Roman Lazarevich Karmen (born Efraim Leyzorovich Korenman) (Russian: Роман Лазаревич Кармен; 30 November [O.S. 17 November] 1906 – 28 April 1978) was a Soviet film director, war cinematographer, documentary filmmaker, journalist, screenwriter, pedagogue, and publicist.[1]
Karmen was born to a Jewish family in Odessa. His father was the writer Lazar Karmen (real name Leyzor Korenman) and his mother was the translator Dina Leypuner.
Karmen was a communist, and roamed the world portraying the Spanish Civil War, the battles for Moscow and Leningrad in World War II, the First Indochina War, and the rise of communism in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and in South America during the 1960s.
Karmen was also granted personal access to the emergence of communist leaders China's Mao Zedong, Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh and Cuba's Fidel Castro, and Chile's socialist president Salvador Allende.
Karmen's documentary methods were both influential and controversial; his renowned technical ability captured the emotion of war and the repetition of key shots and framings between film projects became a hallmark, but he would often blur the lines of cinéma vérité by restaging key battles, including the lifting of the siege of Leningrad (Ленинград в борьбе, 1942), the Viet Minh victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (Вьетнам, 1955), and the 1956 landing in Cuba of militants led by Fidel Castro, re-enacted as a first person documentary.
In 2001, French documentary directors Dominique Chapuis and Patrick Barbéris produced a 90-minute film, titled Roman Karmen: A Cineast In The Revolution's Service.[2] The following year Barbéris (his co-author Chapuis had died in late 2001) published the portrait Roman Karmen, A Red Legend.[3]
