The Important Thing Is It Should Not Be Very Much: An Interview with Boris Frumin About His Work on Kozintsev's King Lear (Web Exclusive)
by Sue-Lynn Zan

In 1980, sociologist Roland Robertson coined the term “glocalization,” or "the simultaneity—the co-presence—of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies.” Boris Frumin, the Latvian filmmaker who joined the staff of New York University’s Institute of Film and Television that same decade, was an important conduit for the wave of glocalization that has expanded in American independent cinema until today. He trained Debra Granik, who debuted Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, a 2010 Sundance Festival–winning drama set in an impoverished Ozark forest’s “meth subculture.” Granik gave particular emphasis to the impact of Frumin’s “hundred slides of stills from films.” He also trained Cary Fukunaga, the director of the forthcoming James Bond film, No Time To Die, who cut his teeth on Sin Nombre, a 2009 Sundance winner about Honduras to New Jersey train-hopping immigrants delivered solely in Spanish.

Frumin’s own creative work, now reignited in the early stages of pedagogical retirement, is no less glocalized. In 2017, he co-penned Oh Lucy!, a Tokyo-to-LA crossover comedic drama that first attunes us to a Tokyo mindset before re-immersing us in Josh Hartnett’s familiar LA. Frumin later joined Benh Zeitlin in producing the 2019 Independent Spirit Award–winning Give Me Liberty, a kinetic and close-quarters panoramic view seen through the eyes of a Russian-American van driver for the disabled. Most recently, Frumin brought the grail back to his hometown of Riga with the script adaptation for Blizzard of Souls (2019), based on Aleksandrs Grins’ novel about the “liberators of interwar Latvia in 1919.” Cineuropa reported in December that Blizzard of Souls had become the “most watched film in Latvia since the 1991 restoration of Latvian independence.”

Frumin was not only touted as the youngest directing student at VGIK — Moscow’s All-Union State Institute of Cinematography — in the late 1960s, but his third feature in 1978, Errors of Youth, was rebellious enough to be banned by Soviet officials, leading to his immigration to the United States. Perestroika allowed for completion of the film and its screening at Cannes in 1989. With its criticism of military life and indulgence in romantic situations resuscitating life through bright colors and music in the rural south of Russia, Errors of Youth may have been most guilty of revealing Russians as indistinguishable from Americans.

What some might not expect is the impact of an early formative experience rooted solidly in the classics—Frumin’s film school internship on the set of Grigori Kozintsev’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1970). Laurence Olivier once lauded Kozintsev as the most effective Shakespearean film interpreter; Peter Brooks collaborated with the Soviet director insofar as they wrote letters to one another while planning fraternal twin adaptations of Lear. Brooks’ version of the story, which took its visual inspiration from Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, found its form in voluble close-ups. A contender for best Shakespeare on film by many accounts, Kozintsev’s Lear demonstrates an incisive winnowing of words in favor of events, and a seamless confluence of the avant-garde and cathartic emotion. Frumin was promoted to first assistant director during Lear’s final months of filming.

Significant not simply to our understanding of Kozintsev’s adaptation, but also to our understanding of Professor Frumin—the neorealist who made his early features in the decade following this first apprenticeship—is King Lear: The Space of Tragedy—The Diary of a Film Director (University of California Press, 1977). Kozintsev’s diary centers most strategically on the director’s entry points toward the “real.” One of these was de-emphasizing conventions of language. Kozintsev cast an untrained, non-Russian-speaking Estonian actor, Yuri Yarvet, favoring what he called his “spiritual education.” Yarvet, originally envisioned as Poor Tom in the hovel scene, proved to be self-possessed enough to play King Lear (and aptly, as Lear learns to identify with the lower classes while trapped in the hovel during a storm). After an Estonian translation was provided to Yarvet, he chose to struggle with the original translation by Boris Pasternak so as not to diminish the mutual inspiration he and the director gained from it. Thus, his “spiritual education” could visually carry the film, while his spoken dialogue was dubbed into Russian by another actor.

King Lear and Kozintsev’s diary notes are one way to place Boris Frumin’s teaching methods in contexts that were sometimes deftly hidden even while they should have been completely obvious: influences of minimalism and Japanese art (Kabuki and Noh) on Kozintsev and his friend Eisenstein during the 1920’s; earlier molding of formalists such as the revolutionary Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold and British stage screen inventor Gordon Craig; references to war documentaries and war photography; grace notes of Chaplin, Marceau, Voltaire, Daumier, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and many more. Finally, one discovers, in reading the diary, a specific phrasing that may have been passed down from Kozintsev to Frumin to his own students in America. Although Frumin may not confirm, unequivocally, his intentions with these words, he strives earnestly to take us back to those early years.—Sue-Lynn Zan 

Cineaste: Eisenstein and Kozintsev had both been professors at VGIK, and Andrei Tarkovsky attended the film institute about a decade earlier than you. You were known to be the youngest directing student accepted in your time. Can you explain more about that?

