The Last Grudge

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.

The vain station master of a Russian train station out in the sticks has a quarrel with an old peasant woman and has her thrown in jail. The local party youth organisation finally manage to get her released, after having to cut through lots of red tape.

In a capitalist country, workers are heavily repressed but manage to get a Death Ray to fight back. Partially lost movie.

The first Russian talking picture which won a prize at the 1st Venice IFF. The action is set in 1923. The USSR is struggling with hunger and economic ruin. It is a story of homeless teenagers for whom a work commune is set up with the idea of uniting and reforming them.

The First World War, the Russian-Austrian front in March 1917. Hungarian soldier Janos becomes acquainted with Bolshevik ideas and helps a Russian prisoner of war escape.

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.

The film covers the events of 1896-1905 - from the first revolutionary gatherings to the armed Moscow uprising of workers at Krasnaya Presnya, later called Bloody Sunday. St. Petersburg students Alexander Mikhailov and Yevgeny Svetlov and a peasant girl Varvara Postnikova arrive in Moscow and follow the complicated path of underground revolutionaries.

The movie tells about the first years of Nazism. In the center of the plot is a German student graduating from an institute and receiving a diploma with a gold medal for success in science. The same is honored by his Jewish friend Joseph Voltmeyer. During the solemn ceremony, Nazi students provoke a fight, beat Joseph and Ruddy, who stood up for him.

As a response to criticism for the allegedly excessive “mass appeal” of his earlier epic STORM OVER ASIA (1928), Vsevolod Pudovkin unleashed his flair for experimentation in what was supposed to be the director’s first sound feature. Everything went wrong: technical problems forced him to complete the film as a silent; viewers were baffled by the lack of a recognizable plot; then, the ideological climate of the Soviet Union changed. He was now being blamed for catering to bourgeois taste! Time has come to set the record straight. Here’s lyrical cinema at its best, deliberately operatic and yet intimate as it matches the characters’ inner life with the solemn rhythms of nature, and depicted through breathtaking black-and-white photography. A sensation at last year’s Pordenone fest, Pudovkin’s long-forgotten swan song to the art of montage is resurrected by Gabriel Thibaudeau’s emotionally charged live music performance. –PCU (USSR, 1930, 75m)

An agit-film about the struggle of Ukrainian peasants against the White Poles. A young woman, the daughter of a blacksmith taken prisoner by the White Poles, and a Red commander organise a partisan unit. One scene depicts the capture of a Polish landowner attempting to elude capture. He had been hiding from the Red Army soldiers in a barrel. The peasants nailed the barrel shut and, having inscribed the words: ‘To Warsaw – to Mr Piłsudski’, threw it into the Dnieper. Lost film.

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.

A Jewish tannery worker, Nahum Beychik, invents a machine that makes hard work easier in leather tanning. A private entrepreneur, former kulak Lopatin, tries to buy the invention and use it for his own selfish interests. Having met with a decisive refusal from Nahum Beychik, the kulak exploits the anti-Semitic sentiments of the backward part of the workers and, with the help of his accomplices, hooligans and truants, tries to kill the inventor.

A down on his luck peasant goes to fight in World War I and returns home a hero. Partially lost.

Khokhlova, a girl-reporter on a Moscow newpaper, falls in love with factory manager Petrovsky. To her he's the epitome of manliness--virile, decisive, strong-minded. Conversely, she rejects the sensitive, diffident editor Vasilchikov, who's in love with her, as unmanly. Her infatuation affects her work, and she is fired.

The brave son of a woman inthe political underground tries to save her from Nazi stormtroopers.

Goga is a Russian man who has no luck with women. He has a chance meeting with Mary Pickford, and after she kisses him on the cheek, he becomes as irresistible as her.

The rich widow Madame Collie leaves the fortune to her lost niece Maria Ivanova. Two cousins of Maria go from Paris to Moscow in order to search her. They have to find a 17 year old girl with the birthmark on her right shoulder. The documents of the heiress are hidden in her doll.

Three reporters and an office girl are trying to stop a bacteriological strike by some powerful western business leaders against the USSR.