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Film: Sol Svanetii (Salt for Svanetia)

Still from Salt for Svanetia (1930), by Mikhail Kalatozov. Courtesy of National Film Foundation of Russian Federation.

Film

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

Prior to making his acknowledged masterpieces The Cranes are Flying (1957) and I Am Cuba (1964), Georgian filmmaker Mikhail Kalatozov cemented his international reputation with the stunning Sol Svanetii (Salt for Svanetia, 1930). One of the earliest examples of ethnographic filmmaking, Sol Svanetti was filmed on location among the Svans, an isolated ethnic group living in the Caucasus mountain region. With a script by famed constructivist writer Sergei Tretyakov, the film functions both as classic agitprop—depicting the value of communist progress and work for the village of Ushguli—and a philosophical mediation on man’s relationship to nature. Kalatozov (who is both director and co-cinematographer) alternates between extreme impressionistic close-ups of villagers and imposing shots of the mountain range, disorienting and startling the viewer. A shot of a grieving mother pouring milk from her breast onto the recent grave of her child, for example, still shocks today. With its pioneering explorations of the role the moving image might play in instigating the revolution to come, Sol Svanetii stands as an essential entry in the international canon of revolutionary films.

Emma Widdis, reader in Russian Studies at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, will offer introductory remarks.

This screening is offered in conjunction with the lecture “Feeling Revolution: Cinema and the Emancipation of the Soviet Senses,” on Monday, October 2, 2017, which is part of the three-part series “What about Revolution? Three Lectures on Aesthetic Practices after 1917.”

The screening will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway.

Free admission

Co-sponsored by the Department of History of Art and Architecture, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Harvard Art Museums.

Support for this program is provided by the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.