Gleb Panfilov

Gleb Panfilov first worked as a factory foreman after graduating from the Urals Polytechnic Institute. After seeing Mikhail Kalatazov's "The Cranes Are Flying" (1957), he became interested in film and started a correspondence course at VGIK (the State Cinema Institute) in 1960. In 1968 Panfilov made his first feature film, "No Ford in the Fire," which also marked the beginning of an ongoing collaboration with his wife, Inna Churikova. The star of all his films, Churikova has been described as "a Russian Giulietta Masina" for her endearing, comic awkwardness.

In 1970, Panfilov made the financially successful "The Beginning," which intercuts the story of Joan of Arc with a contemporary narrative. Not satisfied with depicting only part of the French heroine's life, Panfilov and Churikova tried for the next six years to film her entire story. The simplicity of Joan's peasant roots combined with her extraordinary sensibility and her faith in her cause fascinated the filmmakers, who learned French and traveled to France in order to study records about her. Although they wrote and even published a script, they never received the financial backing needed to make the film on location.

In his early works, Panfilov explored the interplay of life and art. "No Ford in the Fire" is a civil war story in which a nurse who cares for wounded soldiers is also an artist whose work has displeased a cultural commissar. A comment on the stifled talents and creativity of the Russian people, the film also reviles socialist realism. "The Beginning" deals with a young factory worker involved in amateur theatricals who gets the opportunity to play Joan of Arc in a film. The complex interplay between the two lives reveals the richness behind ordinary existence; Panfilov suggests this by juxtaposing the funny and the tragic, the great and the small. Despite the vast differences in the historical scale of events and destinies, both the heroine of the film and Joan of Arc gather their strength from a national spirit.

With "I Want the Floor" (1975), Panfilov began to examine the increasing conservatism of Soviet life. The film relates the difficulties faced by the female mayor of a large town who is overwhelmed by party politics. "The Theme" (1980), based on problems encountered by a writer, suggests the difficulty of emigration from the Soviet Union; this film was screened a few times and ultimately banned. These later works suffer from mechanical plots and flat characters, due perhaps to the imposition of veteran screenwriters. In response to the increasingly conservative reactions to his films, Panfilov adapted two plays in 1981. The Chekhovian "Valentine" (1983), from Alexander Vampilov's "Last Summer in Tchoulimsk," chronicles the interactions among ten characters in a village inn. Maxim Gorky's "Vassa Gelznova" is the basis of "Vassa" (1983), a tale of a decaying petit bourgeois family. His most recent effort was also a look back, though this time at film history: a worthy 1990 remake of Pudovkin's landmark "Mother" (1926), about a working class woman who is slowly radicalized. Although these later films are not quite on a par with his earlier work, Panfilov is still considered to be one of the former Soviet Union's leading filmmakers.