Film Festival: Stravinsky's Legacy
and Russian Émigré Cinema

The first two weekends will focus on the films produced by the Albatros studio, which combine elements of early 20th-century modernism with a classic sensibility rooted in both French and Russian traditions. The collaboration of Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev on The Firebird in 1910 created a vogue for Russian aesthetics that eased the transition of those who left after the 1917 Revolution. In its treatment of an impresario patterned after Diaghilev, its reinvigoration of fin-de-siècle creative models, and its haunting depiction of all-consuming artistic obsession, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes sets the tone for the festival. The silent films included here, some presented for the first time in the United States, make similarly synthetic use of then-contemporary developments in narrative form, performance, and design.

Émigré studios like Films Albatros helped support French directors committed to pushing the boundaries of cinematic art, including Jean Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier, Jacques Feyder, and Jean Renoir. They also provided an opportunity for exiled filmmakers to make the most of their encounter with the new styles available in Paris, extending the achievements of the pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema in dynamic ways. The pivotal link between these two streams was Ivan Mozzhukhin, whose hypnotic screen presence made him immensely popular in both Russia and France. Mozzhukhin is the central figure of the festival’s second weekend, which also includes the most important sound film produced by Albatros.

Weekend Three begins with one of the defining films of the 1920s, Marcel L’Herbier’s L’inhumaine, which includes a scene recreating the famous riot during the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Other films during the last two weekends make provocative use of particular Stravinsky pieces (The Truth); were created by artists who collaborated with Stravinsky on important works (Rapt, Orpheus); or meditate upon his practice—Jean-Luc Godard’s stylistic heterogeneity is in dialogue with that of Stravinsky, while Claude Chabrol admired the composer’s assiduous dryness. Jacques Rivette’s La belle noiseuse brings the series full circle, using sections of Stravinsky’s late ballet Agon to enrich a subtle and profound exploration of the relationship between painter and model, the nature of creativity, and the meaning of a work of art.