Boris Barnet: poet of the outskirts

Last week saw the 124th anniversary of Boris Barnet – one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of the Soviet Union. In Europe, Barnet’s lyrical and humanistic cinema has long since been canonised, largely due to the early admiration for his work from French New Wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette. But in the English-speaking world, he was until recently a more acquired taste. That’s changed in recent years, as critical consensus has started to shift in his favour. There have been major retrospectives in Chicago and New York, and our friends at Outskirts Magazine (which is named after one of Barnet’s most beloved pictures) published a fantastic dossier on his work in their first issue.

To understand this shift and to give Barnet his due, this week host Sam Goff with another Boris, Boris Nelepo, who listeners might remember from our episode last year on Marlen Khutsiev. Boris is a programmer and critic from Moscow now based in Lisbon, where he is Co-Head of programming at the DocLisboa International Film Festival. Boris and Sam take on the long, difficult sweep of Barnet’s career, which stretched from silent comedies to wartime thrillers and sixties road movies, discussing the utopian spirit of Barnet’s films and the loneliness that contributed to his tragic early death from suicide in 1965.

Watch Boris Barnet’s films Girl with a Hatbox and Outskirts on Klassiki now.

Read Boris Nelepo’s writing on Barnet here.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Listen above or head to your favourite podcast app to subscribe now. The Klassiki Podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, Audible, and more.

Intro music by Juliet Merchant.