The General Line 1929
Also known as The Old and the New (Staroye i Novoye), The General Line illustrates Lenin’s stated imperative that the nation move from agrarian to industrial culture in an epic ode to farm-collectivization progress.
Also known as The Old and the New (Staroye i Novoye), The General Line illustrates Lenin’s stated imperative that the nation move from agrarian to industrial culture in an epic ode to farm-collectivization progress.
Sergei M. Eisenstein's docu-drama about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Made ten years after the events and edited in Eisenstein's 'Soviet Montage' style, it re-enacts in celebratory terms several key scenes from the revolution.
An adaptation of Evgenii Zamiatin’s short story “The Cave,” about a musician dying of hunger in his large, unheated Petersburg apartment because he was not needed in the revolutionary city.
A young country girl who becomes an apple seller is seduced and abandoned. She finds a protector but when he is arrested for theft she finds honest work in a factory.
Life changes for a Moscow couple after they allow an old friend of the husband’s to move in.
In the short-lived Commune of Paris, a conscripted soldier falls in love with a Communard saleswoman. As the army cracks down on the revolutionaries, the soldier is forced to fight against the Commune, and the pair's love is put to the test.
Chinese workers start a rebellion, arm themselves and take over the train on which they are travelling and manage to break through the frontier.
Shame or Counterplan is a 1932 Soviet drama film directed by Sergei Yutkevich and Fridrikh Ermler. The film’s title-song called "The Song of the Counterplan", composed by Dmitri Shostakovich, became world famous and was adapted into "Au-devant de la vie", a notable song of the French socialist movement of the 1930s. This film could be considered as a Stalin propaganda film. The plot involves an effort to catch "wreckers" at work in a Soviet factory. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Through the travelogue format, it depicts the multitude of Soviet peoples in remote areas of USSR and details the entirety of the wealth of the Soviet land. Focusing on cultural and economic diversity, the film is in fact a call for unification in order to build a "complete socialist society".
Director Frederick Ermler’s last silent feature and the last of four collaborations with actor Fiodor Nikitin. Nikitin plays an officer who spends a decade after the Great War as a shell-shocked amnesiac, until a glimpse of a woman through a train window sparks the return of his memory. He makes his way back to St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, a man out of time who struggles to make sense of the new society brought about by the revolution.
This SovKino production was a major early experiment in Soviet historical film about the oprichnina period of Muscovite history, combining the costumed drama and Gothic thrills of the genre with historical materialist commentary on the dialectical collision of scientific progress and patriarchal religious tyranny under Tsar Ivan the Terrible. It follows a self-taught inventor from the serf class Nikishka, whose efforts to build a flying machine incite accusations of witchcraft. Nikishka and his beloved Fima are persecuted by the feudal lord Kurlyatev, who took their village in a petty land squabble. They’re rescued when Kurlyatev’s lands are taken by the Tsar in his autocratic campaign against the feudal system. Ivan puts Nikishka to work in his linen mill, where the young serf is coveted by Tsarina Maria Temryukovna, who the Tsar’s been ignoring in favor of his cupbearer Feodor. A series of harrowing intrigues wind a bloody dance through bedchamber, feast hall, cathedral and dungeon.
About the fate of a ex-Wrangel's White Army soldier who flees from the Foreign Legion and returns to the USSR.
The film tells about the Decembrists’ revolt in the south of Russia. Right before the Decembrist Revolt 1825 a chevalier of fortune decides that it's time for a game. But on whom to make a bet? He asks the cards. But he's not the only one who makes the choice.
A compilation of newsreels shot between 1913 and 1917 - the years leading up to the Russian Revolution.
The rebel leader Jose Real is allowed to leave prison for one day to visit his family. But it is a ruse to make him reveal the whereabouts of his rebel gang. This existential drama disguised as a saga about the proletarian struggle presents a lonely and insecure individual who is challenged to act more heroically than he is prepared to, but who constantly questions his confidence and loyalties.
This little known Russian movie, from the director of the following year's Oblomok imperii/ A Fragment of Empire is both surprising and accomplished. The mute cobbler is interested in the local girl but she is already pregnant by one of the gang of sailor suit toughs. The Soviet Youth League secretary's only assistance to her is a book about sex in Russian literature and things turn nasty.
This documentary depicts the creation of collective farms for Jews in Crimea. It shows them building their houses, digging a well, and farming the land.
When Praskovya’s new husband attempts to hurt her on their wedding night, she fights back, and when he’s called away to fight in World War I not long after, she tends to their farm on her own, determined to make the best of a bad situation.
A little girl denounce her evil step-father who plotted against the communist movement. The film, under the influence of Russian formalism, has some interesting experimental compositions.