Roman Karmen


Roman Lazarevich Karmen was a Soviet film director, war cinematographer, documentary filmmaker, journalist, screenwriter, pedagogue, and publicist.

Biography

Karmen was born to a Jewish family in Odessa. His father was the writer and his mother was the translator Dina Leypuner.

Career

Karmen was a communist.
He documented the Spanish Civil War. Karmen also documented the battles for Moscow and Leningrad in World War II, the First Indochina War, and the rise of communism in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and in South America during the 1960s.
Karmen was also granted personal access to the emergence of communist leaders like Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh and Cuba's Fidel Castro, and Chile's socialist president Salvador Allende.
Karmen went to Yan'an in 1939, where he met Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders and filmed during May and June 1939.

Style

Karmen's documentary methods were both influential and controversial; his renowned technical ability captured the emotion of war and the repetition of key shots and framings between film projects became a hallmark, but he would often blur the lines of cinéma vérité by restaging key battles, including the lifting of the siege of Leningrad, the Viet Minh victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, and the 1956 landing in Cuba of militants led by Fidel Castro, re-enacted as a first person documentary.
In 2001, French documentary directors Dominique Chapuis and Patrick Barbéris produced a 90-minute film, titled Roman Karmen: A Cineast In The Revolution's Service. The following year Barbéris published the portrait Roman Karmen, A Red Legend.

Filmography