Committed to PEOPLE'S RIGHT TO KNOW
Vol. 5 Num 275 Sun. March 06, 2005  
   
Culture


Russian comedy master Gaidai's films in Dhaka


The famous Russian filmmaker Leonid Gaidai's comedies of the 1960s owed their phenomenal success to his visual style of humour, which starkly contrasted with the verbal insinuations of official Soviet ideology within narrative-driven Soviet cinema. Dhaka Film Society (DFS) is set to organise a two-day retrospective of Gaidai from March 6 at the Russian Centre of Science and Culture.

The retrospective will feature four of the most popular Russian films of Gaidai: Kidnapping Caucasian Style, Operation "I" and Other Adventures of Shurik, The Diamond Arm and Ivan Vassilyevich Changes His Profession. The film The Diamond Arm gained a cult status in the erstwhile USSR after its release and after many years is still considered to be the number one comedy in Russia.

What makes Gaidai unique is his interest in visual, especially physical, humour. Gaidai incorporated key elements of physical comedy, such as the primacy of visual over verbal humour, an exhibitionistic enlargement of the human body as a comic attraction, the transition from a still image to a moving picture as a visual attraction, and, most important, a chain of loosely connected sight gags (which became his signature structure) over a coherent and cohesive narrative.

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The Diamond Arm to be screened at the event