OBITUARIES: Hryhorii Chukhrai, 80, filmmaker of Soviet era known for unorthodoxy (11/11/01)

OBITUARIES

Hryhorii Chukhrai, 80, filmmaker of Soviet era known for unorthodoxy

MOSCOW - Hryhorii Chukhrai, the Soviet-era filmmaker best known for his unorthodox treatment of wartime themes, died on October 28 at the age of 80.

Mr. Chukhrai gained prominence in the 1950s, when, following Stalin's death, censorship of cinema was eased under Nikita Khrushchev. He is best known for the film "Ballad of a Soldier," which won the 1960 Cannes award for best direction, as well as the 1961 Lenin Prize and a series of awards in Edinburgh, London, San Francisco and Italy.

Nevertheless, the work upset Com-munist censors who had little tolerance for films that hinted at frailties in the socialist system or focused on existentialist themes, to the extent that they tried to revoke his membership in the party.

Mr. Chukhrai's first feature-length film, "The Forty-First," won a special award at the 10th Cannes Film Festival in 1956 for its "genuine script, humanism and high poetry."

In an interview with The New York Times in 1998, Mr. Chukhrai noted that in contrast to the standard Russian war films with large crowds of soldiers, battle scenes and people giving their lives for the motherland, he decided "to make a film about what happens when the world loses a single person."

"Ballad of a Soldier" (1959) and the 1961 work "The Clear Sky" are considered Mr. Chukhrai's masterpieces. As noted in The New York Times obituary (October 30), "the film ostensibly was about a Soviet soldier who was taken prisoner by the Germans in World War II and discovers on his release that the fact of his capture has made him an outcast in society and in the Communist Party. But its underlying theme ... was the arbitrary cruelty of life under Stalin's dictatorship."

Mr. Chuchrai again clashed with the authorities in 1963 when, as chairman of the jury of the Moscow Film Festival, he awarded top prize to Federico Fellini's film "8 1/2," against the dictates of the Communist Party's Central Committee, (allegedly because Mr. Khrushchev had fallen asleep while watching the film). Consequently, he was barred from traveling abroad for several years.

Despite his repeated conflicts with the party establishment, Mr. Chukhrai remained a Communist Party member to his death.

Mr. Chukhrai was born May 23, 1921, in Melitopol, in eastern Ukraine's coal-mining region. With the outbreak of war in 1939, he volunteered for the airborne infantry. He fought at Stalingrad, on the Don River front and in Ukraine, and was wounded four times.

After the war he studied at Moscow's All-Union State Institute of Cinemato-graphy. Upon graduating he returned to Ukraine and worked as a film director at the Kyiv Artistic Film Studio (1953-1955), where he produced among others, "Velyke Braterstvo" and "Nazar Stodolia."

He returned to Moscow in 1955 to join the main state studio, Mosfilm, where he began work on the film that launched his career.

Mr. Chukhrai's son, Pavel, also is a director. His film "A Thief" was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1997.

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