KALIK, MIKHAIL

KALIK, MIKHAIL (Moshe ; 1927– ), Russian film director. The son of an actor, Kalik graduated in 1949 from the art history faculty of the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. From 1951 to 1954 he was imprisoned in a "corrective-labor" camp, having been sentenced for "Jewish bourgeois nationalism." After graduating from the Institute's directing faculty in 1958, he became one of the representatives of the so-called "poetic cinema," a significant aspect of the new wave in Soviet art in the early 1960s. Together with B. Rytsarev he made the film Yunost' nashikh otsov ("Youth of Our Fathers," 1958), adapted from the novel Razgrom ("The Rout") by Fadeyev in which the appearance of the Jewish hero Levinson was stressed, and Ataman Kodr ("The Cossack Leader Kodr," 1959). Kalik included scenes with Jewish characters in his films Kolbel'naya ("Cradle Song," 1960), and Chelovek idet za solntsem ("Man Goes Beyond the Sun," 1962). In his film Do svidaniya, mal'chiki ("Goodbye, Boys," 1965), Kalik partially relied on his personal experience to depict the tragic fate of his generation. One of the film's three heroes, a Jewish youth, is arrested during the Doctors' Plot and perishes in prison. Despite his successes and prizes, he was not allowed to make films on Jewish themes, for example, about *Korczak. His television film Tsena ("The Price," 1969), based on the play by Arthur *Miller, was shown with the name of Kalik omitted from the credits several years after he immigrated to Israel in 1971 after a long struggle.

In Israel Kalik directed Three Men and a Girl (1975) based on short stories by Gorky, several short films, and a video-documentary about the country, which was shown at the entrance to the Israeli pavilion at the Moscow International Book Fair in 1987. In 1991 he made the autobiographical And the Wind Returneth.

[E. Kapitaikin /

The Shorter Jewish Encylopaedia in Russian]