by Allan Fish
(USSR/Germany 1928 123m) not on DVD
Aka. Zhivoi trup; Der Lebende Leichnam
I want to leave my wife
d Fedor Ozep w Boris Gusman, Anatoly Marienhof play Leo Tolstoy ph Anatoly Golovnya, Phil Jutzi ed Fedor Ozep, Vsevelod I.Pudovkin m Werner Schmidt-Boelcke art Sergei Kozlovsky, Viktor Simov
Vsevelod I.Pudovkin (Fyodor Protasov), Maria Jacobini (Yelizaveta ‘Lisa’ Protasova), Viola Garden (Sasha), Gustav Diessl (Viktor Karenin), Julia Serda (Anna Pavlovna), Vera Maretskaya (prostitute), Nato Vachnadze (Masha), Boris Barnet (sailor),
Personal opinion this might be, but I don’t think there’s a more forgotten, overlooked classic in all Soviet silent cinema. Or a more forgotten director, for that matter, for who now knows Fedor Ozep (or Fyodor Otsep, as he is sometimes known)? He isn’t one of the accepted greats alongside Eisenstein, Vertov, Dovzhenko or Pudovkin, and yet the latter was a close friend and both starred in and co-edited this, his greatest work. Nor is he generally listed amongst the second elite level of directors with Bauer, Kuleshov, Barnet, Kozintsev and Room. It’s as if he never existed, a living corpse himself. (more…)