Double Feature: THE LAST BOLSHEVIK, 1993,ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF ANDREI ARSENEVICH, Icarus Films, 1999, September 17, 2012

Monday, September 17 – 7:30 PM
Double Feature: THE LAST BOLSHEVIK, 1993, Icarus Films, 116 min. If there’s anything to equal SANS SOLEIL, it may be THE LAST BOLSHEVIK, Chris Marker’s astonishing look at the history of 20th-century Russia through the life and work of his dear friend, filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin. Told in the form of six letters to the late Medvedkin, THE LAST BOLSHEVIK is a film of heartbreaking devotion (to a friend, to an ideology, to film itself), of acidic wit and endless curiosity - oh, hell, we’ve run out of superlatives on this one. It’s simply one of the best films from the past two decades - don’t miss it! In French and Russian with English subtitles.
Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dHB0Eqslhk
ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF ANDREI ARSENEVICH, Icarus Films, 1999, 55 min. "The best single piece of [Andrei] Tarkovsky criticism I know of, clarifying the overall coherence of his oeuvre while leaving all the principal mysteries in his films intact. It becomes clear early on that Marker was an intimate friend of Tarkovsky and his family, and was shooting home-video footage of some of Tarkovsky’s final days in the mid-1980s, when he was dying of cancer, for Tarkovsky and his family’s use as well as his own. But this is handled throughout with exquisite tact and restraint and is never allowed to intrude on the poetic analysis of the features. In fact, the video interweaves biography and autobiography with poetic and political insight in a manner that seldom works as well as it does here, perhaps because personal affection and poetic analysis are rarely as compatible as Marker makes them." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmHqfKeRhsE

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