Motion Picture Director. An important Soviet filmmaker of the late silent and early sound periods. Friedrich (or Fridrikh) Markovich Ermler was born Vladimir Mikhaylovich Breslaw in Rechitsa, Latvia. His initial training as a pharmacist was interrupted by World War I service, and he fought with the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. He then enrolled at Leningrad's Fine Arts Institute. A committed Communist (he joined the party in 1922), he deplored what he saw as the stylistic excesses of Soviet silent cinema and his first films as director, "Scarlet Fever" (1924) and "Children of the Storm" (1926), were made by the group he founded, the Cinema Experimental Workshop (KEM), which aimed for propaganda that was more easily assimilated by the masses. This won him the support of the Central Committee and during the 1930s his work was promoted as a perfect example of "Socialist Realism". Ermler's achievement was a difficult balancing act, adhering to party ideology without sacrificing his intelligent command of the medium, and he enjoyed a measure of creative independence envied by his colleagues. He even flirted with forbidden topics, such as political corruption and the Stalinist purges. His best films are notable for their intense realism and psychologically detailed characters. They include "The Parisian Cobbler" (1928), "Fragment of an Empire" (1929), "Counterplan" (1932), with a famous music score by Dmitri Shostakovich, "Peasants" (1935), "The Great Citizen" (two parts, 1938 and 1939), and "The Turning Point" (1946). In 1935 Ermler visited Hollywood as an ambassador for Soviet films and from 1939 to 1943 he was artistic director of the Lenfilm Studio. Among his many honors were four Stalin Prizes, the Order of Lenin (1935), and People's Artist of the USSR (1948). Having sailed through the terrors of Stalin's regime relatively unscathed, Ermler's fortunes declined after the dictator's death in 1953 and he ended his career making documentaries. He was given a retrospective at the 2003 Moscow Film Festival.