At the Café
28 August 2025 08:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeAt least when it comes to food and drink my experience with Russian recipes comes in handy for vocabulary purposes ;-)
The episodes in this course are actually interestingly different from the sort of educational videos we used to get in lessons at school (though we were never subjected to them in Russian lessons, only French and German, possibly because as A-level students we were felt to be above such things -- though I certainly had them as part of German evening classes!) They seem to have a different 'cast' and mini-story for each episode, rather than following the same set of characters throughout the course, which I was subconsciously expecting.
I suppose that from a production point of view, if you are filming clips to accompany different chapters in your textbook, it comes a lot cheaper and easier to employ a single set of actors, although I always assumed at the time that they did it in order for us to establish an ongoing relationship with the cast. After all, even our Latin course (which was simply a set of books with no 'multi-media' content) featured the same characters from lesson to lesson, but this one evidently doesn't, which gives it a different feel; every episode elegantly and concisely sets up a new family dynamic. Presumably Soviet state central casting could call on a more or less infinite supply of actors for small jobs, as opposed to a private company producing its own video material and needing to turn a profit on the manufacturing costs of the course as a whole?
I was busy admiring the way in which featuring young children (and elderly persons requiring spectacles!) allows the scripts to include in a natural way a good deal of text being read out loud for the benefit of the viewers, and repeating things in very simple language -- but of course it dawns on me that this course was very probably aimed at schoolchildren rather than adults, and thus (like Ecce Romani) would naturally have included 'relatable' child characters... Although the children in this episode are definitely too young to go to school, let alone to be expected to be studying Russian grammar :-)
As I have observed in other contexts, Soviet child actors appear to be much better than ours of the same era :-p Or perhaps I am unduly harsh in remembering stage-school children earnestly reciting their lines to camera in a succession of British films and TV programmes... (or perhaps, of course, I am simply not so conscious of the niceties of natural inflection and vocabulary in a foreign language). But this pair are so young -- five to seven, maybe? -- that it must have been a challenge to 'direct' them at all; easy enough to get them to giggle via antics off-camera, but tricky to get them to deliver the required dialogue simply and clearly and with the right expression.
The other thing that struck me as unusual about this episode as versus the sort of language videos I was more familiar with was just how much of it has no dialogue at all. The sequence showing the two children drawing while their grandfather reads his newspaper and glances at them from time to time over the top of his glasses serves no educational purpose at all, for example; it is just pure character/storytelling. And the parents slipping away to enjoy one another's company free of the responsibility for their children has no real relationship with the instructional aspect of the episode, either; they could perfectly well just turn up at the café without any intervening action. So someone was apparently taking the opportunity to do some creative film-making while commissioned to do what is on the face of it a very simple project -- like good books for very small children, this material is actually more sophisticated than it needs to be.
The episodes in this course are actually interestingly different from the sort of educational videos we used to get in lessons at school (though we were never subjected to them in Russian lessons, only French and German, possibly because as A-level students we were felt to be above such things -- though I certainly had them as part of German evening classes!) They seem to have a different 'cast' and mini-story for each episode, rather than following the same set of characters throughout the course, which I was subconsciously expecting.
I suppose that from a production point of view, if you are filming clips to accompany different chapters in your textbook, it comes a lot cheaper and easier to employ a single set of actors, although I always assumed at the time that they did it in order for us to establish an ongoing relationship with the cast. After all, even our Latin course (which was simply a set of books with no 'multi-media' content) featured the same characters from lesson to lesson, but this one evidently doesn't, which gives it a different feel; every episode elegantly and concisely sets up a new family dynamic. Presumably Soviet state central casting could call on a more or less infinite supply of actors for small jobs, as opposed to a private company producing its own video material and needing to turn a profit on the manufacturing costs of the course as a whole?
I was busy admiring the way in which featuring young children (and elderly persons requiring spectacles!) allows the scripts to include in a natural way a good deal of text being read out loud for the benefit of the viewers, and repeating things in very simple language -- but of course it dawns on me that this course was very probably aimed at schoolchildren rather than adults, and thus (like Ecce Romani) would naturally have included 'relatable' child characters... Although the children in this episode are definitely too young to go to school, let alone to be expected to be studying Russian grammar :-)
As I have observed in other contexts, Soviet child actors appear to be much better than ours of the same era :-p Or perhaps I am unduly harsh in remembering stage-school children earnestly reciting their lines to camera in a succession of British films and TV programmes... (or perhaps, of course, I am simply not so conscious of the niceties of natural inflection and vocabulary in a foreign language). But this pair are so young -- five to seven, maybe? -- that it must have been a challenge to 'direct' them at all; easy enough to get them to giggle via antics off-camera, but tricky to get them to deliver the required dialogue simply and clearly and with the right expression.
The other thing that struck me as unusual about this episode as versus the sort of language videos I was more familiar with was just how much of it has no dialogue at all. The sequence showing the two children drawing while their grandfather reads his newspaper and glances at them from time to time over the top of his glasses serves no educational purpose at all, for example; it is just pure character/storytelling. And the parents slipping away to enjoy one another's company free of the responsibility for their children has no real relationship with the instructional aspect of the episode, either; they could perfectly well just turn up at the café without any intervening action. So someone was apparently taking the opportunity to do some creative film-making while commissioned to do what is on the face of it a very simple project -- like good books for very small children, this material is actually more sophisticated than it needs to be.