THE FIRST CIRCLE
Symposium
After his expulsion from the Polish People’s Republic, Aleksander Ford tried to gain a foothold as a filmmaker in several different countries, without quite managing to make it work anywhere. At first he went to Israel, where he didn’t feel comfortable. His next significant station was in Denmark, which resulted in his penultimate work THE FIRST CIRCLE: an aesthetically exaggerated Solzhenitsyn adaptation oscillating between naturalism and stylisation, which one can best regard as a very private cry of pain, with the various sharashka inmates and their fates serving as reflections of his own experiences as well as his fears – which fits the autobiographical core of the novel perfectly.
DEN FØRSTE KREDS / DER ERSTE KREIS
DNK, DEU 1971 / 98 min
Language: English
Director: Aleksander Ford
- Screenplay: Aleksander Ford
- Cinematographer: Wladyslaw Forbert
- Editor: Carl Lerner,Merete Neegaard
- Music: Roman Palester
- Cast: Gunther Malzacher,Elzbieta Czyzewska,Peter Steen,Vera Tschechowa,Ole Ernst
- Producer: Mogens Skot-Hansen
After his expulsion from the Polish People’s Republic, Aleksander Ford tried to gain a foothold as a filmmaker in several different countries, without quite managing to make it work anywhere. At first he went to Israel, where he didn’t feel comfortable. His next significant station was in Denmark, which resulted in his penultimate work THE FIRST CIRCLE: an aesthetically exaggerated Solzhenitsyn adaptation oscillating between naturalism and stylisation, which one can best regard as a very private cry of pain, with the various sharashka inmates and their fates serving as reflections of his own experiences as well as his fears – which fits the autobiographical core of the novel perfectly.
- Screenplay: Aleksander Ford
- Cinematographer: Wladyslaw Forbert
- Editor: Carl Lerner,Merete Neegaard
- Music: Roman Palester
- Cast: Gunther Malzacher,Elzbieta Czyzewska,Peter Steen,Vera Tschechowa,Ole Ernst
- Producer: Mogens Skot-Hansen