16 February 1920 year
Born in Perm Mikhail Schweitzer — the director who filmed The Golden Calf and Dead Souls.
Along with the film, the director produces himself
The mother was a convinced revolutionary, worked underground, and after the events of 1917 headed the revolutionary committee in Poltava region.
My father returned from World War I as a full Knight of St. George. In 1937, he was repressed as an enemy of the people.
While still in school, Schweitzer fell in with street gangs and strolled around town with a Finnish pistol in his pocket. It was then that he fell in love with cinema.
To finance his trips to movie screenings, he worked part-time as a janitor. This forced him to frequently skip classes. He was eventually expelled from school, but was able to enroll in another school and graduate.
At the age of 19 he entered VGIK and studied under Sergei EisensteinAfter the war began, he was evacuated to Tashkent.
He made his first independent film in 1955. "Alien Relatives" told the story of the problems of rural life and a young machine operator who began to feel suffocated in the bourgeois world of his wife's parents.
The next film, "The Tight Knot," also dealt with the problems of the Soviet village. It depicted leaders of all ranks as immoral people, accustomed to achieving everything at the expense of others, regardless of the cost. However, this was beyond the bounds of acceptable criticism, and the film was forced to be reshot.
Schweitzer threw away millions of Soviet funds. (Minister of Culture of the USSR Ekaterina Furtseva)
After such a failure, the director promised himself not to work with “modern material” anymore and switched to the classics.
He adapted works by Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Mayakovsky, Ilf, and Petrov. All of these films were made with a "reverent attitude toward the author's style," and the characters' images were imprinted on the audience's memory exactly as the director saw them.
What is it worth at least? Chichikov, played by Alexander Kalyagin. Or Ostap Bender performed by Sergei Yursky.
He lived to be 80 years old. He died on June 2, 2000, two months after a serious car accident.
