Another new host
26 October 2025 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI'm still working my way through the 1970s broadcasts for learners, and got a jolt with Episode/Lesson 23 (out of 30). We have another change of host, another very young teacher-like woman in place of the affable young man in the sports jacket, and a distinct change in style; this film feels almost surreal in comparison to the straightforward story-telling of previous episodes, with its deliberate jump-cuts as things appear in the frame that weren't there before, and its flashback structure, signalled (but initially unexplained) by stylised slow-motion and massively over-the-top swelling music.
It also gives the appearance of being taken from a noticeably lower-quality print; both picture and soundtrack are indefinably fuzzy. It feels almost as if it was commissioned from a different studio with a different director; oddly, the actual dialogue content strikes me as a good deal more simple than the last couple of episodes, where we were dealing I think with more naturalistic speech patterns and (in the case of "In The Country") with rural accents :-p (It does strike me that, in the area of the mega-farm when the countryside is littered with unused farmhouses whose land has been amalgamated into vast prairie-fields, the scale of everything on the kolkhoz is no longer as alien as it must have seemed to English viewers at the time!)
Despite the fact that this episode is, according to the title, about being late, that has very little to do with the actual subject matter, which is all about the aforementioned surreal and seemingly one-sided romance in flashback between a gawky photographer, who lurks among the meadow flowers and swoops down on an unexplained crane lift to get his shot, and the tour guide who is escorting his group of tourists from Odessa around Moscow... and who just happens to turn out to have been the daughter of the fussy and deliberate old man who invites him back to his flat after they both miss the southbound train and have to buy airline tickets instead.
(The completely casual way that 1970s Russia seems to regard air travel is still alien to me -- actors commuting weekly between Moscow and Odessa by plane, and the frequent suggestion in these videos that if you miss the boat/plane on which your beloved is travelling, you can simply jump on an aeroplane and surprise them at the other end. I suppose it comes of having a very large landmass with no borders, where flying is a routine way to get from A to a very distant neighbouring B, rather than an international expedition requiring visas, passports, customs, phrasebooks, foreign currency, and hours of queuing. It was the 1990s before I ever set foot on an aeroplane, and I can still count the number of flights I've ever taken in single figures compared to the long journeys by land and sea; to me it's still a major undertaking, but to them it appears to be akin to hopping on a local bus :-p)
It also gives the appearance of being taken from a noticeably lower-quality print; both picture and soundtrack are indefinably fuzzy. It feels almost as if it was commissioned from a different studio with a different director; oddly, the actual dialogue content strikes me as a good deal more simple than the last couple of episodes, where we were dealing I think with more naturalistic speech patterns and (in the case of "In The Country") with rural accents :-p (It does strike me that, in the area of the mega-farm when the countryside is littered with unused farmhouses whose land has been amalgamated into vast prairie-fields, the scale of everything on the kolkhoz is no longer as alien as it must have seemed to English viewers at the time!)
Despite the fact that this episode is, according to the title, about being late, that has very little to do with the actual subject matter, which is all about the aforementioned surreal and seemingly one-sided romance in flashback between a gawky photographer, who lurks among the meadow flowers and swoops down on an unexplained crane lift to get his shot, and the tour guide who is escorting his group of tourists from Odessa around Moscow... and who just happens to turn out to have been the daughter of the fussy and deliberate old man who invites him back to his flat after they both miss the southbound train and have to buy airline tickets instead.
(The completely casual way that 1970s Russia seems to regard air travel is still alien to me -- actors commuting weekly between Moscow and Odessa by plane, and the frequent suggestion in these videos that if you miss the boat/plane on which your beloved is travelling, you can simply jump on an aeroplane and surprise them at the other end. I suppose it comes of having a very large landmass with no borders, where flying is a routine way to get from A to a very distant neighbouring B, rather than an international expedition requiring visas, passports, customs, phrasebooks, foreign currency, and hours of queuing. It was the 1990s before I ever set foot on an aeroplane, and I can still count the number of flights I've ever taken in single figures compared to the long journeys by land and sea; to me it's still a major undertaking, but to them it appears to be akin to hopping on a local bus :-p)