Criterion’s Eclipse series is a selection of “lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics,” and Dušan Makavejev’s set of three films from the mid-to-late 1960s, Man is not a bird, Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator and Innocence Unprotected, certainly fits the bill. Most people are probably more familiar with Makavejev’s later, more extreme work. This DVD package includes a brief, but inspired and wide-ranging leaflet, which puts the films and director in context, and should be very useful to those new to Makavejev’s work.

Since the glasnost years the Stalin era has become a popular topic in Russian cinema, and has also helped to draw attention to Russian film abroad. At the last Moscow Film Festival (2009), the Grand-Prix was once again conferred on a picture about the Stalin era, Nikolai Dostal's Petya on the Road to the Kingdom of Heaven [Petya po doroge v Tsarstvie Nebesnoe].

South of Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport lies the microraion, Belye Stolby [White Pillars], home to Gosfil’mofond, the State Film Fund. It is housed in a tall, red building. An eye-catching circle crowns the façade, cutting a hole in the steel blue sky, and reminding me of film reels, or perhaps the shiny metal canisters in which films are stored. It is February. Black and white birches (another meaning of Belye Stolby) protrude from the deep snow. This is the Russian Homeland for Old Films–specifically, for prints which have been “retired” from active life in regular film distribution, and now rest in this realm called Gosfil’mofond.