Aelita: Queen of Mars 1924
A young man travels to Mars in a rocket ship, where he leads a popular uprising against the ruling group with the support of Queen Aelita, who has fallen in love with him after watching him through a telescope.
A young man travels to Mars in a rocket ship, where he leads a popular uprising against the ruling group with the support of Queen Aelita, who has fallen in love with him after watching him through a telescope.
Working with children led Barskaya to create superb direct sound and an inspired style of shooting. Don’t look for conventional cinematic syntax here. The film is chaotic in the way that Soviet films still knew how to be, and Langlois couldn’t help but be seduced by its rebellious spirit, its anarchy and love of children, comparable to Vigo’s Zero de conduite. As well as being a film made with and for children, it offers a complex take on Western society. Pre-Nazi Germany is not named as such but is carefully reconstructed, possibly under advice from Karl Radek, and children offer a playful reflection of class struggle – doubly excluded, as proletarians and as minors. “They play in the same way that they live”, one intertitle says. The interaction between their comical games and the yet more ludicrous ones played by adults is developed on several levels.
Not being able to implement his invention in his home country, engineer Arrowsmith, the author of the patent for ore flotation, goes to the USSR to work at one of the flotation plants, where he soon learns that a group of Soviet engineers is conducting similar work.
In 1918 a young and simple Mongol herdsman and trapper is cheated out of a valuable fox fur by a European capitalist fur trader. Ostracized from the trading post, he escapes to the hills after brawling with the trader who cheated him. In 1920 he becomes a Soviet partisan, and helps the partisans fight for the Soviets against the occupying British army. However he is captured by the British when they try to requisition cattle from the herdsmen at the same time as the commandant meets with a reincarnated Grand Lama. After the trapper is shot, the army discovers an amulet that suggests he is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. They find him still alive, so the army restores his health and plans to use him as the head of a puppet regime. The trapper is thus thrust into prominence as he is placed in charge of the puppet government. By the end, however, the "puppet" turns against his masters in an outburst of fury.
The film is based on real events and reveals the tragic episodes from the life of the Austrian biologist scientist-materialist Paul Kammerer (1880-1926), hunted by regressive scientists and Catholic reactionaries who committed suicide.
The Soviet Union wants more influence in Europe and decides to get more power by giving the nation of Boufferia a new king, an easy to handle drunkard, because they don't have enough power over the current king.
A supposedly ordinary woman’s personal triumph and tragedy is explored in Igor Savchenko’s 1936 Sluchainaya Vstrecha (Accidental Meeting). Irina – the best shock worker in a provincial children’s factory – develops a relationship with the newly arrived and charming physical culture instructor named Grisha. Soon we learn that Irina is pregnant. Disappointed and angry on hearing her news, Grisha asks her about what will now happen to all their dreams.
This documentary, made up of 3 episodes, is based on three songs sung by anonymous people in Soviet Russia about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Two young women fight over the love of a hunter.
A young Lyova travels with the hope of ascent from Czarist Russia to New York. Disappointed, he returns to the young Soviet Union and is glad to have found a simple work.
Two men shipwrecked on an island in the Caspian Sea are saved by members of a collective farm, where they work on its fishing boats and woo the young woman leading the fishermen.
The film addresses issues of racism in the Jim Crow American South. Themes of racial injustice, racial violence, working-class solidarity dominate the film. It depicts black men working in a field, walking in chains, sitting behind bars, and being executed in an electric chair. In most scenes, a white authority figure is seen whipping or guarding the men.
Naturally, the circus milieu of 2 Buldy 2 (1929) encourages stunts. A father and son, both clowns, are to perform together for the first time, but the civil war separates them, and the elder Buldy, tempted for a moment to acquiesce to the White forces, casts his lot with the revolution. At the climax Buldy Jr. escapes the Whites thanks to flashy trampoline and trapeze acrobatics; the gaping enemy soldiers forget to shoot.
From his early silent works, the great Russian film director, Herr Yakov Protazanov, made literary adaptations from equally great Russian writers, as is the case with "Chiny I Lyudi" ( Ranks And People ) (1929) in which three short stories by Chekhov, "Anna On The Neck", "Death Of A Petty Official" and "Chameleon" were assembled for the silent screen.
Ogudolova, unlike her sisters, refuses to obey her mother's wish that she marry a wealthy old man in order to collect a dowry
In a remote Russian village during World War I, colourful and nuanced characters experience divided loyalties: family loyalty vs. personal desire, nationalism vs. transcendent humanism.
A 1925 Soviet comedy sponsored by the Soviet Finance Ministry, with a plot promoting the new economy. A small-town tailor, Petya Petelkin (Ilyinsky), bought a lottery ticket and handed it to his landlord, widow Shirinkina (Deykun) who wants to marry him. Petya is a hard-working tailor trying to start his own business. He is also in love with Katya (Maretskaya), whom he wants to marry. He has to survive a cascade of funny situations in the unstable Soviet reality, before his romance with Katya comes to a happy ending.
The film is based on The Governor, a play by Leonid Andreyev. V.I. Kachalov plays the governor of a small Russian province who tries to treat the people under his authority with kindness and equanimity. But when a local factory goes on strike, the governor buckles under to pressure from the Tzar and orders the wholesale slaughter of the strikers. He pays for this betrayal of his trust with his life -- at the hands of a courageous Bolshevik spy.
In an unnamed English-speaking capitalist land, a young engineer invents inexhaustible giant robots to replace the fragile human workers on high-volume assembly-lines, and soon finds his invention co-opted by the military-industrial complex.