Boris Barnet: poet of the outskirts | Klassiki Podcast

Last week saw the 124th anniversary of Boris Barnet, one of the most influential filmmakers of the Soviet Union. In Europe, Barnet’s lyrical and humanistic cinema has long been canonised – but in the English-speaking world, he was until recently a more acquired taste. That’s changed in recent years: there have been major retrospectives in Chicago and New York, and our friends at Outskirts Magazine (which is named after one of Barnet’s most beloved pictures) published a fantastic dossier on his work in their first issue.  To understand this shift, this week host Sam Goff speaks with Boris Nelepo, who listeners might remember from our episode last year on Marlen Khutsiev. Boris is a programmer and critic from Moscow now based in Lisbon, where he is Co-Head of programming at the DocLisboa International Film Festival. Sam and Boris take on the long, difficult sweep of Barnet’s career, which stretched from silent comedies to wartime thrillers and sixties road movies, touching on the utopian spirit of his films and the loneliness that contributed to his tragic early death from suicide in 1965. Watch two of Boris Barnet’s films on Klassiki now – Girl with a Hatbox: https://films.klassiki.online/girl-with-a-hatbox Outskirts:https://films.klassiki.online/outskirts Read Boris Nelepo’s writing on Barnet here: https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/the-back-of-p-p-on-final-films-and-boris-barnet Get in touch: [email protected] Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.