Yuli Raizman

Biography

Yuli Yakovlevich Raizman (December 15, 1903 – December 11, 1994) was a Soviet film director and screenwriter, and also a pedagogue according to some references. He spent most of his career in the Soviet film industry, where he became one of the most officially honoured filmmakers of his generation. His work spans the transition to sound, the Second World War and the decades that followed.

He began in 1924 as a literary consultant at Mezhrabpom-Rus, a German-Russian studio. A year later he became assistant to Yakov Protazanov, and in 1927 he made his directing debut with The Circle. In 1928 Penal Servitude first drew attention to him. His next success, The Earth Is Thirsty (1930), was the first sound film made in the Soviet Union. He joined Mosfilm in 1931.

In 1937 he released The Last Night, his first film with the writer Yevgeny Gabrilovich, with whom he would work for some forty years. The film won the Grand Prix at the Paris International Exhibition that year and earned him his first Stalin Prize. During the war he made documentaries such as Fall of Berlin (1945). In the postwar period he moved between dramas and contemporary subjects. Mashenka (1942) and Dream of a Cossack (1951), which competed at Cannes and won the top prize at Karlovy Vary, reinforced his reputation abroad.

Late in his career he directed Private Life (1982), which won the USSR State Prize and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He was named People's Artist of the USSR in 1964 and Hero of Socialist Labour in 1973, and in 1988 he became the first recipient of the Nika lifetime achievement award. His legacy rests on a humanist cinema closely tied to the official concerns of its era, and his films remain a useful reference for classic Soviet cinema.

Key films

• The Last Night (1936)
• Mashenka (1942)
• Fall of Berlin – 1945 (1945)
• Dream of a Cossack (1951)
• The Communist (1958)
• Private Life (1982)