alr

A Nest of Gentry
(Dvoryanskoe gnezdo)

Screening on Film
Directed by Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky.
With Irina Kupchenko, Leonid Kulagin, Beata Tyszkiewicz.
USSR, 1969, 35mm, color, 111 min.
Russian with English subtitles.

Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky's impressionistic adaptation of the novel by Ivan Turgenev teems with life onscreen and in its soundtrack. Alternately playful and brooding, it concerns a Russian aristocrat (Kulagin) who has left his adulterous wife (Tyszkiewicz) in Paris and returned to his childhood home, where he subsequently falls in love with a young woman (Kupchenko). Ovchinnikov's sumptuous Romantic orchestral score intertwines with a variety of folk and liturgical songs, classical pieces for piano and harpsichord, and sounds of nature. Especially notable is the comic horse-buying episode featuring young actors Nikolai Gubenko and Nikita Mikhalkov (and attendant Gypsy musicians), and a recurring balalaika tune which culminates in a poignant vocal duet between the nobleman's two loves. (This theme makes an appearance in the composer's later score for They Fought for Their Motherland.) Ovchinnikov has described A Nest of Gentry as "one breath in, one breath out."

Part of film series

Read more

A Tribute to Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2024 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Practice (and Other Works) By Martín Rejtman

Read more

Chronicles of Changing Times. The Cinema of Edward Yang

Read more
Gene Hackman crouched beside a toilet with audio equipment

From the HFA Collection...

Read more

Being In a Place. Rediscovering Margaret Tait