Karmen, Roman

Born Nov. 16 (29), 1906, in Odessa. Soviet cameraman, film director, journalist, and scriptwriter. People’s Artist of the USSR (1966). Member of the CPSU since 1939.

Karmen graduated from the camera operation department of the State Institute of Cinematography in 1931. He proved himself an adept film reporter during the National Revolutionary War in Spain (1936–39). From the film that he and B. K. Maka-seev took, 22 installments of the film chronicle On the Events in Spain were created, as well as the documentary film Spain (1939) and the poetic film Granada, Granada, My Granada (1968, by Karmen and K. M. Simonov). At the end of the 1930’s Karmen began his work as a director with the films A Day in a New World (with M. Ia. Slutskii, 1940), TheSedovMen (1940), and In China (1941). During the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), Karmen headed film groups at the front and helped shoot the films Defeat of the German Armies Near Moscow (1942), Leningrad in Combat (1942), and Berlin (1945). In 1946 he made the film Judgment of the Nations, which dealt with the Nuremberg trials. He later made the film The Great Patriotic War (1965) based on materials from the newsreels.

Karmen directed the films Story of the Caspian Oil Workers (1953) and Conquerors of the Sea (1959), both of which won the Lenin Prize in 1960. He made the first Soviet wide-screen film, Far and Wide My Country Stretches (1958), as well as the films Vietnam (1955), Awakening of India (1956), Island in Flames (1961), Comrade Berlin (1969), and Continent in Flames (1972). He teaches at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, where he has been a professor since 1970. Karmen received the State Prize of the USSR in 1942, 1947, and 1952 and has been awarded five orders and various medals.