Page 251 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

232 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
the long-serving director Yuli Raizman. As well as demonstrating many of Kuleshov’s
tropes in action, it incorporates American-style sight gags along very similar lines to
Kravtsev’s role in Aelita.
83 A Severe Young Man has remained banned until recent years. It includes degrees of
stylisation and outright fantasy that were unique in Soviet cinema of the time, outside
Alexandrov’s musicals.
84 Lady in the Dark [USA, 1944], directed by Mitchell Leisen, analyses its heroine by
means of her lurid dreams; Spellbound [USA, 1945], directed by Alfred Hitchcock,
features a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali; Dead of Night [Great Britain,
1945] is a compendium of ghost stories; A Matter of Life and Death [Great Britain,
1946], directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, pits the subjective
fantasy of a heavenly trial against its hero’s medical treatment, and his love of a woman
against love of country; Orphée [France, 1950], directed by Jean Cocteau, takes its
poet-hero through the looking-glass into a highly charged netherworld of symbols and
portents.
85 Protazanov will be the subject of a future retrospective, to include all his extant films,
jointly organised by the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and the British Film Institute
in London, which will provide scope for testing the claims made here and elsewhere
by Denise J.Youngblood and others. Thanks are due to Richard Taylor, Julian Graffy
and Jeffrey Brooks for advice and help with research for this essay, which was begun
while teaching in Spring 1989 in the Art Department of the University of South
Florida, Tampa. I am grateful to Bradley Nickels and other colleagues, the USF
Library and my students studying Russian art for their encouragement and
enthusiasm.

6
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE: YAKOV PROTAZANOV AND
SOVIET CINEMA
Denise J.Youngblood

1 The research for this essay was supported in part by a grant from the International
Research and Exchanges Board. My thanks to Anna Lawton for her careful reading
of an earlier version and to the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, and the All-Union
State Institute of Cinematography [VGIK], Moscow, where I viewed the films.
For descriptions of Protazanov’s pre-Revolutionary work, see: Leyda, pp. 63, 80,
88; Ginzburg; M.N.Aleinikov (ed.), Yakov Protazanov. O tvorcheskom puti rezhissera
[Yakov Protazanov: On the Director’s Creative Path] (2nd edn, Moscow: 1957),
hereafter cited as YaP; M.S.Arlazarov, Protazanov (Moscow: 1973). See also
Tsivian, pp. 15—16 this volume.
On Protazanov’s French films, see: R.Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave,
1915—1929 (Princeton, NJ: 1984), pp. 19—20; Abel, who uses the French spelling of
the director’s name, Jakob Protazanoff, does not mention his important role in either
Russian or Soviet cinema.
2 Aleinikov, ‘Zasluzhennyi master sovetskogo kino’ [An Honoured Master of Soviet
Cinema], YaP, p. 27. Aleinikov says that Protazanov was homesick, but adds no
supporting detail.