For many years even the film scholars and filmmakers had little access to the foreign part of the Gosfil’mofond collection. When in the mid-1960s Michail Romm was finally able to launch his famous documentary Ordinary Fascism, Vladimir Dmitriev – the curator of Gosfil’mofond – was happy to provide the director with as much footage of the 1930s-1940s as possible. But Dmitriev was disappointed with the results: he thought that Romm ignored some of the most interesting material. In his narration Romm is saying: “We wanted to find any footage… How did an ordinary man live those years… But among two million meters of the Nazi newsreel footage we found just a few mediocre shots.” Dmitriev always had a strong desire to contradict Romm, to show that there is still much to be shown of the everyday life in Germany – and other countries of the war – and pre-war years. So when only the political situation changed – thanks to Perestrojka – and it became possible to make a broader use of the collection, Dmitriev suggested a young director Ivan Tverdovskij to make a series of films based entirely on documentary footage from the Gosfil’mofond collection. The first of these – Bolshie kanikuly tridcatych [ The Big Vacation of the Thirties] – was released in 2003, the next one – Sorokovye: Bol’šie igry malen’kich ljudej [ The Fourties: Big Games of Little People] – came out two years later.

From the very beginning Dmitriev and Tverdovskij agreed that the footage should speak for itself, that any kind of an auteurist tendentiousness should be minimized or rather be expressed in film language only: editing, audiovisual counterpart, etc. e original version has no text, but a narration was added later for a Tv-release.

Vladimir Solov’ëv credited as the author of the project is a pseudonym of Vladimir Malyshev. At that time the director general of Gosfil’mofond, he actively supported Dmitriev’s idea.

Natal’ja Jakovleva