Regulated Immediacy

Abstract

This chapter explores the work of Viktor Sokolov, a much-admired director at Lenfilm whose extensive work in genre films (production dramas, sports films, literary adaptations) made him relatively invisible to the critical establishment of his own day and later. Sokolov’s combination of emotional surges and a precise and critical eye for cinematic patterning made him difficult to classify at any time, and never more so than in A Day of Sunshine and Rain (1967), an unusual children’s film that explores the unexpected and fragile friendship of two young boys who have skipped school, but also the nature and purpose of art.