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“The Great Consoler, Kuleshov’s greatest film, is not just an innovative masterpiece, but also one of the most profound reflections on the social utility of art to be found anywhere” (Jonathan Rosenbaum). “The Great Consoler is the most complex and significant film in Kuleshov’s career,” pronounced Ekaterina Hohlova, the director’s granddaughter and co-curator of the amazing Kuleshov retrospective at this year’s Bologna festival. Pre-eminent film historian David Bordwell wrote in his report on the event: “Soviet specialists already suspected that The Great Consoler (1933) was K’s sound masterpiece, and another viewing confirmed it.” This 35mm print, imported from Britain just for this screening, should therefore rank high in any cinephile’s priorities. A film of startling narrative and visual invention, of “story within a story” loop de loops and spinny digressions, The Great Consoler mixes mischief with severe social critique – the film is often cited as one of the bravest works against Stalinism. Set in America in 1899, Consoler centres on William S. Porter, wrongly jailed for embezzlement, who works in the prison infirmary where he witnesses a great deal of injustice and brutality. He comforts himself, and others, like the romantic shopgirl Dulcie, by writing tales under the pseudonym of O. Henry. Into Porter’s and Dulcie’s separate but interlocked tales, Kuleshov inserts a third: a mock silent film, based on the real O. Henry, about a safecracker who saves a girl locked in a vault. The wild artifice keeps building until one doesn’t quite know where the ground is, where the sky. The scramble to make sense of it all is helped, a little, by Kuleshov’s assigning different tones to his trio of stories: “The three narrative registers of The Great Consoler are delineated largely through acting: naturalistic and slowly paced in the prison scenes, rigid and posed in
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