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If it weren’t for Facets Multimedia’s Werner Schroeter series, Twenty Days Without War (1977) and My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1982-5), which screen twice this week in the Siskel Center’s Aleksei Guerman retrospective, would be the most challenging movies in town. Both deal extensively with Soviet history while barely addressing Soviet politics directly; the films plunge the spectator into the past and demand that he fend for himself. Without any background knowledge of the sociopolitical context, these works might seem incomprehensible—and this probably accounts for Guerman’s low profile in the U.S. despite his long-standing prominence in Russian cinema. Yet the films are often breathtaking even if you don’t fully understand what’s happening (and I speak from experience), which makes these rare big-screen revivals especially valuable.
