When the Trees Were Tall
On March 26, 1962, the premiere of Lev Kulidzhanov's film "When the Trees Were Tall" took place at the Rossiya cinema in Moscow.
There is a very good publication about the history of this film. I'm not going to retell it, but I can recommend it to those who are interested.
Filming of Lev Kulidzhanov's film "When the Trees Were Tall" was completed in the autumn of 1961 and on December 19 of this year the film was submitted for approval to the artistic council. At the end of the screening, a very lively discussion took place. Some members of the artistic council, in particular, Sergei Gerasimov and Ekaterina Furtseva, who at that time held the post of Minister of Culture of the USSR, liked the film. But some members did not like the picture at all. Playwright Georgy Mdivani and film director Mark Donskoy expressed their dissatisfaction especially violently.
Natalya Fomina, film critic of the Art of Cinema magazine, explained the reason for not accepting Lev Kulidzhanov’s picture:
“Because it contradicted the guidelines adopted back in the Stalin years. The hero in the cinema had to be the very best. It was supposed to be considered that “Soviet dwarfs are the tallest in the world”. And suddenly - a swindler-loser, an impostor, who eventually awakened to a moral existence. Problems of morality did not extend to the declassed elements. And suddenly such a hero! And after all, it was precisely at the time when the rehabilitation of many, many thousands of innocently serving their sentences in the underworld of Stalin's camps, how many people appeared around us with a broken, failed life, how difficult it was for them to gain some kind of status in real Soviet reality."
The result of stormy disputes between members of the artistic council was that the film was released to the screens, but with a rather average circulation - 891 copies. Nevertheless, 21 million Soviet moviegoers watched the picture in a year. But this was not enough to enter the top ten leaders of the Soviet film distribution. However, Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece "Ivan's Childhood", which was released a few days later, gathered even fewer viewers in cinemas - 16.7 million. And, for example, the film directed by Yevgeny Brunchugin and Anatoly Bukovsky "Among good people", released in November of the same 1962, was watched by more than 30 million Soviet moviegoers. But who remembers this picture today?
A month and a half after the release Lev Kulidzhanov's film "When the Trees Were Tall" was presented at the Cannes International Film Festival, where it received a nomination for the main prize - the Palme d'Or. Kulidzhanov's film did not receive this award - by decision of the jury chaired by the Japanese poet and diplomat Tetsuro Furukaki, it was awarded to the Brazilian film "O Pagador de Promessas (The Given Word)" directed by Anselmo Duarte. But Kulidzhanov's film turned out to be in a more than worthy company of "relative losers", which, in particular, included the Italian films "Divorzio all'italiana (Divorce Italian Style)" by Pietro Germi and "L'Eclisse (The Eclipse)" by Michelangelo Antonioni, the French film "Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7)" directed by Agnès Varda, American film "Long Day's Journey Into Night" by Sidney Lumet and others.
However, despite participation in the Cannes Film Festival, Lev Kulidzhanov's film "When the Trees Were Tall" remained practically unknown to the Western audience, as evidenced by the almost complete absence of reviews on it both on the IMDB website and on the rottentomatoes.com website. Perhaps the devastating review of the film in the influential The New York Times played a role in this. The author of this review, Howard Thompson, called Kulidzhanov's film
"an odd, fumbling drama", which hero - "is the most negative, ground-down and dull protagonist".
Thompson concluded his review with the words:
"it's hard to care about a hero who piously dodges responsibility for nearly two hours"
It is curious how the columnist of the mouthpiece of the US Democratic Party and the adherents of Stalinist views on cinematography agreed.
The modern viewer, several decades after the release of the film on the screens, highly appreciated the picture of Lev Kulidzhanov. 70% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated the film from 8 to 10. And 23% of users rated the film with the highest score - "ten".
With this in mind, Lev Kulidzhanov's film "When the Trees Were Tall" was rated 8.002 by FilmGourmand, which allowed it to take 706th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