Boris Frumin: At that time, Soviet school education lasted for ten years. You finished school when you were about sixteen. Then you tried to get yourself into college. Young men had two or three years to do that, or you would go to the army. My father was working at a documentary film studio in Riga. At first, I wanted to become an actor. I was in an acting studio, then, toward the end of school, I decided that I wanted to become a director, and to go to the VGIK film institute. Twice, I was not accepted. 

Before attempting the entrance exams for the third time, I received a summons to the army. I avoided receiving summons in person by moving to the empty apartment of a friend. Then I received a letter from VGIK announcing that I did not pass “creative competition,” so my portfolio had been rejected again. I decided to go to Moscow anyway. 

Cineaste: What did your portfolio consist of? 

Frumin: It consisted of two pieces—an analytical paper and a short narrative script that could be an adaptation of a short story. My analytical paper was on The Brothers Karamazov, the Dostoevsky novel.

I was reading Dostoevsky seriously at the time. It was an influence, a way of understanding certain things. It was not a script, but about how to develop the book into a movie. It was also a certain definition of characters in the novel, of Dostoevsky, and his thinking. My paper discussed his book chapter by chapter. I provided visual descriptions of key scenes. Usually a professor or a “master” for whose workshop at VGIK you were applying would not read your portfolio, but people from his team. The paper was not accepted. 

So I found a way for my papers to be read personally by Sergei Gerasimov, and I was allowed to come for an interview. During entrance exams, he interviewed applicants himself.

Cineaste: What did you talk about with Gerasimov in your interview?

Frumin: We talked about Dostoevsky, dialectics, El Greco, Salinger. I wrote a script adaptation of Salinger’s short story A Perfect Day for Bananafish.

Every year, one of the key Soviet directors—the Soviet “classics”—would take directing students into their workshop, or masterskaya. In the workshop, you would stay with the Master for five years. In addition, you would take classes in art history, philosophy, the history of the Communist Party, and other disciplines, but you would stay with your main professor for five years. He would come to class once or twice a week. I was accepted into Gerasimov’s narrative workshop, so my master would be Sergei Apollinarievich Gerasimov. 

What was unique about the Gerasimov workshop was that first year directors would write, direct, and act themselves. Then in the second year, he would accept a group of young actors and the directors would work with these young actors. It was real directing experience. We had some classes with actors, such as “scenic movement.” In the classroom, we staged excerpts from classical books and plays, learning dramaturgy.

In order to direct actors, you have to be an actor yourself. This is important. Good directors are good actors. Gerasimov was a very good actor himself. He started as an actor in Kozintsev’s silent movies. He expected us directing students to act. Gerasimov was considered an “actor’s director,” someone who trained and worked with actors. Actors from his workshops became important actors in the Soviet film industry. 

Cineaste: Gerasimov—The Journalist [1967], The Youth of Peter the Great [1980].

Frumin: No, this is no good. Start from the beginning.

Cineaste: Seven Brave Men [1936], City of Youth [1938]. 

Frumin: Seven Brave Men was a good one. After acting for Kozintsev, Gerasimov made two or three unimportant films as a director, but then he made Seven Brave Men. Years later, it would be Masquerade [1941], an adaptation of Lermontov, and then Quiet Flows the Don [1957], an adaptation of Sholokov, which was an epic, a substantial movie. 

Cineaste: It’s interesting that for your summer internship, you chose King Lear over Waterloo, even though you became a neorealist, and Waterloo is more akin to realism than Lear.

Frumin: VGIK students would go to internships in the summer between the third and fourth years. It was called “summer practice.” Directing students would work as “Assistant Directors,” cinematography students would work in professional crews as “Camera Assistants.” The list of movies-in-progress would be sent to VGIK from the Ministry of Cinema, and students would choose productions to work on.

I knew nothing about Waterloo except that it was directed by Sergei Bondarchuk. For me, it was not a choice between Waterloo and King Lear; it was a choice between Bondarchuk and Kozintsev. Bondarchuk was a director of a certain reputation. Kozintsev was a Soviet “classic.” We studied his silent movies at VGIK. 

