Aleksandr Sokurov - Avtomobil nabiraet nadezhnost AKA The Automobile Gains in Reliability (1974)

This film was created by Sokurov before or during his VGIK student years for the regional TV of Gorki. He does not consider it a part of his filmography. For its creators, it was just a TV program, and the people who worked on it most often were being given no distinction in the credits. This document of the very origins of Sokurov gives us a notion of his "pre-stylistic" period, where the personality of the future great filmmaker reveals itself in spite of means and circumstances. [from the catalog of Torino Film Festival]

Sergei Eisenstein & Grigory Alexandrov - Frauennot - Frauenglück AKA Misery and Fortune of Woman (1929)

Description:
This short film shows the contrast between the good conditions in which a rich woman makes a abortion and the miserable and dangerous condition in which a poor woman has to do an abortion.

Aleksandr Sokurov – Vostochnaya elegiya AKA Oriental Elegy (1996)

Quote:
Oriental Elegy (1996). Visually impressionistic, atmospherically dense, and narratively opaque, Oriental Elegy is the surreal journey of a displaced spirit (Aleksandr Sokurov) as he wanders in the interminable darkness through the temporal landscape of a quaint and isolated feudal-era fishing village. Guided by a series of faintly illuminated rooms, the wandering spirit comes upon ancient souls who take on physical forms as they recount their personal stories of daily existence, loss, and tragedy in the peasant community. Intrigued by his initial visit to a curiously distracted elderly woman, the spirit returns to her home in order to ask a fundamental question - "What is happiness?" - an existential query that is innocently answered with innate humility and accepted unknowingness. Through abstractly textured imagery and indelibly hypnotic dreamscapes, Sokurov composes a metaphoric, sensual, and evocative tone poem on a soul's search for enlightenment and the essential survival of human consciousness.

Kira Muratova - Lyst do Ameryky AKA Letter To America (1999)

Description: The short is made in a typical Muratova style that merges surrealism and reality into a mesmerizing act full of understatement and metaphor.

Some trivia: this is nominally Muratova's first short. However, she herself considers it her fourth - she prefers to think of her Three Stories as three short films instead of a single feature.

The film was made with no budget whatsoever - all Muratova was given were the camera and the film stock. None of the actors were paid. The rumor has it that the film was shot in Muratova's own apartment.

Larisa Shepitko - Rodina Electrichestva aka The Homeland of Electricity (1967)

Quote:
Shepitko graduated from VGIK, where she had studied in the workshop of Alexander Dovzhenko (whom she always referred to as her mentor) and Mikhail Romm in 1963. Her diploma work was Znoi / Heat (1963), made for Kirgizfilm from "The Camel's Eye", a story by the Kirgiz writer Chingiz Aitmatov, about a clash of generations in which a middle-aged woman, director of a civil engineering school, yearns for her days as a pilot during World War II and struggles to understand her daughter's generation. Shepitko's next project was the short film Rodina elektrichestva / Homeland of Electricity (1967), from the story by Andrei Platonov about the coming of electricity to a Russian village after the Revolution. Frequently compared to the work of her master Dovzhenko, this film, like Andrei Smirnov's Angel, was shot as part of a portmanteau film, Nachalo nevedomogo veka / The Beginning of an Unknown Century, made to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution. But the films were banned for twenty years, and Rodina elektrichestva surfaced only in 1987, long after Shepitko's death.

Aleksandr Sokurov - Pozyvnye R1NN AKA Prefisso R1NN AKA Calls R1NN (1975)

Plot (source IMDB): In the 20's an enthusiast radio amateur, Fyodor Lbov, experiments one of the first short-waves radio in the city of Gorky.

Aleksandr Sokurov - Sonata dlya Gitlera AKA Sonata for Hitler (1979 - 1989)

Set to the music of Bach and Penderecki, Sonata for Hitler weaves together a bank of images from German and Soviet archive footage, drawing out a psychological dimension from the historical landscape at the end of World War II.

Alexander Sokurov’s Sonata for Hitler was banned by the Soviet authorities in his home country of Russia and was not released until a decade after it was completed. Much of his early work, in fact, was considered ‘anti-communist’ and remained unseen for years. It was not until 1996 that he produced his first internationally acclaimed feature, Mother and Son.

Sergei M. Eisenstein - Dnevnik Glumova AKA Glumov's Diary (1923)

The first film from Eisenstein.

From allmovie

" Eisenstein's interest in film began with an appreciation of the work of D.W. Griffith, whose editing style influenced him in the production of his first cinematic endeavor, the 1923 five-minute newsreel parody Dnevnik Glumova. A stint with Lev Kuleshov's film workshop followed, as did an increasing fascination with the burgeoning avant-garde."

Sergei M. Eisenstein - Bezhin lug AKA Bezhin Meadow (1937)

This short film is only still-image restoration of an unfinished film.

What is one to make of Bezhin Meadow? What is one to make of Sergei Eisenstein? The questions are in many ways the same as this film maudit and its maker are in much the same boat these days – lost to history both artistic and political. Filmed between 1936 and 1937 Bezhin Meadow was to signal Eisenstein's return to the Soviet fold after his sojourn in America and the debacle of Que Viva Mexico. What resulted was an even greater debacle in that no sooner had the film neared completion than it was attacked and banned from view – with Eisenstein contributing to the banning by penning an essay in which he 'confessed' to the 'mistakes' of Bezhin Meadow. Finally adding injury to insult, the sole surviving print of Bezhin Meadow was destroyed – supposedly in a bombing raid during World War II, but just as likely burned outright. Then around 1968 a 'reconstruction' of the film was engineered when splices from the editing table, saved by Eisenstein's wife, Pera Attasheva, were discovered. Cobbled together with a track of Prokoviev music, intertitles fashioned from the original script and cutting continuity and a brief spoken introduction, it exists today as a 35-minute silent film-cum-slide show. Of obvious interest to film scholars, and doubtless pleasing to those who share Roland Barthes' preference for still images over moving ones, Bezhin Meadow once again begs the question of Eisenstein's actual value – once the myth of the Great-Individual-Artist-Suffering-at-the-Hands-of-Stalin is scraped away. For all the ups and downs of his career Eisenstein was always Stalin's favorite filmmaker, never meeting the fate of his teacher Vsevolod Meyerhold. Internationally celebrated, a linchpin of Soviet propaganda, photographed more than any other director in the history of the cinema, Eisenstein was a Movie Star – first, last and always.