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a particularly notable film but, because of the spectacularly controlled performance of the central character, I'd say it's well worth the effort.
The film deals with the difficulties of a Jewish family attempting to survive with their six children and it's set during the revolution; at one point, a powerful person is forced upon the already struggling family. The actor portraying the head of the family, who workds as a jack-of-all-trades, I found the weak link: he was over the top, a caricature of ethnicity. He portrayed somewhat the same character in Andrei Rublev so it must be his "schtick."
But see it for that one performance, the commissar: it's very special.
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But I would imagine it does not cross the language and culture barrier all too well. Actually, most people consider Bykov's performance wonderful, well preserving the local flavor and culture. Which - I agree here - might look like an over the top from distance.
universality.
I found the film was transparent propaganda, especially considering its date of release.
I wanted to find out more about the commissar and less of the tinker.
"Art should transcend cultures"
So would you like to explain Fyodor Dostoevsky's stance on modern-day Russia, assuming he was alive? It's in his novels.
Sure, art, like culture and generation, can transcend. But it usually takes effort from the receiving party. Considering that Europe doesn't even understand Russia, which is part of Europe for crying out loud, it doesn't look like people try very hard.
Well, it would be nice, but often it is not possible, due to subtle, and not so subtle things about which the receiver might have no idea. Cultural and historical things of great importance might not be known to the new audience. How many people read books before going to a foreign movie? How many people read on American history, for pete's sake, before going to the Patriot movie?
In many works there are underflows, undertones, hints and such that will be totally lost.
Ironically, the same is probably true of many foreign movies that we DO like.
So yes, art CAN transcend, but is not guaranteed to.
Shakespeare and Mark Twain as popular in Russia as in English-speaking cultures?
How about Beethoven... a German only audience favorite?
Greek tragedy?
Korean film?
Dutch painting?
Brazilian bikinis (okay, a little bit self-serving...) or music?
American rock n' roll? Does one need to understand black history and culture to like jazz, the blues, or... gumbo?
Music is unique in that it has no borders. But not even that is true. You couldn't sell black music in middle-America in the 1950s. Still, that music transcends everything is still largely true.
Nobody wanted Rembrandt's last and finest painting, not even the Dutch. But that's unrelated.
Some people here, like you, are better than most at appreciating, let's call it the different. My reaction was more about the general idea that art transcends. Some art does. But it's not a measure of the greatness of the art.
Would Dostoevsky have been considered a giant of literature in America and Europe if American and European critics had understood what they read, that Dostoevsky was in fact anti-West? But the question is probably moot. I don't think most critics tried to understand. We in the West usually don't try to understand other cultures. If we do not understand, we tend to assume it's because they are wrong. We are content imposing our culture--the RIGHT culture--on others. Granted, it's not the one-way street it used to be. You will be hard pressed to name one major Hollywood production made the last decade that wasn't a remake or rip-off of an Asian movie. But one thing remains. Most people do not want to see the Asian original. They rather watch the culturally cleansed Hollywood version. God forbid they should ever get exposed to anything remotely new or different.
Dostoyevsky is popular in many, many countries and I think it's because he's just not a political polemicist. Need one know Confucius was a failed bureaucrat to appreciate his analects?
Korean films immensely are popular, for foreign films. Americans, and many other peoples, just don't like to hear films in foreign languages, forcing them to read subtitles. English-language films get a "by" in many countries because of the long ascendancy of Hollywood: its huge budgets, star-making machines, distribution schemes.
(Black music was popular in many places here in the 50s: Black rock n' rollers (the Big Bopper), Motown (known in the South as "beach music"); "big bands" (Duke, Count); MIles and lots of other jazz figures).
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