Historical Voyage
For anyone interested in film history, anything by David Jeffers on Siffblog is a must-read.
Today, he’s posted a piece on COSMIC VOYAGE, a silent film that will be showing in our TSARS TO STARS series this Saturday at 7 and 8:30pm.
To get a sense of the depth and thoroughness of David’s interest in film, consider his research for this posting. Beginning with a silent DVD screener with intertitles in Cyrillic and no English subtitles, David spent an entire weekend trying to install Cyrillic characters onto his computer so he could personally translate the film using online software. When this proved unsuccessful, he hired a Russian translator to make an audio recording of the translation, which he then transcribed to refer to while watching the film.
Now that’s dedication.
Read with appreciation, and keep an eye out for his future postings.
July 27, 2007 at 2:03 am
Ryan,
The English translation was generously donated by SIFF programmer Maryna Ajaja’s husband Val. I met Maryna at a SIFF screening in 2005 and know she is well versed in Eastern European cinema, so who else would I contact? I think they enjoyed the film also. Being accustomed to thinking of Russian film in terms that are quite serious and even austere, this was surprisingly fun and lively. I would be willing to bet I’m not the only one this film will surprise.