Lev Kulidzhanov
| Lev Kulidzhanov | |
|---|---|
| Born |
19 March 1924 Tbilisi, Soviet Union (now Georgia) |
| Died | 18 February 2002 (aged 77) Moscow, Russia |
| Occupation | Film director Screenwriter |
| Years active | 1954–1994 |
Lev Aleksandrovich Kulidzhanov (Russian: Лев Александрович Кулиджанов; 19 March 1924 – 18 February 2002) was a Soviet film director, screenwriter and professor at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. The head of the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR (1965—1986). People's Artist of the USSR (1976). He directed a total of twelve films between 1954 and 1994.
Born on March 19, 1924 (according to other sources including his tomb — on August 19, 1923) in Tbilisi, Georgian SSR. His father Aleksandr Nikolaevich Kulidzhanov (originally Kulidzhanyan) was an Armenian revolutionary who served as a high-ranking Communist Party official. He was arrested during the Great Purge of 1937 and disappeared without a trace. Kulidzhanov's mother Ekaterina Dmitrievna was either of Russian or of Armenian descent. She was arrested along with her husband and sentenced to five years in the Akmol labor camp in Kazakhstan. She returned home only in 1944. All those years Kulidzhanov spent with his grandmother Tamara Nikolaevna.
From 1942 to 1943 he studied at the Tbilisi State University. In 1944 he traveled to Moscow and enrolled in the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography to study film direction under Grigori Kozintsev, but left it in just a year because of the poor living conditions and returned to Tbilisi. In 1948 Kulidzhanov became a VGIK student again, with Sergei Gerasimov and Tamara Makarova as his teachers. He graduated in 1955 and immediately started working at the Gorky Film Studio, releasing his first short film Ladies co-directed with Genrikh Oganisyan.
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