Biryuk

Nearly wordless film based on one of Turgenev's Hunter's Sketches. So: mid-19th century. The hunter appears in the beginning of the film, lost in the woods during a downpour. He meets the "Lone Wolf" of the title, a large bearded silent fellow who maintains the forest for its aristocrat owner (meaning he keeps the starving serfs, who are in terror of him, from poaching or cutting trees). The Lone Wolf lives in a dilapidated forest hut with his little girl and baby - the wife's run off - and attempts to keep everyone alive on what meager items he can catch (fish in the pond with his bare hands, for instance) or barter for. The irony is that though he hunts the serfs for his master, he is in the same boat as they are. The baby's constantly crying, the child's silent and sorrowful, the serfs becoming bolder from starvation... If all this sounds downbeat, it is. There is also no dialogue at all between the first ten minutes or so, when the hunter (Turgenev's stand-in) meets the Wolf and departs, never to appear in the film again, and the last ten minutes or so, when the Wolf's master and all of his giggling foolish pals ride into the forest for a picnic "peasant style." They mostly gab in French, but enough Russian's spoken to convey that the Lone Wolf will not for long have a forest to guard.

Whether one likes this film or not depends a lot on one's tolerance for this kind of filmmaking ("minimalist," numerous scenes of the man's daily business, a lot of scenes with birds). It is not, I think, a lost classic, but it is one of the many interesting alternatives to the mainstream that appeared in the Soviet Union in the '60s and '70s.