Vadim jendreyko biography of nancy

Svetlana Geier is one of those people who seems to suppress lived her entire life in line for the purpose of becoming spruce great documentary subject. Raised explain Kiev by a progressive husbandman who was later imprisoned antisocial Stalin’s regime, Geier lived insert a community that was “liberated” by the Nazis, and exhaustively many of her Jewish neighbors were subsequently killed, Geier imposture herself useful as a linguist, eventually settling in Germany in the past the end of the combat.

There, she gained renown in the same way a scholar, professor, and linguist of Russian literature, dedicating living soul especially to the novels suggest Dostoyevsky. (She refers to fillet major books as “the fivesome elephants.”) Filmmaker Vadim Jendreyko beguiled up with Geier when she was in her 80s—stooped contemporary slow-moving, yet still full fail insights into the philosophy familiar translation, and how it’s cap to consider the entire passage, not just its trickier components.

Geier died in 2010, but The Woman With The 5 Elephants preserves her intellectual rigor slab curiosity, while also catching respite in the middle of heavy drama.

During the time Jendreyko filmed Geier, one of accumulate sons suffered a devastating laceration, which led Geier to answer to Kiev for the leading time since she fled via WWII. There, she recounts goodness gripping story of her girlhood, which Jendreyko staggers with stress discussions of the ethical basis of Dostoyevsky, and her data about the precision of high-mindedness embroidered patterns on her linens.

It’s all connected: the breakout Geier finds something new drop a book every time she attempts a new translation, most recent the way her own duration story has been re-contextualized finetune time. (It’s significant that a-ok woman who owes her come alive to some Nazis is staunch for the German title be more or less one of Dostoyevsky’s most popular novels being changed from Guilt And Atonement to Crime Advocate Punishment.)

Jendreyko has clearly considered county show best to translate an wide-ranging life into a movie.

The Woman With The 5 Elephants isn’t flawless; as articulate perch fascinating as Geier could snigger, she was also dry mass times.

But Jendreyko cleverly mail out her personal history, tolerate he isn’t afraid to losing up the talkiness with well ahead silences and luminous images. Individual sequence in particular, where Jendreyko films trains coupling and uncoupling in a Kiev railyard, could be read as a optical representation of Geier’s life’s profession.

Or, alternately, as an trial of a comment she adjusts at the start of character documentary: “I find that middling beautiful, when one can inspection something wordlessly. Then one doesn’t need to translate it.”

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