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November 1957
FILM & TV TECHNICIAN
153
Above: "The Forty-First", which won a special prize at Cannes, opens the London season. Below: " Magdana's Donkey "
Russian film-makers have discovered that new techniques alone do not produce good productions, and there has been a return to the normal size black-and-white picture, where the nature of the subject demands it.
In conclusion I must mention a technique that is also common to both our countries, because it greatly increases our ability to understand and appreciate each other's films — foreign language dubbing. The showing of the Soviet film Othello at the Royal Festival Hall this summer marked the first public performance of a Soviet film dubbed into English since the war.
The clubbing of Othello, which has been brilliantly done by the De Lane Lea process in Britain, is the first of a series which includes Twelfth N^ght, Skanderbeg, Carnival Night, The Forty First and Don Quixote. Dubbing of this calibre greatly increases the audiences for such films in a way that sub-titles could never do. The fact that British technicians and artists have had considerable employment in this work has been a further welcome way of celebrating the anniversary of a film industry that is forty years young this November.
the Republics, and this one comes from the Georgian studios. It is a local story from the last century of a poor peasant widow and her three children, who find a sick donkey on the road, and nurse it back to health. Incidentally, the independence of the local studios is an important feature in the new policy of decentralisation which has recently been adopted in the USSR. The job of the film department of the Ministry of Culture is to co-ordinate the production of the many studios without interfering with the artistic side, which is left entirely to the producers, directors, stars and technicians.
Finally, a film from the popular treasury of Russian classics, The Grasshopper, which is based on a short story by Anton Chekhov. For many Londoners this will be a most welcome return of a colour picture that ran for a most successful season at the Everyman, Hampstead, nearly a year ago.
I have left to last the technical advances of Soviet film production — perhaps readers of film and tv technician will be the best judges of that, anyway. I should mention, however, that new techniques have come to the fore, including Sovscope (an equivalent of CinemaScope), stereophonic sound, and panorama (similar to Cinerama). But like their British colleagues,