Cineaste: So was Kozintsev’s stature generally much greater than Bondarchuk’s in terms of being a “classic”?

Frumin: That is not how I would define it. Before Waterloo, Bondarchuk directed War and Peace [1966], which I did not like; it was not real Tolstoy. It was Tolstoy adapted by Mosfilm. So I didn’t want to go work for Bondarchuk.

Cineaste: What do you remember about being on the set with Kozintsev?

Frumin: Kozintsev had been working with production designer Yevgeny Yenei for about forty-five years. Yenei would come to the set every morning. I remember him touching surfaces of the sets; his eyesight was diminishing, so he was “testing textures.” Kozintsev’s conversations with Yenei were always polite and quiet. They would use “Vi” when talking to one another. In Kozintsev’s crew, people always used the polite “Vi” form of Russian, which is different from the regular “ti.” I was surprised when Yenei and Kozintsev would use “Vi” when talking to me, a VGIK student. 

Politeness on the set was expected, demanded, and maintained. The crew was expected to be quiet, especially when Kozintsev was working with actors. He spent a lot of time talking with actors. 

Cineaste: What was his relationship to his main collaborators?

Frumin: Kozintsev’s favorite crew member was costume designer Simon Virsaladze. He would come to the set from Moscow, from the Bolshoi Theatre. Kozintsev was fanatical about textures. He demanded “dirty” costumes and “unshaved” faces. Every morning, we assistants would bring extras dressed in costumes to a dirty pool in the middle of the castle’s grounds and applied dirt by hand to leather outfits. In one of those sessions, Virsaladze took part himself.

Two more people had Kozintsev’s special respect: the montazor [editor] Evgenia Mahankova, and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Kozintsev was screaming once in the hallway of the editing building at Lenfilm—“Quiet! Zenya is working!” That was the second scream I ever heard. The first scream was directed at me. 

Mahankova was the most experienced Lenfilm editor. She was a skinny woman, always chain smoking papirosi, a Russian nonfiltered product. From time to time she had “drinking spells,” and the editing would stop, she would not answer the phone, or open the door of her apartment. Besides Kozintsev, she worked mostly with Fridrikh Ermler, another Lenfilm “classic.”

Kozintsev admired Shostakovich. As a young Leningrad composer, Shostakovich wrote music for several early Kozintsev movies. Shostakovich had a problem walking and climbing stairs. Several times, during editing, I would meet him at the Lenfilm entrance and bring him to the editing room. I was “timing” scenes for him that had been indicated by Kozintsev, with Kozintsev and Shostakovich watching a rough cut in the adjoining room.

Cineaste: What was Kozintsev like with his actors?

Frumin: Kozintsev’s two favorite actors were Yuri Yarvet, who played Lear—a modest, quiet Estonian actor, a nonstar, who silently listened to Kozintsev and always found a way to nuance Shakespearean lines (his Estonian accent needed to be dubbed, though, and we spent months testing the best Soviet actors for dubbing)—and Oleg Dal, who played the Fool. Dal was drinking heavily, so morning rehearsals would be spent listening to Dal’s postdrinking monologues and countless improvisations.

Actors were the responsibility of Kozintsev; he spent time with them. The staging of shots was the responsibility of the First AD, the experienced Iosif Shapiro, and cinematographer Ionas Gritsus, who is still alive at ninety-one. When Shapiro collapsed from a heart attack during the shooting, I was appointed by Kozintsev as the First AD. 

Cineaste: It’s interesting that in Kozintsev’s film diary, he posts only one letter to Shapiro in which he specifically talks about how all these people are getting sick during winter, including Valentina Shendrikova, who played Cordelia. It almost seems as if he’s hinting at the time when Shapiro got sick. Right before posting that letter, he sent another letter—to a Boris Slutsky—where he includes a quote from a part of the play that he says needs editing: 

The weight of this sad time, we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

This made me think of double entendres and the ways in which we often communicate toward our younger collaborators. What was your relationship with Kozintsev? Did you ever feel you challenged each other?

Frumin: Challenge Kozintsev? I was assisting him. Once, during a break, I was reading Pasternak poems to a girl from the prop department. Then I realized that Kozintsev was sitting behind us. After that, I think, Kozintsev started to talk to me in the mornings.

