Gleb Anatolyevich Panfilov, the director sensitive to the Big History, attentive to Man. Intolerant to empty rhethorics and empty shots, the person who made the most honest Soviet films where the ideological "truth" was presented in all of its dialectic complexity. Panfilov's first feature "No Path through Fire" showed the amazing duality of the reality and the ideal. The routine of the civil war and the naïve art, war and peace, the harsh reality and a dream as a promise of that very unattainable bright communist future.
And then there was the unparalleled project "Beginning" which won universal love and offered a very natural blending of two opposite genres, those of tragedy and comedy. In the ordinary story of the rises and falls of the factory working girl Pasha Stroganova, Bresson and Forman reign supreme, but the narrative style itself has no analogies in Western cinema.
"Beginning" should have given rise to a movie about Joan of Arc. It did not work out and all that remains is fragments of a movie inside a movie, but its legendary aura affected all of the master's later works. The image of an ideal Godly human being who heaves the world upon her back and serves the lofty moral diction with maniacal perseverance becomes the cornerstone of the director's works. In Panfilov's most brilliant films this inborn quality is personified by his remarkable muse Inna Churikova. Be it the chairman of the town council Elizaveta Uvarova in "I Ask to Speak", or the company owner Vassa Zheleznova, or Gorky's miserable Nilovna, or the refined lover of "dead poets" from "Theme": those are women from different epochs, different ideological climates, different social strata. In Gleb Panfilov's interpretation their tragic delusions are illuminated by the light of the steadfast belief in their own lofty mission.
The author himself serves this mission too. His sincerity and perseverance are expressed in a specific cinematic style which seems outwardly impassionate, analytical, avoiding direct preaching and evaluations. Gleb Panfilov's classic outwardly dispassionate cinema demonstrates the director's ingenuity in expressing Hitchcock-like suspense, the intensity of thought and multiple meanings through long takes and prolonged pauses. That is exactly why Panfilov's movies are always invincible to one-sided criticism and are as mysterious as the whimsical life itself.
Moscow International Film Festival
