviet (montage) formalism. "I am not a theoretical kind of person; I take the material for my films from life," as Barnet put it. Thus he remains a "cult figure" today, particularly for other film directors such as Otar Iosseliani, Scorsese, Godard and Rivette, who declared him to be "the best Russian director alongside Eisenstein". In 1980, on the occasion of a first retrospective in London, Barnet was honoured as "the greatest 'undiscovered' director of all time". 25 years down the road hardly anything in that assessment has changed.