Tale of How Tsar Peter Married off His Negro
[Сказ про то, как Царь Петр арапа женил] | |||
USSR, Mosfil'm, 1976 Color, 100 minutes Russian with no English subtitles Director: Aleksandr Mitta Screenplay: Aleksandr Mitta, Iulii Dunskii, and Valerii Frig Cinematography: Valerii Shuvalov Cast: Vladimir Vysotskii, Aleksei Petrenko, Ivan Ryzhov, Irina Mazurkevich, Mikhail Koshenov, and Zhenia Mitta |
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Aleksandr Mitta's Tale of How Tsar Peter Married off His Negro is based on Aleksandr Pushkin's The Moor of Peter the Great (1827), an unfinished historical novel inspired by Pushkin's great-grandfather, Ibrahim Petrovich Gannibal, who was brought to Russia from Africa in 1704 as a slave and worked his way up to become a great military leader, an engineer, a nobleman, and was eventually adopted by Peter the Great. Gannibal was enslaved by Peter's orders not only because it was fashionable to have black children in European courts at the time, but because Peter wanted to prove that even the most savage "Arap" could be civilized through a Russian education and a Christian baptism. Although Mitta's Tale is similar in many ways to Pushkin's work, in its aesthetics and narrative the film is more faithful to the genre of the fairy tale than to the historical novel. In Mitta's Tale, Ibrahim is portrayed as a loyal follower of Peter the Great and as the most moral individual in the Tsar's court (even more so than the Tsar himself). Ibrahim refuses to marry a girl who does not love him and mourns his separation from his illegitimate child, conceived during his time in Paris. His magnanimousness, however, overshadows his exoticness. Ibrahim is described as "not black, but chocolate" and refuses to engage in many "barbaric" Russian customs, such as Peter's morbid, practical jokes. Many who meet Ibrahim ask how he knows Russian, and Ibrahim, although morally superior to his Russian compatriots, answers that he is Russian. This claim of "Ia russkii" is the line that will later become one of the primary jokes in Aleksei Balabanov's Dead Man's Bluff (2005) where an Ethiopian tries to convince his white, Russian associates, to their amusement, that he is Russian despite his appearance. Like Pushkin's description of the Moor of Peter the Great, Ibrahim is seen as "a rare beast, an exceptional and strange creature, accidentally transferred to their world," but also as an individual who identifies himself with this world, despite his physical otherness. Although Ibrahim is harassed and ostracized by many members of Peter's court, Mitta's film ends on a happy note. As in any good fairy tale, the princess falls for the beast and helps him assimilate into society. Natasha, who initially found Ibrahim so repulsive that she fainted upon discovering that she was betrothed to him, comes to love her admirer—the man with "the face of a Moor and the soul of a Russian"—and the two live happily ever after.
Aleksandr Naumovich Mitta Aleksandr Mitta was born in Moscow in 1933 and graduated from the engineering department of MISI under V. Kuibysheva. Mitta worked as a caricaturist before graduating from VGIK in 1960 (workshop of Mikhail Romm). He went on to direct a number of films and wrote the screenplays to Lost in Siberia (1991), The Story of the Voyages (1984, USA), Tale of How Tsar Peter Married off His Negro (1976), among others. He has also acted in July Rain (1966) and Trial By Fire (1998, USA). Mitta was a member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival (1980) and has taught dramatic techniques at Hamburg University's Graduate Film program (1995-6).Filmography 1961 My Friend, Kolka! (co-director Aleksei Saltykov) |