There are many shades of grey in Yevgeny Yufit's world.
Yesterday, the Russian film maker treated Penn students to clips of his black and white work from the 1980s and 1990s.
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1961, Yufit started Mzhalala Films, the first independent film studio in Russia.
The clips shown to the Penn students represented Yufit's perspective on various social elements in the Russia of the last two decades.
One of them represented the brutal murder of travelers by marauding gangs and compared the acts to those of animals.
Another looked at the government's scientific experiments, including a shadowy attempt to clone human beings with trees.
Yufit also talked about his experiences as a filmmaker under a totalitarian government.
"Showing my films to large audiences would have been impossible. The government would have cracked down heavily," he said.
However, under former Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev, film production became subsidized, but the government still influenced the themes used by film makers.
Yufit was always in a comfortable position because he made his films with an extremely low budget. He could afford to be independent.
Yufit spoke of his endeavors as a journey in the artistic underground.
"I represented a point of view the establishment did not want to listen to," he said.
To portray this point of view, he used black humor to expose the absurdity of societal follies.
Yufit never moved into mainstream film making, preferring to deal with themes associated with art cinema.
His audience consisted mostly of those in art circles and the world of the theater.
Yufit also explained the predominance of black and white in his films. He believed that they lent a poignancy to his subject that color could not achieve.
Within the art genre, he experimented endlessly.
"By nature an experimentalist, I cannot bear to see films in any one way," he said.
The audience's responses were mixed. Some, like College senior John Coplan, were not very impressed.
"I think the presentation was very dry. The clips were not coherent," he said.
Nathan Clark, a first-year graduate student in the College of Design was more enthusiastic.
"It was impressive. I was fascinated by his use of black and white. It was very effective," he said.
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