Private Life : Premier prix du festival national de l'Union soviétique de 1983 Nommé aux Oscars 1983 du meilleur film étranger
Berlin : Grand prix international au festival de Cannes (meilleur long métrage documentaire), 1946
Prix Staline pour Yuli Raïzman et Elisaveta Svilova(montage), 1946
Film Director, People's Artist of the USSR (1964), Hero of Socialist Labor (1973).
Yuli Raizman graduated from the faculty of Social Sciences of the first MSU (Moscow State University) in
1924, the same year he worked as a literary consultant at the studio "Mezhrabpom-Rus"1, and as
assistant director of Y. Protazanov in 1925.
At the end of 1926, Raizman was called to the Red Army and commissioned to PUR Agitprom (Political
governance of Soviet armed forces). In turn, PUR appointed him as a director to the newly created
studio "Gosvoenkino" 2 where Yuli Raizman produced his first film "Krug" (1927).
From 1931, Raizman worked as a film director at the studio "Mosfilm" (in 1948, after the comedy "The
Train Goes East" was banned, he was transferred to the Riga film studio), where he collaborated with
the screenwriter Evgeny Gabrilovovich. In 1944-1964, he is a professor at VGIK (The Gerasimov Institute
of Cinematography) and supervisor of the directing and acting workshop.
In 1935 Raizman made the film "Pilots" (1935) about the “greatness of the day-to-day life of Soviet
people". <...> the charm of "Pilots" is not as much in the astonishing poetry of the everyday flying school,
captured by the experienced and elegant movements of the camera of L. V. Kosmatov; the film is
penetrated with light, yet not the one of a the boastful apotheosis of 1930s, but of a timid motive of
serene happiness that all these young people just live and fly.
A new height in the work of Raizman was "Mashenka" (1942, Stalin's prize 1943), launched in
production before the beginning of the war. The particular charm of "Mashenka" is that the everyday,
unremarkable pre-war life of a modest telegraph employee and her friend, a taxi driver, appears as
through a washed clean glass, literally penetrated with light and poetry of being.
During the war, Raizman creates another film in which the heroic is inseparable from the everyday, and
the grandiose is not at all in contradiction with the humane -"The Sky of Moscow" (1944), a kind of
continuation of "Pilots". At the same time, he undertakes two political orders, documentary films "On the
question of the Armistice with Finland" (1944) and "Berlin" (1945), both distinguished with another Stalin
prizes in 1946.
In 1948, the director was relegated at the lower capacity Riga film studio, as a consequence of not meeting
Stalin’s expectations with his lyrical comedy "The Train Goes East" (1947). This seemingly unpretentious
film was criticized for the small importance of its themes and a lightweight treatment of the idea of return
of the Soviet people to a peaceful life after the war and their inspired building of a new society.
In the early 1950s, the opal of Raizman continued, this time because of his Jewish origin, as he fell under
the general appellation of “rootless cosmopolitans"3 - he was suspended from work in cinema for several
years. Only in 1955 Raizman had returned to creative work and shot a family drama "The Lesson of Life".
Three years later, in 1958, the film director makes the cult film of Soviet time "The Communist", made
honestly and with sincere faith in the sacrificial feat of the modest storekeeper Vasily Gubanov. From that
time, Raizman took place among the most venerable Soviet directors, he fruitfully worked in the 1960-
1980-ies, and made a number of successful films that provoked a public interest.
