Mikhail Kalatozov, The Salt of Svanetia (1930)

Salt for Svanetia is a haunting portrait of a village in the remote, snowbound region of Caucasus, Svaneti. Celebrated for Mikhail Kalatozov’s masterful expressive camera work, the film instantly placed him alongside the great Soviet directors. Salt for Svanetia is based on Sergei Tretyakov’s script and includes episodes from Kalatazov’s earlier film The Blind Woman, which had been banned for distribution, along with nonfiction footage he shot in Svanetia. The Svans are shown as people of archaic culture, retaining medieval practices and living a natural economy. Kalatozov’s ethnographic fiction combines authentic medieval towers and re-enacted events to visualize Tretyakov’s indictment of “three locks that keep the Svans in the dark middle ages: houses, roads, and the dead.” The combination of bird’s eye panoramas with a subjective camera, diagonal, low-angle shots and dynamic editing emotionally affect the viewers with images of isolation in picturesque and austere conditions. The poetry of repetition and juxtaposition, distance and extreme close-up, wild rhythms and radical constructivist angles blends fiction and documentary in a powerful and expressive visual statement.

This screening is the fifth and final event in the SHOOTING THE REVOLUTION film series that is part of the WHAT’S LEFT program series organized by the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, which aims to revisit the complex socialist ideological and visual legacy in the year marked by the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The screening is introduced by Dr. Oksana Sarkisova (Blinken OSA).

Free admission.
Limited seats are available on a first come first served basis.
The films will be screened in Russian with English subtitles. The program is in English.

In the framework of the one-year program series “What's Left?”.