Roman Karmen | |
|---|---|
Роман Кармен | |
 Karmen in 1975 | |
| Born | Efraim Leyzorovich Korenman 30 November [O.S. 17 November] 1906 Odesa, Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) |
| Died | 28 April 1978 (aged 71) Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Occupations | |
Roman Lazarevich Karmen (30 November [O.S. 17 November] 1906 – 28 April 1978, born Efraim Leyzorovich Korenman) was a Soviet film director, war cinematographer, documentary filmmaker, journalist, screenwriter, pedagogue, and publicist.
Karmen was born to a Jewish family in Odessa. His father was the writer Lazar Karmen (real name Leyzor Korenman) and his mother was the translator Dina Leypuner.
Karmen was a communist.
He documented the Spanish Civil War.: 126 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.: 126
Among his well-known works are such films as Spain (1939); Moscow Strikes Back (1942); Leningrad in Struggle (1942); Berlin (1945); Judgment of the Peoples (1946, about the Nuremberg trials); A Tale of the Caspian Oil Workers (1953); Vietnam (1955); Morning of India (1956); Great Is My Country (1958 — the first Soviet panoramic film); Conquerors of the Sea (1959); The Burning Island (1961); The Great Patriotic War (1965); Grenada, Grenada, Grenada of Mine… (1968, together with K. M. Simonov); Comrade Berlin (1969); and The Burning Continent (1972).
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 (Leningrad in Combat, 1942), the Viet Minh victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (Vietnam, 1955), 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 (his co-author Chapuis had died in late 2001) published the portrait Roman Karmen, A Red Legend.
