The New York Times-20080127-Film

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Film

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Film

Stephen Holden

Alexander Sokurov's moving 2006 documentary, Elegy of Life, shown at last year's New York Film Festival, is one of four recent Russian movies being presented in ENVISIONING RUSSIA, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's celebration of 100 years of Russian film at the Walter Reade Theater. The series, which continues through Feb. 14, includes landmarks like Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and Kalatozov's Cranes Are Flying along with social-realist curiosities like Tractor Drivers, a 1939 song-and-dance celebration of Soviet military technology.

Elegy of Life, whose first screening is Sunday at 1 p.m., contemplates the musical and personal partnership of the master cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, who died last April, and his wife, the opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya. The film visits their 50th wedding anniversary party and recounts their conflicts with the Soviet government. After sheltering the dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in their home, they were driven into exile and stripped of their citizenship until it was restored in 1990.

The series, which began Friday, also includes the American premieres of Aleksei Balabanov's Cargo 200, a grisly portrait of Russia in 1984 on the eve of Perestroika, and Vera Storozheva's Traveling With Pets, which won the grand prize at this year's Moscow International Film Festival and whose story imagines alternate lives for a woman in the wilds of central Russia whose husband suddenly dies. Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, (212) 975-5600, filmlinc.org; $11.

[Illustration]PHOTO: Galina Vishnevskaya, left, in Alexander Sokurov's Aleksandra. (PHOTOGRAPH BY REZO FILMS)