Blackwood's "Willows" and Old Believers film

[Extollager]

I've just seen Jana Sevcikova's 46-minute black-and-white movie about the Orthodox Old Believers in the Danube Delta region. The subject interests me as a guy who teaches Russian lit. But I kept thinking of Blackwood's famous story "The Willows," set on the Danube, which surely is one of the very finest stories of supernatural dread ever written. There are many scenes filmed along the river. I won't say that the scenes are precisely as I pictured the story, but the have, to me, a real eeriness all the same. Watch this (it's available on DVD, so you don't have to go the Telluride film festival) and you may feel like you have ventured to a strange lost world. I suppose I get more of a sense of wonder from this than from any fantasy-genre movie I have ever seen.

Those of you who are Werner Herzog fans will like to know that he was obviously impressed by the movie. The DVD comes with a transcript of a film-class (or something) interview with Sevcikova at which Herzog was present. However, the film-maker I was most reminded of wasn't Herzog but Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly his film Andrei Rublev....

 

[nomadman]

Thanks for that. I'll be on the lookout for it.