Dmitriev Vladimir Yuryevich
“A film archive is a dragon guarding our treasures,” said Jean Cocteau. For Gosfilmofond, Vladimir Yuryevich Dmitriev was that very dragon, gathering and carefully guarding the priceless collection. Dmitriev considered himself “a labourer of culture” — that is how he put it in the Kremlin when receiving the State Prize.
In 1962 Dmitriev graduated with honours from the film studies faculty of VGIK and was assigned to Gosfilmofond. He began as a junior researcher, but two years later already headed the department of scientific processing of the foreign collection. He at once became a man whose friendship was sought not only by film scholars but by the great directors of the day, for it depended on him whether a given film would be available for viewing in the Gosfilmofond cinema hall.
Today almost everything can be found on the internet. Fifty years ago, free access to films was available only to the staff of the research department; only occasionally did great directors come for inspiration, or officials and party figures for entertainment. It was Vladimir Yuryevich who gave permission to view a film and could recommend interesting new arrivals.
Dmitriev worked at Gosfilmofond for fifty-one years. One of his tasks was to enrich the collection of foreign films through exchange. During that time the total number of films in the archive grew from twenty-five thousand titles to sixty-five thousand. The international ties of Gosfilmofond grew and strengthened: the film archives of Colombia, Uruguay, Australia and Italy joined the organisations he cooperated with, among them the film archives of Austria, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. In the late 1960s Dmitriev conducted difficult negotiations with the Museum of Modern Art in the United States, as a result of which material from S. M. Eisenstein's unfinished film ¡Que viva México! was obtained through exchange; Grigory Alexandrov later assembled his own version of the film from it. In addition, under Vladimir Yuryevich's direction the films SVD by G. Kozintsev and L. Trauberg and sixteen pre-revolutionary films were restored, among them The Portrait and Cagliostro by V. Starevich, Satan Triumphant by Y. Protazanov, The Precipice by P. Chardynin and Asphalt by Joe May.
Dmitriev rejected selection in building the film collection and believed that nothing was more dangerous than being guided by taste, political expediency, commercial success or even the high artistic qualities of a film. He often recalled that it was precisely because of selection that up to eighty per cent of all silent films and up to fifty per cent of films released before the 1950s had been lost. In his view, all works created by professional cinema should be preserved for future generations. Vladimir Yuryevich never rejected technical progress, understanding that the future lay with digital technologies, but he still preferred film stock, since only it can convey the magical aura of a film.
For fifteen years Dmitriev was the artistic director of the Belye Stolby archive film festival. Every year film scholars, film historians and critics came to the festival. Its programmes often echoed the agenda of the day, and old archive films seemed to gain a new life. He often joked: “First the Lord created the cinematheques, and then everything else.” Gosfilmofond was a home for Vladimir Yuryevich and his colleagues were a family. It seems that his shuffling steps can still be heard in the corridors of the film archive — for dragons never abandon their treasures under any circumstances.