We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
68
CLOSE UP
various republics and peoples. Caucasian films, Georgian films, Armenian, Jewish, Ukrainian, Mongol . . from the areas of these films come the students of the cinema school and the new directors. There's Kalveridze, a Georgian ; another Georgian is Mikhail Kalatozov (schvilli), whose social training began as an economist and cinematic as a cameraman. Kalatzov has just made his first picture as a creator. I saw it before the last touches. Pearl Attashev has written to me that the film has received a first class pass from the censor.
Salt of Swanetia is an ethnographic film. It presents a new approach to ethnographic material. The Soviet Union utilizes the film documenting the lives of its minority people as a call to action in their behalf. Swanetia is the salt-less land in Asiatic Russia. It is a land of darkness and malaria and blood hemorrhages, a land where " death is a holiday and birth a sorrow." Tretyakov, author of Roar, China!, prepared the original scenario for the film. Kalatzov went at it in his own way. The difference seems to be one of stress. Should Kalatzov have stressed the quotidienal facts, or was he right in having constructed an experience on peaks of pathos? The choice having been made, we can view its execution. The ethnographic film has had its literal, factual day, it seems to me. We have awaited a non-fabricated, )ret dramatic, enactment of the life of remote people. Not a simple-minded and charming Chang — it exposes nothing. But a film satisfying the social sense, a film making demands upon the active conscience. The romanticized document like Chang concentrates a tale around a personality to the disadvantage of the evidences of native life. It is, like Flaherty's lovely lyrics, Nanook and Moana, too pleasant, too " openminded." Kalatazov has uncovered the dramatic human heart of the evidences, without destroying the ethnographic value of the document.
Kalatazov has established his point-of-view at once in the bold image and stern grand angles. The film, in these, is related to Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, but being a film of immediate pathos, rather than one of objective tragedy, Salt of Swanetia is a structure of greater liquidity and darker, more sombre tones.. It is unrelenting in its exposure of the dread life of the Swans, exploited and hopeless, incarcerated by the mountains. The funeral of the tuberculosis victim is excruciating in its dire grief. The widow, dripping her milk into the grave, condemns the collusion of paganism and Christianity conspiring against human happiness. 41 We will not give our milk to the grave," the women cry in revolt. The film calls, and we respond : " These people must be saved — roads and salt !" The last part shouting this slogan directly is a weak addendum — the entire film cries that convincingly enough. Yet perhaps Ave must be told that the response is acting, that a road is being built to lead Swanetia to the world, and the world to Swanetia.
Eisenstein has spoken of " the pathetic treatment of non-pathetic material." There is also the non-pathetic treatment of pathetic material. The question arises : shall pathos be stressed bv pathetic treatment ? I