July Rain (1966): Ksenia Golubovich on Marlen Khutsiev’s Masterpiece

This year marks the centenary of film director Marlen Khutsiev’s birth. We invite you to celebrate the anniversary of this outstanding figure of Soviet and Russian culture with cultural scholar Ksenia Golubovich, who will speak about one of the director’s most renowned works, July Rain (1966).

Marlen Khutsiev was a classic of Soviet cinema. He was born on 4 October 1925 in Tiflis and died on 19 March 2019 in Moscow. In 1952, he graduated from the directing faculty of VGIK (the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography). His best-known films associated with the 1960s are “Spring on Zarechnaya Street” “I Am Twenty” (“Ilyich’s Gate”), and “July Rain”. In 1966, he signed the “Letter of the Twenty-Five” opposing the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin. From 1978 to 2009, he taught at VGIK, where he served as Head of the Department of Feature Film Directing.

“July Rain” (1966) by Marlen Khutsiev is a landmark film for Soviet cinema and for the 1960s era. It is a work of “profound viewing”: new global currents—the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism—mapped precisely onto the new situation in the USSR and produced a film of unmistakably European calibre. Khutsiev takes up the theme of the existential crisis and the conflict between generations—those of the war and the postwar period—along with a critique of totalitarianism and authoritarianism, and questions of conformity and the possibility of personal growth. He does this in a shooting style that was innovative for its time, making the most of black-and-white sound cinema’s ability to migrate between newsreel and fiction between staged and incidental sound. Khutsiev creates a highly complex portrait of Soviet social life with its declared and silenced, cutting conflicts, structuring it like a jazz composition. And the entire composition converges on a single event—among other things, it is the story of one “no” spoken by a woman to a man.

When: Thursday, 11 December, 18:30-20:00 (GMT)

Language: English

Format: Online via Zoom

Tickets: £5 – Standard; free – CamRuSS Members and Students

Access to the video recording is included with all ticket purchases

Video recording only: £5 free – CamRuSS Members

Watch "July Rain":

Ksenia Golubovich is a writer, literary critic, translator and cultural scholar. She graduated from the Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology at Moscow State University and undertook an internship at the University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD in Philology, specialising in Shakespeare studies and English Modernism. Her doctoral dissertation examined the poetry of W. B. Yeats, and she has translated poetry and prose by Yeats, Bruce Chatwin, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Dylan Thomas. She is the author of studies on Olga Sedakova (“Postmodernism in Paradise” 2022) and Merab Mamardashvili (“Encounters in an Unknown Homeland” 2021). From 2016 to 2020, she chaired the A. M. Pyatigorsky Prize for the Philosophical Essay. She has also created and taught courses on “Literature and Contemporary Art” and “Cinema and Contemporary Art”. She teaches Poetry and Art at the Moscow School of New Cinema.

Ksenia is the author of a trilogy devoted to the end of the twentieth century: The Fulfilment of Wishes Serbian Parables, and The Russian Daughter of an English Writer.

Image: Photo of Marlen Khutsiev ( https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marlen_Khutsiev_01.jpg)