It usually took a long time to set up the first shot under Shapiro’s supervision, so Kozintsev would walk around the castle, and I would follow. It was mostly him speaking in monologues. He did ask some questions; he was a very polite man, but then he would start talking. At one point, he gave me present, a book by Arseniy Tarkovski, the father of Andrei. He signed it, “Great poems of the father of the great director to remember days of the baptism by fire on King Lear.”

Cineaste: How old were you?

Frumin: I was twenty-two.

Cineaste: You just said that he began to talk to you a lot. How long did you work with him for?

Frumin: About five months. 

Cineaste: You were probably the only student who was elevated to the role of First Assistant Director on that set.

Frumin: Well, for Kozintsev to trust a young student to run his production…he was very strict and very selective about whom he would trust. It was his reputation. An internship was supposed to last no longer than three summer months. After that, I should have gone back to school. Kozintsev wrote a letter to Gerasimov asking him to let me to stay, not to continue studies in film school but to stay with the production. Gerasimov made an exception for me. Kozintsev praised me in the letter, and Gerasimov was impressed. 

When during class I was talking to Gerasimov about the Lear production, an assistant from the dean’s office came to the classroom and said that there was an “urgent” call from Narva. I went to the dean’s office. It was the Lear casting assistant. She said Kozintsev demanded that I immediately return to Narva. He said, “I will not go on the set if Frumin is not there.” I had been helping a lot on the set. 

After Shapiro fell ill from a heart attack and before the producer of the movie, legendary Mikhail Shostak, died in a hotel, Kozintsev was left one on his own with this big production. I took the train from Moscow to Narva. The line producer came to my room at the hotel and said, “You know Napoleon’s expression—‘Every soldier carries a marshal’s baton in his knapsack.’”

I came to the set. I remember it very well. It was the “magic hour” shoot of Kent’s arrival at the castle. We had a lot of extras on the set—not only extras but also medieval artillery, arms, horses, dogs—it’s King Lear. Kozintsev took the mike and said, “Quiet on the set. From now on, Boris is the First AD. He is in charge.” It was a turning point. As First AD, you call crew, you direct crew, you talk to the DP, you talk to assistants, you bring extras, you discuss with Kozintsev things about the shot, then you prepare the blocking for his approval.

Cineaste: That was your first day as AD? The scene of Kent’s arrival is possibly the most beautiful sequence in the film. Kozintsev talks about designing in terms of “blocks,” whether “blocks” of crowds and the ways they domino to influence movement in the film, or “blocks” of locations, with the same effect. One of the most memorable examples of this is when Kent, one of the few purely “good” characters in the film, sneaks into the castle to help Lear, first putting on a wig in the vast exterior of the castle, with the camera then gradually moving into the interior. Could you talk more about Narva?

Frumin: Narva is a small city on the border of Russia and Estonia. The town is split into two parts—Estonian and Russian. Our hotel was in Narva. We had to cross a bridge to shoot in the castle in the Russian part of Narva called Ivangorod.

Before the crew arrived at Narva, casting assistants hired local factory workers as Lear knights. These were strong guys with simple faces. They would spend hours and days waiting for the camera to roll. Every morning Kozintsev, Shapiro, and Gritsus—and me following them—would walk around the old castle discussing upcoming shots. There were two or three shots per day. Productivity was low and the production was behind schedule.

The workers started to complain that they had taken a vacation to be in the movie, but instead of shooting they were spending days lying on the grass in heavy leather outfits, waiting for a “creative decision.” We changed the process after I became the First AD. At the end of the day, we would discuss the “first three shots of the next day,” so when Kozintsev would arrive on the set, the first shot would already be set by Gritsus and me.

Kozintsev hated to be rushed. I got demands from the studio to speed up production. Winter was coming. We could not get extras for shoots anymore. Workers returned to factories, and local army units who had sent soldiers as extras for the background rejected our requests for extras. 

We started to recruit local alcoholics as Lear’s knights. Narva was one hundred kilometers from Leningrad. Alcoholics and bums from Leningrad would often be expelled to Narva as “social outcasts”— parazit elements. They became our resource for “soldiers.” We would go to local bars and hire alcoholics. Kozintsev appreciated them. He wanted faces to be wrinkled, unshaved, and dirty. 

One of the most challenging shooting days during the Narva expedition involved burning movie sets so that Lear and Cordelia would run through flames, surrounded by crowds of the “poor.” I was rushing shots, and, at the end of the day, Kozintsev screamed at me, “No one can rush me.” It was the first time I ever heard him screaming. 

In a few days, dailies arrived at Narva from Leningrad. Kozintsev saw the dailies alone. Gritsus and I were busy preparing the first shot. Kozintsev came to the set happy about the dailies. He told me about it. 

