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My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984)

"Among the most important retrospectives in years, War and Remembrance: The Films of Aleksei Guerman is also a bracing, deeply satisfying cinematic experience," begins Tony Pipolo at Artforum. To follow up on Maxim Pozdorovkin's Notebook piece, I'll be gathering pointers to further reading as the series runs at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York through Tuesday. Pipolo: "Though the Russian director's output is small, his track record is flawless. All five of his features are being screened in this, his first retrospective in North America, along with The Fall of Otrar (1991, directed by Ardak Amirkulov), a curious, almost minimalist epic about Genghis Khan, which Guerman produced and co-wrote in the lull between My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984), his first international success, and Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998), an exhilarating comic masterpiece and one of the great films of the 1990s."

"Guerman's first solo picture...

Above and below: Khrustalyov, My Car!.

The joke about Aleksei German was always that he was great but only Russians liked him. Several years ago, I invited a non-Russian-speaker to a screening of Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998) at Brooklyn's Bam cinema. Ten minutes into the screening, an odd thing happened. I felt the urge to tell my companion to stop reading the subtitles.

The following scene prompted me: A middle-aged housekeeper opens the curtains and spikes her morning tea with cognac; someone polishes a shoe and talks about a veterinarian prone to lethargic sleep; a woman with a yoghurt facial scolds a senile lady for using a walker and, moments later, for taking a large kielbasa into bed with her. The old woman claims to be defenseless against sexual fantasies. Some words are misheard; a grocery receipt is scrutinized; a winter coat is sniffed in search of mothballs, two doll-like Jewish...