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.
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.
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.
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".
The picture compares the fate of two heroines Anna and her lively and energetic sister-in-law Vasilisa, who openly defies the old way of life.
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.
Life changes for a Moscow couple after they allow an old friend of the husband’s to move in.
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.
A compilation of newsreels shot between 1913 and 1917 - the years leading up to the Russian Revolution.
A man discovers that he's not the father of his wife's baby.
In a small Tatar village during the traditional holiday of the beginning of plowing, monks appear accompanied by soldiers. Trying to convert the local population to Orthodoxy by force, the monks and soldiers meet a tough rebuff from the locals. The wife of the peasant Bulat dies, and his son Asfan is taken away in an unknown direction.
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.
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 boy is sitting at a table, writing a letter for Boris Prutkov. The cartoon follows the journey of this letter from Rostov to Leningrad, where its addressee Prutkov has just left for Berlin; when the letter arrives in Berlin, Prutkov has just departed for London; as the letter arrives in London, Prutkov is already on a steamboat to Brazil, and once the letters is delivered by postman Don Basilio, Prutkov is already on his way back to Leningrad– where the letter, having followed Prutkov around the world, finally reaches him. The film sings a song of praise to the global postal services and to the reliability of the postmen, but it also tells the story of a journey around the world, returning once more to the new Soviet capital: Leningrad.
Chinese workers start a rebellion, arm themselves and take over the train on which they are travelling and manage to break through the frontier.
Directed by Pavel Petrov-Bytov.
Katerina Izmailova is a filmization of Dmitry Shostakovich's long-suppressed 1936 opera. Galina Vishnevskaya stars as Katerina, a bored 19th century farm wife. At the behest of her grungy lover, Katerina murders her husband and her father-in-law. She and her new beau are both sent to Siberia, where the lover almost immediately takes up with a younger woman. Banned by Stalin for its bleak portrait of Soviet life, Katerina Izmailova was not given a Russian staging for over 40 years; its Metropolitan Opera debut did not occur until 1994. Dmitri Shostakovich also wrote the screenplay for the screen version of Katerina Izmailova.
Pavel Petrov-Bytov was an enfant terrible of the highbrow Leningrad Sovkino film factory. He was notorious for his article “We Have No Soviet Filmmaking,” in which he criticized all the achievements of the Soviet avant-garde. In spite of his beliefs and his scandalous struggle with “bourgeois” and “formalist” filmmaking, Petrov-Bytov directed an aesthetically refined work, shot entirely on set with masterful chiaroscuro lighting: a perfect example of “Soviet expressionism.” Based on a Maxim Gorky story, the plot of Cain and Artem provides a wake-up call to the Russian people to overcome alcoholism and religious factionalism, as it spotlights the (many) drunken denizens of a typical village and their disregard for the Jewish shoemaker Cain.