Cineaste: Would the Castle of Narva be accessible to you today, if you wanted to shoot there?

Frumin: Yes, but it’s very different. They did restoration work. It’s nothing like it was before. When we were shooting, the castle was deteriorating. Kozintsev loved that.

Cineaste: But you could still make parts of it look like it did if you wanted to. 

Frumin: Kozintsev would never shoot Lear in today’s Narva. It’s too clean. A tourist place. 

Cineaste: One of the best things about the film is a diversity of styles, something that also appears in your teaching. Kozintsev starts off with what he calls a “geometric precision” when filming the angles from which Cordelia, Goneril, and Regan approach Lear. There’s a kind of formalism and a kind of portraiture there, as well as a more theatrical style. But at the end, there is a raw war-documentary aesthetic—burned buildings, fire, Lear and Cordelia on a stretcher—for which he says he used war documentary and photography references to design. Did he share those references with you? 

Frumin: No. But he did talk about the Fool character as a “Nazi Camp child.”

Cineaste: Interesting. In his book, he says he wants the Fool to represent the poor masses in contrast to Lear. Anyway, you were setting up shots, so it doesn’t matter if he shared the photographs themselves with you. You were creating the style of the film with him. 

Frumin: Kozintsev set his standards. We would follow. Everything was about raw textures, real things—dirty, not clean. 

Cineaste: All the stylistic diversity that Kozintsev shows in this film and mentions in his book—influences of Chaplin and Marceau, to a more formal geometry like that of Gordon Craig, who invented stage screens, to war photography—is the same unique range of influences that showed up in your teaching. Your lectures could be very whimsical, with precise comic timing, while you were obsessed with the formal functions of locations. Yet, most of all, you were completely unsentimental with your neorealist photographs. Did that come from Russian film influences at the time, or Kozintsev?

Frumin: I believe that real directing is about real things. Movies can be different stylistically. It could be Kozintsev or Kurosawa, or Huston, or Almodóvar. It could be rough textures or polished textures. A director is always trying to achieve stylistic consistency. But the main concern is for truth—in faces, textures, in the script. Balancing elements is important. 

I know Kozintsev was very unhappy with his studio sets. It was his constant struggle. He couldn’t get in the studio the same quality he was getting doing exterior location photography. I do remember his frustration with movie sets. The only movie set which he liked was the “beggars’ shelter,” or hovel, where Lear spends the night during the storm. Kozintsev was satisfied with it because it was not a set. It was a space between three walls filled with dirty human bodies. And this he accepted.

I didn’t participate in that part of the shooting done at the movie sets built at Lenfilm. And I didn’t participate in the very effective Crimean location expedition. I started to work with Kozintsev at Narva. 

Cineaste: In his memoir, Kozintsev talks about how he went to England to look for castles, and he said, “I don’t think that any castle in England actually tells these Shakespeare stories.” He says, in fact, “Shakespeare never went to those castles.” 

Frumin: I don’t know how extensively he traveled through England. I was in Scotland and saw some castles, which reminded me Kozintsev’s King Lear. I don’t know if Kozintsev had a real opportunity to travel through England.

Cineaste: He did. That’s what he wrote in his memoir. 

Frumin: He probably was in England after finishing Hamlet. To say he was extensively traveling through England, that would have been a luxury for a Soviet director.

When you say “memoir,” I don’t know if he was writing a memoir. I read his diary notes. His wife published his day-to-day notes. I don’t think he intended to publish them, because he let himself be very critical about his Soviet life, about how he and people working in film were treated. I know he was writing every day. I think he was summarizing his experience. He wrote two different things—a book about Shakespeare [Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, NY: Hill and Wang, 1966] and his diaries while shooting King Lear. He wrote another book, under the title of Черное, лихое время, or what would be translated as Dark, Cruel Times, that could not be published during the Soviet era and only appeared after perestroika. 

Cineaste: I saw Oh Lucy!, a film you co-wrote that was half-set in Japan, and it made me think about the fact that Kozintsev begins his diaries with the Japanese in terms of the influence that they had with minimalism, through his experience observing rhythms in a stone garden.

Even before that part, there is an important quote in the book by Virsaladze, the costume designer, regarding minimalism. Virsaladze was one of Kozintsev’s favorites—he had been doing costumes for the Bolshoi Ballet at the time. Kozintsev constantly describes Virsaladze as not “simply” a costume designer; he says that because of his work with ballet dancers, to Virsaladze, costume equals gesture or movement. 

