Lieutenant Kizhe
About Lieutenant Kizhe
In Saint Petersburg in 1800, an army clerk's slip of the pen puts Lieutenant Kizhe on a promotion list, and Tsar Paul signs it. When Adjutant Koblukov cries out while dallying with Princess Gagarina's companion and wakes the Tsar, the court blames Kizhe. The nonexistent officer is flogged before the Imperial Guard and sent to a Siberian fortress as a prisoner with no shape. Princess Gagarina gets him recalled. He rises to colonel and general and is married, in his absence, to the companion. Paul then demands to meet him, so the court reports that General Kizhe has died and stages a funeral with an empty coffin. A note the aide leaves in the empty treasury chest convinces Paul that Kizhe stole the money. The dead man is broken to private, the funeral is canceled, and Koblukov is made a general.
Cast & crew
More about Lieutenant Kizhe
Aleksandr Faintsimmer directed Yury Tynyanov's adaptation of his own novella for Belgoskino in Leningrad. Boris Gusman promoted the production. The Moscow premiere was on March 7, 1934, with a wider Soviet release on December 9.
Themes
Background
The satire is set in 1800, under Paul I's mania for drill and instant obedience, not in the Soviet present.
In film history
Prokofiev's five-movement suite, Op. 60, entered the concert repertoire and is better known than the film. In Russian, a "Lieutenant Kizhe" is a person who exists only on paper.
Making
Prokofiev met Faintsimmer in the USSR in December 1932 and signed a contract in March 1933. Living in Paris, he wrote the cues from written scene descriptions, and sometimes from a timing, without seeing the film. Isaak Dunayevsky conducted the recording at the studio.
Look
Arkadi Koltsaty photographed the film. Kizhe himself is never on screen: a flogging, a wedding, and a state coffin all proceed without him.
Technique
Because he could not be on the set, Prokofiev wrote detachable miniature cues that the editors could repeat or cut to fit a scene.
Music
This was Prokofiev's first film score, finished in early October 1933. The picture uses seventeen short numbers, and much of its running time has no music. He reworked the material into the Lieutenant Kijé Suite, Op. 60: The Birth of Kijé, Romance, Kijé's Wedding, Troika, and The Burial of Kijé. He conducted the suite's premiere in Paris on December 21, 1934.
Preservation
Copies in circulation include an Internet Archive print and a Wikimedia Commons file of the 1934 picture.
Notes
- The name is a misreading of the words "poruchiki zhe," "the lieutenants, however.
- Mikhail Yanshin plays Paul I. Erast Garin is Adjutant Koblukov. Nina Shaternikova is Princess Gagarina, and Sofiya Magarill is her companion.
- Boris Gorin-Goryainov plays Count von Pahlen. Mikhail Rostovtsev is the fortress commandant. Leonid Kmit, uncredited, is the scribe.
- London prints were called The Tsar Wants to Sleep. The Paris title was Le Lieutenant Nantes. In the United States it was The Czar Wants to Sleep.
- Andrei Kostrichkin appears, uncredited, as Lieutenant Sinyukhaev.
Scenes
- Paul signs the promotion list that invents Lieutenant Kizhe.
- The guard flogs an officer who is not there, then escorts him to Siberia.
- Kizhe is married in absentia to Princess Gagarina's companion.
- The state funeral proceeds with an empty coffin.
- The note "General Kijé spent the money on meals" gets the dead man demoted to private.
Influenced by
- Yury Tynyanov's novella Lieutenant Kijé
Also available
- Internet Archive (LieutenantKizhe_0)
- Wikimedia Commons (1934 Поручик Киже.webm)
