Short film
Avdo's Car
Ավդոյի մեքենան
Dmitri Kesayants · 1966
Synopsis
Yerevan, in the time of the NEP. Avdo owns the city's first automobile, and the coachmen, who see in him a serious rival, hatch an absurd and comic conspiracy against him; thanks to their efforts, the city's first “iron horse” breaks down. In parallel, Nvard, a Komsomol activist, declares her own war on the past and, with indescribable enthusiasm, smashes the samovars, accursed remnants of the old bourgeois world.
Context
The director, a pupil of Grigori Kozintsev, found the subject of his diploma film in an article by Walter Aramyan on old Yerevan, read by chance in a daily newspaper, and then spent two months reading the newspapers of the twenties. The censors judged that the film distorted the very idea of progress; the negative of the complete version was destroyed, they say by mistake, and the filmmaker saved a few episodes for his defence and for the almanac Les Gens de notre ville. He returned to the subject in 1980 with another story by Aramyan.
Who it is for
A short story of about half an hour, in Armenian, in a version mutilated by the censors. A grotesque comedy, close to the anecdote.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by Armenian critics as the film that could have marked Soviet cinema had censorship not destroyed it; shown in Paris in 1993 at the Centre Pompidou.