He quotes Virsaladze at the end of the very first short chapter of the diary—in some ways opening the entire philosophy of the book—by saying, “The important thing is that altogether, it should not be very much.”

Frumin: That is good. It’s close. In the movie, costumes could be precise about time, or escape precision by just making suggestions about time through costume. Simplicity is a good way to “suggest.” I don’t know how time-precise Virsaladze’s costumes are in King Lear, but the minimalist approach creates a certain sense of truth. 

Cineaste: Yes. Much of the beginning and later parts of the book talk about how Kozintsev’s goal is to transcend historicism, to make specific “period” details more vague and faces relatable. When he quotes Virsaladze, he’s not talking about just costume at that point, he’s talking about the entire thing.

Frumin: He respected Virsaladze not only as a collaborator, but also as a person. When Virsaladze would come to the set from Moscow, they would talk. It was something about the understanding between the two men on a set.

And with Kozintsev, it was very difficult. Because you wouldn’t see people with whom Kozintsev would be as comfortable as he was with Virsaladze. Maybe there was something similar in Kozintsev’s attitude toward Shostakovich, during Shostakovich’s visits to the editing room.

Cineaste: And he also loved it when Virsaladze just did what he wanted to do. At one point, he says Virsaladze was working with a tailor of some sort, and instead of listening to the tailor, he just tore a newly finished costume apart and repinned it together himself, with a papirosa cigar between his teeth. 

Frumin: Yes. He would do it right in front of Kozintsev. Virsaladze was not limited by Kozintsev. And that was what Kozintsev respected.

Cineaste: One of the things that was most mysterious for your students in America—and sometimes upsetting—was that you were known to have written words that were similar to Virsaladze’s quote when you commented on student scripts. You might use the term “much” without explanation, sometimes the sole phrase, “It is not much.” So if your students read that quote of Virsaladze in the diary saying, “The important thing is that it should not be very much,” they might be relieved. Maybe “not much” was a good thing?

Frumin: You know, minimalistic and modest are important approaches. With experience, you respect it more and more. In the beginning, you want to do big, and you want to do more, but when you gain experience, you want to do less, and you want to be modest. 

Cineaste: It’s very profound that Kozintsev played a diplomatic role internationally in terms of the way that he worked on this production and the way he wrote his diary. And, though maybe not intentionally, you also ended up taking on an internationally diplomatic role when teaching at NYU. The Tisch School of the Arts was founded in 1965. Spike Lee graduated in 1982; Ang Lee, I think, graduated in 1984; you started at the same time and ended up teaching alongside key collaborators of John Sayles, Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese, and so many more. It was such a central place. You became this person who did something similar to what Kozintsev did in terms of diplomacy but through much more direct interaction and collaboration globally. 

Frumin: Diplomacy is not my word. I’m not a diplomatic guy.

Cineaste: What final Lear memories would you like to share?

Frumin: I remember when a small editing room with a 35mm movie projector was set up at the Narva House of Culture. Kozintsev would watch dailies there. Only a few people were allowed to go to the screenings, including Shapiro, Gritsus, Gorunov—the makeup artist who worked with Eisenstein on Ivan the Terrible—and occasionally Yenei and Mahankova would show up. 

Before screenings, Kozintsev always said a line used by his great cinematographer Andrey Moskvin—“Let’s get upset.” [Moskvin died during the preproduction of Kozintsev’s Hamlet.] For Kozintsev, screenings dailies was mostly a painful, disappointing experience. His attitude started to change during editing.

After they started dubbing, I returned to VGIK. Kozintsev worked in the editing room. Later, he wrote me a couple of postcards speaking mostly about all the hard work.

Cineaste: In the features you directed after you graduated, you have a very mature sensibility, a lot of life experience, a lot of constant will and activity that feels very strong and that never feels overstated or precious.

Frumin: Thank you so much.

Cineaste: Have you ever thought about making an autobiographical film about those early years?

Frumin: No, I haven’t. I will be leaving in a couple of days now. I have to do script work in Spain.

Distribution Sources

Kozintsev’s King Lear is currently available in an English-subtitled DVD from Facets Video and in a two-disc widescreen special edition available from RUSCICO (Russian Cinema Council). Both DVDs are available for purchase, along with both books by Kozintsev, on amazon.com.

Sue-Lynn Zan is a freelance writer who received her MFA in filmmaking from New York University and an MA in English from Columbia University. She writes about entertainment and literature.

Copyright © 2020 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 3