Roman Karmen

Roman Lazarevich Karmen (born Efraim Leyzorovich Korenman) (Russian: Роман Лазаревич Кармен; 30 November [O.S. 17 November] 1906 – 28 April 1978) was a Soviet film director, war cinematographer, documentary filmmaker, journalist, screenwriter, pedagogue, and publicist.^[1]

Biography

Karmen was born to a Jewish family in Odessa. His father was the writer Lazar Karmen (real name Leyzor Korenman) and his mother was the translator Dina Leypuner.

Career

Karmen was a communist.

He documented the Spanish Civil War.^[2]: 126 Karmen also documented the battles for Moscow and Leningrad in World War II, the First Indochina War, and the rise of communism in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and in South America during the 1960s.

Karmen was also granted personal access to the emergence of communist leaders like Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh and Cuba's Fidel Castro, and Chile's socialist president Salvador Allende.

Karmen went to Yan'an in 1939, where he met Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders and filmed during May and June 1939.^[2]: 126

Style

Karmen's documentary methods were both influential and controversial; his renowned technical ability captured the emotion of war and the repetition of key shots and framings between film projects became a hallmark, but he would often blur the lines of cinéma vérité by restaging key battles, including the lifting of the siege of Leningrad (Ленинград в борьбе, 1942), the Viet Minh victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (Вьетнам, 1955), and the 1956 landing in Cuba of militants led by Fidel Castro, re-enacted as a first person documentary.

In 2001, French documentary directors Dominique Chapuis and Patrick Barbéris produced a 90-minute film, titled Roman Karmen: A Cineast In The Revolution's Service.^[3] The following year Barbéris (his co-author Chapuis had died in late 2001) published the portrait Roman Karmen, A Red Legend.^[4]

Filmography

• 1939: Испания (Spain), about the Spanish Civil War
• 1942: Ленинград в борьбе (Leningrad in the fight), about the siege of Leningrad
• 1942: Разгром немецких войск под Москвой (Crushing defeat of German troops in the environs of Moscow), about the Battle of Moscow
• 1945: Берлин (Fall of Berlin – 1945), about the Battle of Berlin
• 1946: Суд народов (Judgment of the peoples), about the Nuremberg trials. An English language version of the film called The Nuremberg Trials was also made.
• 1953: Повесть о нефтяниках Каспия (Narrative about the oil-industry workers of the Caspian region)
• 1955: Вьетнам (Vietnam), about the Battle of Dien Bien Phu
• 1956: Утро Индии (Indian Morning)
• 1958: Широка страна моя... (Wide is my country…), the first Soviet motion picture produced in Kinopanorama.
• 1959: Покорители моря (Conquerors of the sea)
• 1961: Пылающий остров (Blazing island), about the Bay of Pigs Invasion
• 1965: Великая отечественная (Great Patriotic War), 20th anniversary of the end of the German-Soviet War
• 1967: Гренада, Гренада, Гренада моя… (Grenada, Grenada, my Grenada…), co-directed with Konstantin Simonov, about the Spanish Civil War
• 1969: Товарищ Берлин (Berlin Kamarad)
• 1972: Пылающий континент (Blazing continent)
• 1976: Сердце Корвалана (Corvalán's heart), about the imprisoned general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile, Luis Corvalán

See also

• The Unknown War (TV series)
• Konstantin Simonov
• Leni Riefenstahl
• Frank Capra
• Robert Riskin
• Pierre Schoendoerffer
• Europe Central

Notes

External links

• Roman Karmen at IMDb
• (in French) Two pictures of Roman Karmen in Trung Gia conference, Vietnam, 4 July 1954 Archived 20 December 2016 at the Wayback Machine (French Defense Ministry archives ECPAD)
• (in French) Sous l’œil d’un cinéaste soviétique by Cindy Cao
• (in French) Extended filmography
• (Russian) Full filmography Archived 2011-09-13 at the Wayback Machine