Leonid Gaidai’s irreverent comedy updates a Leo Tolstoy story for modern Soviet times, in the Caucasus region. Shurik, a naive Russian student mired in his own clumsy Soviet culture, sets off to the Caucasus to write down the folk culture of this region: its traditions, legends, sayings, and toasts.

At film’s start, Shurik, struggling with his donkey in an unspecified but Middle Eastern-feeling part of the Caucasus, meets the local Edik, who is struggling to fix his Soviet jalopy. Here they are passed by a vacationing young Russian girl, and pursuing her will take everyone through not only comic situations, but barbaric stereotypes of a culture and people being in some ways barbarically integrated into the USSR. In a 1999 overview, Kidnapping, Caucasian Style was listed as the 4th most popular box-office hit of the entire Soviet era, measured by number of moviegoers.

Quote:
In the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet cinema turned to a comic genre foregrounding individual (personal) happiness, and increasingly many movies eschewed realism for an inverted chewing-gum reality. This change in the direction of the Soviet cinema also affected the portrayal of the Caucasus. Soviet directors came up with diverse depiction of different ethnic groups. Unlike Turksib (1929), which shows the illiterate and archaic periphery of the Union, White Sun of the Desert from 1970, for instance, “suggests ambivalence in the relationships between colonizer and colonized” and “offers countervailing positive images of Central Asians.”

A Soviet director, Leonid Gaidai, enjoyed and loved by millions of Russian people, approached the theme of the Caucasus and explored the meaning of Russianness in his movie of 1966, Kidnapping, Caucasian Style (Кавказская Пленница, или Новые Приключения Шурика). As Beumers (2005) notices, Gaidai’s popularity came to him “because [his movies] replaced the coherent linear plots of earlier Soviet films with an episodic and fragmented world that corresponded more to reality than the varnished fairy tales of Stalin’s cinema”.

1.67GB | 1 h 19 min | 658×480 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6E0906301F58F76/Kavkazskaya.plennitsa.(Kidnapping.Caucasian.Style).1967.480p.BDRip-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English

The post Leonid Gaidai – Kavkazskaya plennitsa AKA Kidnapping, Caucasian Style (1966) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Leonid Gaidai’s irreverent comedy updates a Leo Tolstoy story for modern Soviet times, in the Caucasus region. Shurik, a naive Russian student mired in his own clumsy Soviet culture, sets off to the Caucasus to write down the folk culture of this region: its traditions, legends, sayings, and toasts.

At film’s start, Shurik, struggling with his donkey in an unspecified but Middle Eastern-feeling part of the Caucasus, meets the local Edik, who is struggling to fix his Soviet jalopy. Here they are passed by a vacationing young Russian girl, and pursuing her will take everyone through not only comic situations, but barbaric stereotypes of a culture and people being in some ways barbarically integrated into the USSR. In a 1999 overview, Kidnapping, Caucasian Style was listed as the 4th most popular box-office hit of the entire Soviet era, measured by number of moviegoers.

Quote:
In the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet cinema turned to a comic genre foregrounding individual (personal) happiness, and increasingly many movies eschewed realism for an inverted chewing-gum reality. This change in the direction of the Soviet cinema also affected the portrayal of the Caucasus. Soviet directors came up with diverse depiction of different ethnic groups. Unlike Turksib (1929), which shows the illiterate and archaic periphery of the Union, White Sun of the Desert from 1970, for instance, “suggests ambivalence in the relationships between colonizer and colonized” and “offers countervailing positive images of Central Asians.”

A Soviet director, Leonid Gaidai, enjoyed and loved by millions of Russian people, approached the theme of the Caucasus and explored the meaning of Russianness in his movie of 1966, Kidnapping, Caucasian Style (Кавказская Пленница, или Новые Приключения Шурика). As Beumers (2005) notices, Gaidai’s popularity came to him “because [his movies] replaced the coherent linear plots of earlier Soviet films with an episodic and fragmented world that corresponded more to reality than the varnished fairy tales of Stalin’s cinema”.

Quote:
Aleksandr Prokhorov (2003) said Gaidai’s films “owed their popularity to the visual style of his humor, with its stark contrasts to the verbal instantiations of official Soviet ideology within narrative-driven Soviet cinema,” where this zany style was novel:

“Gaidai privileged key elements of physical comedy, such as the primacy of visual over verbal humor, 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.”

1.67GB | 1 h 19 min | 658×480 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/2D06A3CBA4F77FE/Kavkazskaya.plennitsa.(Kidnapping.Caucasian.Style).1967.480p.BDRip-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English

The post Leonid Gaidai – Kavkazskaya plennitsa AKA Kidnapping, Caucasian Style (1966) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

This Russian film adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s story was for a long time the only horror film made in the Soviet Union. Khoma (Leonid Kuravlev), a young novice, travels across the countryside and stays for a night in a barn that belongs to an ugly old woman. When she attacks him at night and takes him for a broom ride, the scared novice fatally wounds her, and before she dies, she turns into a beautiful young noblewoman (Natalya Varley). The latter leaves a will, according to which Khoma should pray for her for three nights in the chapel until her body is buried. At night, the witch rises from the coffin and tries to catch Khoma. She flies around but she can’t reach him or see him because he stays inside the circle that he has drawn around himself. During the third and last night, the witch makes the last attempt to scare him out of the circle, and she calls all sorts of ugly creatures to help her… Gogol wrote several stories based on Ukrainian folklore, many of them dealing with the Devil and the supernatural. ~ Yuri German, All Movie Guide

+ Commentary with Eastern European cinema expert Michael Brooke

2.00GB | 1h 16mn | 768×560 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/39B7CE9184297AE/Viy.1967.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.mkv
or
https://tezfiles.com/file/79a2f158ca515/Viy.1967.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.mp4

Language:Russian,English
Subtitles:English

The post Georgi Kropachyov & Konstantin Yershov – Viy AKA Viy or Spirit of Evil (1967) first appeared on Cinema of the World.