Complexities of Resistance: Partisan Films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans Film Series presents a Double feature! on Thursday, October 26, 2023, 7:00 p.m.
THE BRIDE AND THE CURFEW (Nusja dhe shtetrrethimi)
Albania, 1978. 52 minutes.
Directed by Kristaq Mitro and Ibrahim Muçaj. Digital file. Albanian Film Archive, Tirane.
THE BRIDE AND THE CURFEW stands out from other Albanian films of the period through its focus on a single partisan woman, who finds a novel way of escaping from (and, of course, punishing) the occupying Germans. The film was scripted by noted writer Elena Kadare, author of the first novel by a woman published in Albanian.
CONSCIENCE (Sovist’)
Ukrainian SSR, 1968. 75 minutes.
Directed by Volodymyr Denysenko. Digital file. Dovzhenko Film Archive, Kyiv.
After two young partisans kill a Nazi officer in an occupied Ukrainian village, the invaders make an impossible demand: either turn over the perpetrators, or all the inhabitants of the village will be slaughtered. Director Denysenko presents this predicament using expressionist imagery, disjunctive editing and a well-nigh avant-garde soundtrack. Too radical for its time, CONSCIENCE attained its status as a Ukrainian film classic only during the Perestroika years.
These films will be shown with English subtitles as part of the series: Complexities of Resistance: Partisan Films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
Humanities Quadrangle, Screening Room L01
320 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511
Free and open to the public | All films will be shown with English subtitles
Sponsors:
Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Program; European Studies Council; Whitney Humanities Center; Yale Film Archive; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; and Film and Media Studies Program
About the Film Series: In the aftermath of World War II, several European states started reconstructing and reimagining their identities and recent histories by producing a vast number of films that celebrated and commemorated their guerrilla struggles against fascism. These films ranged in scope and ambition from intimate psychological dramas to overblown military spectacles, from elegiac recollections to pure pulp fiction. Similar to Hollywood westerns, partisan films were the defining genre of the socialist film industry for a significant period. Moreover, in the late 60s and early 70s, both genres reinvented themselves and underwent a political revision that ended their respective “classical periods.” Despite being hugely successful in their domestic markets and often cinematically accomplished, many examples of the partisan films never traveled abroad, and most film prints today remain locked up and in dire need of preservation in various national film archives. Aside from a handful of canonical works, the majority of films we will screen have never been shown in the U.S.
