Boris Barnet, A Soviet Poet

Rector has also translated André Bazin’s brief appreciation of Barnet’s Bountiful Summer (1950), “a delightful love story,” and Tom Milne gives us Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 assessment of The Wrestler and the Clown (1957): “One doesn’t have to be stupid to dislike Barnet’s film, but one does have to have a heart of stone.” Metrograph will screen 35 mm prints of Bountiful Summer and The Wrestler and the Clown, both shot in glorious Sovcolor.

The must-read in the Theater of the Matters collection is Bernard Eisenschitz’s 1991 survey of the oeuvre, which opens with an explanation as to how the Cahiers crowd became so taken with Barnet in the first place: “Henri Langlois used to show By the Bluest of Seas (1936) and The Wrestler and the Clown so regularly at the Cinémathèque française that intrigued audiences ended up actually going to see them.”

Having grown up in Moscow as the grandson of a British printer, Barnet joined the Red Army as a teen and became a professional boxer. He signed up for a workshop run by Soviet filmmaker and theorist Lev Kuleshov, who cast Barnet as Cowboy Jeddy in his 1924 slapstick comedy The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks. The movie and its star were hits, and Barnet caught the moviemaking bug, becoming a director who, as J. Hoberman put it in the Village Voice in 2003, displayed “a taste for lyrical, proto-nouvelle-vague hijinks that can suggest a Russian equivalent of Jean Vigo.”

Barnet teamed up with Fedor Ozep to turn a string of adventure novels by Marietta Shaginyan into Miss Mend (1926), a full-speed-ahead tale of three reporters—one of them played by Barnet himself—racing to ward off a biological attack on the Soviet Union by a Western businessmen. Released in three feature-length parts, Miss Mend nods stylistically to both American serials and the spy movies of Fritz Lang.

Russians flocked to see Miss Mend, and as Dave Kehr has pointed out in the New York Times, “party-line critics, of course, despised it, decrying its ideological impurity and lowbrow appeal.” Barnet and Ozep “signal their attitude toward the material by overplaying it, adding layers of complications that strain credulity,” noted Kehr. “A fine example is the chase for a purloined will that comes near the end of Part 1, which involves horses, cars, a motorcycle, and a steam locomotive, all charging along in a swirl of expertly intercut strands of action . . . For all of the exaggeration of the action, the emotions seem real, and death still has its sting, striking at least one major character with a force and suddenness that abruptly brings the film back to earth.”

Hoberman suggested that The Girl with the Hat Box (1927) was probably Barnet’s “best-known movie, mainly because this charming housing-shortage comedy features the future failed Hollywood star Anna Sten, here a Soviet Kewpie doll with bee-stung lips.” In The House on Trubnaya Square (1927), a provincial peasant girl is exploited in Moscow by a hairdresser. “Portrayed by the popular actor Vladimir Fogel (familiar to some from Pudovkin’s 1925 Chess Fever),” wrote Mark Le Fanu for Sight and Sound in 2012, the hairdresser comes across “as one of the all-time great self-justifying monsters—up there, in self-deluding arrogance, with Blackadder or Withnail. This of course is what makes the film so enjoyable. It would be going a bit far to claim that we love such a character; yet, in a strange way, it’s impossible not to admire him—he so clearly takes the world as he sees it.”

In 2022, Christopher Small and his editorial team launched Outskirts, a print magazine taking its name from Barnet’s 1933 group portrait of villagers dealing with the outbreak of the First World War and the October Revolution. “This masterpiece, about as good as movies get,” wrote Small in the inaugural issue, which features a dossier on Barnet, “is also something of a UFO in cinema history: an unclassifiable classic that eludes easy interpretation at every turn; shifting tones, sounds, and forms not simply from one scene to the next, but also within each and every moment, as when a soldier in the trenches pretends to be dead after a shell explodes next to him to get a laugh out of his buddies and his brother, with mixed results.”

In By the Bluest of Seas, two castaways compete for the love of Mariya (Yelena Kuzmina), who oversees a collective farm on an island in the Caspian Sea. “It’s difficult to account for what makes this movie so exquisite,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum in 2004, “apart from the characters and their quirks (such as one man’s ticklishness) and the beauty of the idyllic setting. Eisenschitz seems to be on the right track when he says that the film is unclassifiable, that it’s ‘certainly not a comedy even if it provokes laughter.’ We wind up feeling affection for the three leads, partly because of the affection they show for one another and partly because of the gusto with which they show it.”

Ivan Skuratov stars in The Old Jockey (1940) as a rider at the Moscow Hippodrome who retires to his native village. The portrayal of Russian life in this comedic drama seems to have hit a little too close to home, and the film was banned until 1959. Once Upon a Night (1945), a WWII drama starring Irina Radchenko as a young woman hiding three wounded Russian soldiers in a bombed-out building next to a Nazi headquarters, will screen with Barnet’s 1942 propaganda short, A Priceless Head. And Barnet’s hit spy thriller Secret Agent (1947) features himself as a Nazi commandant and Pavel Kadochnikov as a Red Army major who infiltrates the Nazi high command in occupied Ukraine.

Whistle Stop (1963) is the last feature Barnet completed before he hung himself in a hotel room in 1965. Metrograph Journal is running Ted Fendt’s translation of passages from Barnet’s letters to his fourth wife, Alla Kazanskaya, who appeared in Bountiful Summer and, decades later, in Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun (1994). “I can think of nothing else than this wretched art of cinema, which I hate and which, no doubt, I love at the same time,” wrote Barnet in 1947. “I am always crushed beneath the weight of responsibility, seized in fact by fear before the success or failure of the undertaking.”

Often perceived as a job-for-hire, Whistle Stop does not rank high in most evaluations of the oeuvre, as Boris Nelepo notes in an in-depth essay from the Outskirts dossier that later ran at Notebook. Nelepo argues that Whistle Stop, in which an aging scientist takes a holiday in the country, is “not only a valediction but an attempt to capture its maker’s already thinning connection to a certain lived reality. If I may indulge further in grandiloquence, Barnet’s film proves cinema’s ability to be something larger than a faltering storyline—that is, an object that reveals the medium’s transcendental foundations through its narrative gaps and oddities, features without which cinema wouldn’t even be an art form at all.”