Maya Plisetskaya
"The Eternal Face" - Since he took his father's death mask he has stopped carving. The sculptor, guided by an internal voice, must leave. He departs from his Bavarian village and family, who belong to an indefinite past, and sets off for Prague. On his journey he has visions: Tadpoles squirming in a puddle, a worm writhing in agony, a flying eagle attacking a swan and a dreamlike masked procession which files past him. Upon his arrival in Prague he meets an invalid dancer - she has been expecting him. Seized by a quiet affection for one another, they take a coach-ride through the desolate streets of fin de siècle Prague. But death is also closing in on her.
A look at the rich history of the Mariinsky Theatre in the birth and growth of the Russian tradition in opera, music and ballet.
Maya Plisetskaya was born in Moscow in 1925 and studied at the Bolshoi Theatre Ballet School, becoming a principal dancer with the Bolshoi on graduating in 1943. She became prima ballerina in 1962, and after being excluded for political reasons many years from tours to the West, she was finally in 1959 allowed to join the American tour with the Bolshoi. She soon gained recognition as one of the world's foremost ballerinas, combining flawless technique with a sensitivity to emotional nuance and becoming the first to truly understand how to combine outstanding dance skills with dramatic expression. This documentary features footage of her greatest successes as a ballerina together with an interview in which Plisetskaya describes her life as a dancer, from Stalin to perestroika, giving an insight into the life of an artist in this extraordinary chapter of Russian history.
The film is a Bolshoi Ballet version of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina with choreography by Maya Plisetskaya who also took on the titular role. Anna Karenina is a young wife of an older husband. She has an affair with the handsome Count Vronsky. By following her desires Anna complicates her life.
The film is dedicated to the great Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). It tells of the last twenty years of the great master’s life, of his friendship with Baroness von Meck, an outstanding woman of her time, who for many years was Tchaikovsky’s guardian angel. The film also includes retrospections of the composer’s childhood and adolescent years, with Tchaikovsky’s life poetically recounted against the background of fragments from his operas and ballets performed by the best Russian musicians.
The plot of the film is the love of a married woman, Anna Karenina, and a young officer, Aleksei Vronsky. Anna leaves the family in search of happiness to her beloved person. She has to take a very serious step in her life - to part with her son. The attitude of the high society towards her is changing. All this brings a lot of pain and humiliation to the main character. The tragic story of love and betrayal, the fate of a woman, for the sake of passion who decided to change her life irrevocably.
The Bolshoi Ballet performs the Russian fairy tale of a Queen Maiden (Maya Plisetskaya), a stableboy (Vladimir Vasiliev) and a lucky horse (Alla Shcherbinina).
An anthology of three filmed ballets, two written for the film and the third an abridgment of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake". It was entered into the 1954 Cannes Film Festival. Filmed in color.
