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Valentina Kolodyazhnaya, 1911 – 2003
By Julia Khomiakova

The death of the 91 years old teacher of VGIK (the Russian Film Institute) — less famous than her students like Andrei Tarkovsky, Vassili Shukshin, Naum Kleiman, Nikolai Khrenov, Andrei Plakhov, Armen Medvedev, Eugenia Tirdatova, Lyubov Alova and many others — her death is perhaps not so tragic an event as the recent death of the 31 years old Sergei Bodrov jr. The Filmmakers' Union of Russia, where some days before Pavel Lebeshev's and Ilya Vaisfeld's civil funerals had been held, didn't agree to give its hall for Valentina Kolodyazhnaya's last good-bye – but this is maybe the only reason why many people couldn't come to the civil funeral in the morgue of a distant Moscow hospital.

Valentina Kolodyazhnaya was one of the brightest teachers of foreign film history at VGIK from 1949 to 1987, and to understand what that means, it is necessary to understand that for VGIK students (i.e. those who studied behind the Iron Curtain), the film history lessons were the only means to feel a mentality based on something different from the doctrines of Socialist Realism and Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism.

Valentina Kolodyazhnaya never had a reputation as a VGIK dissident. Nevertheless, she understood that teaching the know-how of analysis automatically presupposes a certain opposition to any ruling, state-patronized absurdities. Valentina Kolodyazhnaya possessed a brilliant sense of humor, and even now her jokes continue to be remembered in Moscow cinema "couloirs". Besides, she did her best to develop her students' style of writing. Behind her were 200 years of Russian classic "art critique" tradition. In her young years she wanted to become a writer. But, since the daughter of "tsarist and bourgeois specialist" (Valentina was the only daughter of a railroad engineer) couldn't become a student of a "proletarian writers' institute", she studied theatre history and also English and some French (this was to prove a kind of omen: she would later give the world more FIPRESCI members than any other VGIK teacher of foreign film history.) After World War II Valentina Kolodyazhnaya became one of the founders of Soviet film theory and history.

It was characteristic that when any child from a filmmakers' family became her student, Valentina Kolodyazhnaya was more exacting than ever, especially when it was (like myself) the offspring of a former student. She never married, she had no children of her own, but we all were her descendants. Valentina Kolodyazhnaya felt like a strict grandmother - totally responsible for the "kid" concerned, especially for his or her talent. This is why her brightest students (the brighter they were, the more difficult their fate – in a particularly Russian manner!) for decades wrote her letters, remained in contact with her, brought her gifts and informed her about all events in Moscow's film world. It was especially important because ten years ago she had become virtually blind. What a torture for a film history specialist whose whole life was in seeing and reading! I described to her Chinese films, "Dogma" works and "Titanic", and Valentina Kolodyazhnaya told me stories about Tsar Nicolas II which she heard as a child from a former courtier who hid in Kharkov in the Ukraine (Valentina Kolodyazhnaya's birthplace) in 1918. She also tried to understand how the Internet worked, and how computer graphics were made.

Valentina Kolodyazhnaya died as she lived – quietly and alone. Her ex-student, now heir to her one-room apartment, came to her only once a week, and Valentina Kolodyazhnaya knew that a lonely mother is far from a perfect tutor. In Russia they pay to lonely mothers a monthly allowance of approximately three dollars a month! Imagine how it feels to survive. But Valentina Kolodyazhnaya decided to become a kind of a really good great-grandmother for Svetlana who will hardly remember her. Svetlana is now only four. But who will dare to stop her if she wants to become a film theory and history student?

Julia Khomiakova
English text: Thomas Birchenough
© FIPRESCI 2003

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