Sergei Tret’iakov, Mikhail Kalatozov and The Blind Girl Sergei Tret’iakov: The Blind Girl. A Script. Translated by Albert Newberry

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mikhail Kalatozov, the first and only director to win a Golden Palm in Cannes for The Cranes are Flying in 1957, started his career as a filmmaker in Georgia. However, Salt for Svaneti, believed to have been his first film, was not at all the director’s debut: rather, he had already made a number of films, most of which have not survived. This is also the case for The Blind Girl. In 2010, Sergei Tret’iakov’s script for this film was discovered in the archive of the theatre critic Aleksandr Fevral’skii and published in Russian. The present publication, which consists of an introduction and the publication of the script, first traces the origins of the script and contextualises it, before offering a first English translation by Albert Newberry. The Blind Girl sheds light on an obscure episode in the biographies of both Kalatozov and Tret’iakov, addressing the challenges of overcoming the accumulated effects of centuries of underdevelopment and backwardness in the lives of the multinational population of Soviet Russia. This, however, made the film ripe for censorship by the time of its completion.