Grigory Roshal is a director who hardly has his own handwriting, but is rather revealing as a factor of time. When the avant-garde aesthetics dominated, he thought from this paradigm. When the time came for a small picture, he consistently filmed the lives of great people in the stylistics of late Stalinist socialist realism. Here you and academician Pavlov, and Mussorgsky, and other Rimsky-Korsakov. That's just in the thaw he somehow did not thaw, and he shot a monstrous picture called ' Court of madmen' at one time gained sad fame due to its inadequacy, and its name became a household name.
'His Excellency' also not a unique film. Immediately you feel dependence on camera tricks and editing wonders of the Soviet avant-garde cinema. His elders, not by age, but by talent, paved the way, and the so-understood film language became mainstream as long as it existed ' the great mute'. Roshal does not invent anything, but simply shoots a very local story as a plot ' The Great Turn'. But he fails to portray the Jewish province as a symbol of future change. In general, the settlement zone has repeatedly attracted the attention of filmmakers, but most often at the output we can see quite propaganda films. Exactly. The whole Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s is propaganda, but its best examples are art in the first place. Eisenstein, personally coloring the red banner in 'Battleship...', makes a political plot, but also gives rise to one of the most iconic and significant stories in the history of cinema.
But Roshal did not find his own red banner. Despite the technical and stylistic delights, the plot plan is obvious and ideological milestones in their places. It seems to give the director the task to shoot the same, but changing the artistic approach, he will do just that without hesitation. Which is what happened next. Although Roshal noted and the screenwriter of the excellent 'New Gulliver', but not a single iconic film has not made. Therefore, if you are interested in the broad context of the film language of the 1920s, you can pay homage to His Excellency & #39. In any other case, there is nothing to motivate.