Screen wars. Episode seven. The colour awakens

With the support of the Gosfilmofond and Mr. Lucas we continue our history of cinema. This time, as promised, we will focus on colour.

The desire to see cinematic images in colour appeared simultaneously with the very birth of images itself. One hundred and twenty-five years ago charming young women sat in the first film studios and hand-coloured film reels with their tender hands. Then came tinted films, followed by two-coloured. Finally, in 1935, the great Hollywood Armenian Ruben Mamoulian directed the first fully colour film "Becky Sharp". A digitally restored print of this adaptation of William Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" will be presented in our program. It is interesting to mention, however, that the same year the first Soviet colour film, known by two affectionate titles: "Grunya Kornakova" and "Solovey-Solovushko" was shown to public.

The Gosfilmofond has not yet been completed the restoration of this propaganda film about class struggle during the collectivisation period. So the early Soviet colour film will be presented by "The Stone Flower". Produced by Alexander Ptushko immediately after the war, this film experienced incredible popularity thanks to the vibrancy of its colours, the astonishing beauty of Tamara Makarova as the Mistress of the Copper Mountain and the charming and passionate Vladimir Druzhnikov as Danila the Master, who broke the hearts of all girls in the USSR.

However, in the following 1947 year the same popularity gained to "The Woman of My Dreams", the first colour trophy film from the collection of the Reichsfilmarchiv, seized during the defeat of Berlin in May 1945. This film has gone down to the history of our country. It has been quoted countless times in movies and books. (Remember: "Stierlitz watched "The Woman of My Dreams" for the tenth time. He hated this film"?) It was severely criticized and yet constantly re released. The last such re-release took place in the late 1960s.

During this remarkable decade (which, by the way, is in the focus of a special program at our festival), monochrome cinema gave way to colour film everywhere. The classic masters, who had earned this title through their great black-and-white films, held out the longest. When Federico Fellini made "Juliet of the Spirits" in 1965, he already had three Oscars and the main prize of MIFF. Michelangelo Antonioni, in his "Red Desert" faithfully followed the principles of Eisenstein, who called to create not just colour, but colourful cinema.

Sergey Lavrentiev