Not bad for a student film. How many students get a cast of thousands, or at least hundreds?

We watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Katok i skripka” (Steamroller and violin) some time back. I hadn’t known until now that it wasn’t his first student film. This one is “Sevodnya uvolnyeniya nye budyet” (Today There Will Be No Leave) and was produced in 1959, a couple of years before Steamroller.

I downloaded it from Memocast, and then found out it has French subtitles. The English subtitles from a .srt file overlay on top of them, making it kind of messy to read. I had sometimes wondered what it would like to watch a film with subtitles in both languages; now I’ve had no choice but to find out.

I’m not sure whether there is any great meaning to this film (I’m about 1/3 of the way through) but it keeps my attention.

It’s interesting that everybody in the city has to leave it in a mass evacuation, while the title of the film says NO leave. (That’s a play on words that doesn’t work in Russian, as far as I can tell.)

BTW, I kind of hate to say it, but it seems to me that Tarkovsky did better work in the Soviet Union than he did after he left it so he could have greater artistic freedom. However, some of the better work he did in the Soviet Union was also censored there, so the moral isn’t simply that repression is good for artists.

Today’s WSJ told about the new CCTV building now under construction in China. It will be the 2nd largest office building in the world, after the Pentagon.

I wonder if it will become a ubiquitous symbol of China. If so, that will be some interesting symbolism — a communications building as national symbol of a country that tries hard to restrict certain types of communication.

Another country with a ubiquitous building as national symbol is Russia. The Foreign Ministry Building is everywhere. This photo of it is from Wikipedia. It’s also in the standard intro scenes on Mosfilm DVDs:

It’s shown on the background of some of RTR Planeta’s news broadcasts. Somewhere on my desk was a candy wrapper for one of the Red October brand of candies. It pictured the Foreign Ministry building. (The wrapper still may be on my desk, but I may never know for sure.) One sees it in movies whenever there’s an excuse to show it, such as in Tarkovsky’s graduation project, “Steamroller and Violin”.

It’s interesting that a country would use a foreign ministry building as such an important symbol. Here in the U.S. the State Department building gets no such status. For us, the U.S. Congress is more of a symbol.