Steve Hunt from OSU will present Happiness, the first film in our Russo-Soviet Film Series. This is a silent film made in 1935 by the great Russian director, Alexander Medvedkin. Happiness was banned in Russia for 40 years because of its anti-Bolshevik humor.
"Happiness" is based on a Russian folk tale, and is the story of Khmyr, the lazy kholkozian, a poor and lazy peasant, who dreams of becoming a tsar, eating his fill of pork fat and doing nothing (his idea of happiness), and his industrious wife, Anna, who found real happiness on a collective farm after the revolution. Medvedkin draws a complete landscape of the Russian society in the 20's: nothing has changed, people are still poor materialist animals. The film contains drawn scenery amusingly transplanted into cinema from popular Russian wood prints, ingenious and always purposeful tricks, hilarious scenes of the wanderings around Russia of a scraggly and vicious pilgrim nun, and talented sideshows of "dreams" and "royal repasts" of Khmyr. 1935 95 min. NR

SUGGESTED TITLE: EARTH (Dovzhenko) ALEXANDER NEVSKY (Eisenstein)