Vadim Medvedev

Shakespeare's comedy of gender confusion, in which a girl disguises herself as a man to be near the count she adores, only to be pursued by the woman he loves.

Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.

A screen adaptation of the second version of A. M. Gorky’s play “Vassa Zheleznova”. In this family children were taught from the early years to put accent on the word “my”: my ship, my house, my factory… Here they counted the money earned by other people’s labour and could lose a fortune overnight playing cards; here they indulged in utter debauchery and were sneaking on each other; they prayed and engaged in shady dealings in the name of God… Vassa had it all: money, power, clout, brains and grip. And only one thing she did not have – the future, for the year 1917 was drawing nearer and the age of the Zheleznovs and the Khrapovs was coming to an end.