Max Nemtsov The "masterpiece of soviet cinema" turned out to be artificial and absurd all through its length. Boris Pasternak's translation of Shakespeare's text not only rendered the original meaningless but flattened and simplified it to the level of "simple soviet people's" understanding. In order to reach this goal, the text was also shaped in bureaucratese. All characters speak like chartered accountants, insurance agents, lawyers, or trade union activists. You constantly feel a sort of Spanish shame for actors, like you're watching a village culture club's amateur dramatics. Oleg Dal is especially bad. Apparently, actors simply didn't understand what they should, well, act, for the text itself was bad with its unpronounceable syntax, soviet clichés, and all falsity stemming from this. For the most part, the film is a sorry spectacle, filled with illogical dashings to and fro across the screen, for these massive crowd excursions are impossible to explain neither by common sense nor by strategy and tactics of the plot itself. Horses, too. In fact, one feels sorry for the poor beasts here more than for anyone else. At first, a herd of them runs across some takyr, apparently somewhere in soviet Middle Asia (pretending to be marshes and heather), and then, immediately, they are made to climb up the White Cliffs of Dover. Inexplainable.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU King Lear is a tragedy that had to appeal to Soviet film-makers. It is dense and extreme. A whole world is destroyed in a couple of years because of an unwise decision of the king doubled with an unwise blindness about the real feelings of his daughters. That's dramatic and that appeals to the good old Russian soul. But there is in this play by Shakespeare what we find in all the tragedies of that author: a full cycle of elimination of all the participants in the drama and the future falls then in the hands of some nearly outsider that comes back by chance and manages to survive through the swords and the poison that runs freely in the wine. The new leader appointed by fate is there to clean up the mess, bury the dead and then try to rebuild some kind of a human world. That too can but attract the Soviet mind of old for whom change can only come through a tabula rasa, a full elimination of the past and change can only the result of an effort to reconstruct after the violent destruction of what was. What's more there is in this play a general structure that can only please a dialectic mind: the destruction comes from inside and the third party that comes from outside is defeated by the two parties that are fighting one against the other inside and unite just long enough to defeat the third sister and her husband. But this film is a lot more interesting than just that story we know by heart. It is the phenomenal acting of the actors in a setting that wants to recreate the dreary drab misery of the ninth century and the horror of a constant civil war that ensues the departure of the king. The war does not even aims at looting but just at destroying everything and everybody. The vision is so extreme that we wonder if it is realistic or just a nightmare in the director's mind. In fact it is beautiful and the king is really crazy and his clown is the most fascinating suffering toy I have ever seen in that part. His job is to annoy with truth in order to become the outlet of the anger of others who will make him suffer to regain some peace of mind. And in this case he does not even pretend to be joyful, he is suffering all along and showing it because that is exactly why he is there and that is why other people are appealed to him, to make him suffer if they can but let him live for more.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

theelegantdandyfop Shakespeare's plays are difficult to realize on stage or on film. Reading through his plays, one gets the impression that they are greater than they can ever be performed. But there are those few productions that hit the mark and do his works justice. So it is with Korol Lir (King Lear), Grigori Kozintsev's final film.In 1964, Kozintsev's Hamlet was released and earned high praise both in Russia and the West. As a consequence, Kozintsev was invited to and attended many western film festivals including Cannes. Kozintsev cherished these trips to the west as he was able to see many films that were not shown in the Soviet Union. He was particularly eager to see the films of Kurosawa, Ford, Capra and Fellini. But it was the films of Orson Welles, Citizen Kane in particular, that made the deepest impression on him. In fact it was Citizen Kane that inspired Kozintsev to film King Lear in black-and-white rather than in color.There are so many wonderful touches in this film starting with Yuri Yarvets' harrowing portrayal of the mad Lear. His Lear always leaves me feeling crushed at the end of the film. Superb as well is the eerie, haunting performance of Galina Volchek as Regan and the outstanding cinematography of Jonas Gritsius. Of course there is also the translation used which is itself a masterpiece, by Boris Pasternak no less (the fool's songs were performed with translations by Samuil Marshak however). Dmitri Shostakovich's score is exactly what you would expect: genius. Here is no simple sonic wallpaper to play along as images move about the screen. Neither does this dark score overwhelm the on-screen action but rather acts as a wordless narrator, commenting on the drama as it unfolds. At the heart of all this is Kozintsev's bleak and powerful vision of King Lear. There are no gimmicks here, no attempts to "update", no trace of the portentousness and pomposity that mars many films based on Shakespeare. Here, the tragedy is revealed with a brutal and simple honesty. It is not only Lear and those around him who suffer but his whole nation suffers and decays alongside him. Seeing this film from first to final scene is a draining emotional experience.You probably won't find the DVD of this great film at your local video store but it is available from the Russian Cinema Council's (RUSCICO) website for about $35. Their transfer of this film is decent but it does leave a bit to be desired. One can only hope and pray that Criterion will release it one day (don't hold your breath). Still, any fan of great cinema should make the effort to acquaint themselves with this film, one that I personally consider to be one of the greatest films ever made.

Galina This version of King Lear is an incredible achievement due to the masterful adaptation from the Shakespeare original by one of the best Russian poets, writers, and translators of the last century, Boris Pasternak; elegant and powerful images by the cinematographer Jonas Gritsius (he also worked with Grigori Kozintsev on the earlier Shakespeare's adaptation, "Hamlet", 1964), the music of Dimity Shostakovich, and the great performances from all actors.Estonian actor Jüri Järvet is masterful as the mad king in a performance which is reminiscent of Kinski as another brilliant madman - Aguirre. They were even the same age when they played Aguirre and Lear. The whole cast is amazing: Kozintsev chose the best actors possible for his project and everyone delivers. I'd like to mention Oleg Dal as the touching Fool; Karl Sebris as the Duke of Gloucester, whose scenes with his son Edgar after having been blinded are very moving; Regimantas Adomaitis as Edmund, a treacherous son and brother but a brilliant man; and Donatas Banionis (who played the main character in Tarkovsky's Solaris) as an intelligent and noble Albany. But like I said, everyone and everything is just perfect in this little known but IMO, the Best adaptation of the beloved and one of the most wrenching tragedies in the English and in the world literature.