Epic age of Russian cinema

Series at MFA focuses on major USSR studio

''War and Peace,'' clocking in at eight-plus hours, will be screened at the MFA in multiple parts. (Film Forum/Seagull Films)

The Russian Ministry of Culture recently decreed that 1908 marked the birth of Russian cinema. That year, director Vladimir Romashkov produced his country's first narrative film, "Stenka Razin," a 10-minute adventure story that inaugurated a century of world-class cinema, from the austere epics of Sergei Eisenstein to the formal innovations of Mikhail Kalatozov and the contemporary hits of directors like Alexander Sokurov and Aleksei Balabanov. Most of that cinema was created under the auspices of Kinostudiya Mosfilm, a distilled, rectified, charcoal-filtered, red-tinctured version of Hollywood.

After being founded in 1920, Mosfilm quickly became the largest and most important USSR film studio, producing about 2,500 films during the Soviet era. Beginning Wednesday, 16 of those films will be shown at the Museum of Fine Arts as part of the "Envisioning Russia" film series. Although the series will feature canonical works like Eisenstein's "The Battleship Potemkin" and Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Mirror," it will also highlight lesser-known genre films like the 1934 musical "Jolly Fellows" and the 1959 Kalatozov "The Letter Never Sent," a film that was influenced by American Westerns.

The MFA is also bringing back "War and Peace" (1968), "a spectacular, epic production" that screened to sellout crowds there last Christmas, according to Bo Smith, head of film/video at the MFA.

"Spectacular" and "epic" are to this four-part, 484-minute, $100 million (over $600 million in today's dollars), seven-years-in-the-making adaptation of Tolstoy's novel what the adjectives "large" and "cold" are to Siberia - accurate, but not quite the whole truth. "Gone With the Wind" was epic. "Titanic" was spectacular. "War and Peace" is simply "War and Peace" - often cited as the most ambitious and expensive film in history. It includes 300 speaking characters. The Battle of Borodino features 120,000 extras and took two years to shoot. Director Sergei Bondarchuk suffered two heart attacks during production.

Of course, Tolstoy's novel was no less ambitious, with about 600 characters sprinkled over nearly 1,500 pages of small type.

"The only way to do justice to the novel was to make the film eight hours long," said Smith. "It's either that or not at all."

The MFA will screen all four parts of "War and Peace" today from 10:15 a.m. until 7 p.m. and on Thursday and Saturday from 1:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. You can also catch Parts One and Two on Wednesday from 5:30 p.m. to 10:15 p.m. The series' other films begin screening next week and continue through Oct. 23. Call 617-369-3907, or go to www.mfa.org/film.

PECKINPAH SERIES: The Harvard Film Archive kicks off its new season with an 11-film Sam Peckinpah retrospective. Peckinpah earned the sobriquet "Bloody Sam" for the hyper-stylized violence of films like "The Wild Bunch" (1969) and "Straw Dogs" (1971), the latter of which influenced Quentin Tarantino so much that he named his first movie after it. The retrospective's programmer, David Pendleton, said he hopes the series will dispel the prevalent conception of Peckinpah as a violence junkie.

"Nowadays, Peckinpah is remembered as the father of the modern action film and an influence on directors like Tarantino," Pendleton said. "But he was also responsible for much of what is considered the New American Cinema of the 1960s and '70s. Peckinpah was not only a director interested in extreme violence, but someone responsible for a certain level of formal innovation - he knew exactly what he was doing." The retrospective begins on Friday with "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" at 7 p.m. and "Major Dundee" at 9:15 p.m. On Saturday, "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" plays at 7 p.m. with "Straw Dogs" at 9:15 p.m. Call 617-495-4700 or go to www.hcl.harvard.edu/hfa.

OTHER SCREENINGS: The third annual Films at the Gate outdoor festival will run from Wednesday to Sunday in a vacant lot (10 Hudson St., between Beach and Kneeland) near the Chinatown Gate. "My Young Auntie" plays Wednesday night, Jackie Chan's "Police Story" plays Thursday, the 1929 silent film "Red Heroine" plays Friday with a live soundtrack by the Devil Music Ensemble, and "The 36th Chamber of Shaolin" plays Saturday night. All movies begin at 7:30 and are free to the public. Call 857-234-6509 or go to www.filmsatthegate.org.

To raise money for her first short film (to be shot in Hingham's World's End park), Hingham resident and current NYU undergraduate Kayt Conti will be hosting a one-night screening of 10 to 12 short films either shot in Boston or made by Boston directors. Many of the filmmakers will be in attendance to answer questions. (www.kaytcontifilm.wordpress.com)

The Coolidge Corner Theatre will be screening 1981's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" tomorrow at 7 p.m. Before the film, Boston University archeology professor Curtis N. Runnels will contrast Spielbergian archeology to the rather more mundane reality of non-Spielbergian archeology. Then, after being doused with the cold water of scientific fact, audiences can watch Harrison Ford being chased by a large rock. Sounds like the best of both worlds. (617-734-2500 and www.coolidge.org)