Those who know me in real life are aware of my liking of Soviet film from the 1950s and 50s, made during the Khrushchevskaya ottepel. And so, keeping with the theme of an obscure former Soviet Republic, to the bottom left is the opening scene of Andrei Konchalovksy’s 1965 film adaptation of Chingiz Aitmatov’s novel The First Teacher. Basically, a goofy and Bolshevised Red Army soldier, demobilised after the Communist victory in the Russian Civil War, and with his habit of enthusiastically repeating revolutionary maxims, spends a lot of the time getting the piss taken out of him by Kyrgyz villagers who view what he says as being irrelevant to their lives. A few years before he made Pervyy uchitel, Konchalvosky, while uncredited in helping with the writing, once played a bit part in his friend Andrei Tarkovsky’s war film Ivan’s Childhood (he very briefly played a geeky bespectacled soldier trying to win the affections of an army nurse, with her also being pursued by a lecherous captain).

He is perhaps most well-known in the ‘West,’ though, for such things as his taking on of Akira Kurosawa’s screenplay for the 1985 film Runaway Train, with two escaped convicts trapped on the out of control locomotive, hurtling through the wastes of Alaska. And, not to mention, the seminal Sylvester Stallone buddy cop flick Tango & Cash.

In my absence, however, I think any members of the admittedly small audience who visit here regularly will be in safe, capable hands, considering there are two new authors for this blog, who will no doubt keep you entertained while I’m away until the end of March. I should have some more filler posted up by then. I’m sure you can hardly contain yourselves at the thought.