Sergei M. Eisenstein - Bronenosets Potyomkin AKA Battleship Potemkin [2005 Restored Version] (1925)

The Battleship Potemkin (1925), accompanied by a new arrangement of Edmund Meisel’s orchestral score, which Eisenstein himself authorized for the film’s Berlin premiere in 1926. The Battleship Potemkin was recognized from the start as a landmark work both for its innovative use of montage and for its sheer power as propaganda. In particular, the “Odessa steps” sequence is arguably the single most famous and widely quoted passage in the history of film. But in a sense The Battleship Potemkin has been the victim of its own effectiveness. Reissued over the years in various censored and reedited versions, Eisenstein’s great vision has not been seen for several decades in anything like what the director likely intended. This new version, overseen by the film archivist and historian Enno Patalas, attempts to reconstruct, as closely as possible, the film as it was presented in Moscow during its initial release.

Victor A. Turin - Turksib [+Extras] (1929)

Turksib: bold and exhilarating, Turksib charts the building of the Turkestan-Siberian railway. Presented in the English version prepared in 1930 by John Grierson, with an evocative new score by Guy Bartell (Bronnt Industries Kapital).

Grigori Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg - S.V.D. - Soyuz velikogo dela AKA Union of the Great Cause (1927)

Summary:
The film tells about the Decembrists’ revolt in the south of Russia.

(imdb)
A failed Russian Revolution succeeded magnificently on screen., 3 June 1999
Author: Theodore J. van Houten from Haamstede, 4328 ZG 1 Netherlands

S.V.D. was released in August 1927. A beautiful costume drama, it is on the other hand a somewhat expressionistic, poetical fantasy. Its photography and images are more important than its desired political contents. The script, written by the inspiring historian Yuri Tinyanov (director Leonid Trauberg [1901-1990]could speak about Tinyanov for hours) supplied a failed love story, a political intrigue involving two czars, and a traveling circus background. The picture glorifies the 1825 'Decembrists' uprisal: officers in the imperial Russian army are fed up with the new czar's autocracy. The main character is a traitor, the Scotsman Maddocks (Medoks). He has won a ring gambling. It carries the initials S.V.D. - the secret union of the 'Big Deed' (overthrowing the czar). Maddocks expects the ring to protect him. He is desparate to enter the circles of political power in St. Petersburg hoping a former lover (Sofia Magaril) will introduce him there. A wounded revolutionary officer is on the run, finding refuge in a circus. This setting enabled cinematographer Andrei Moskvin to film a sequence on a galloping horse 'holding only the camera'. One of the most imaginative scenes takes place on the skating rink. The picture suddenly turns into an ice crystal created by using mirrors. The skater now waltzes his rounds all over the picture. S.V.D. introduces several pessimistic symbols: night clouds, a turtle suggesting how slowly the wounded revolutionary can move, etc. It is an extremely beautiful film, its narrative less important than its image qualities. An un-Russian revolution that failed but turned out a success on screen. It is clear that Kozintsev & Trauberg were ready for their next costume drama THE NEW BABYLON, now considered their great masterpiece. S.V.D. was restored by the German TV-station ZDF ca. 1980. For this version German composer Hamel wrote a new electronic music score, not very fitting apart from the skating rink waltz.

Aleksandr Razumnyj - Mat aka Mother [Incomplete] (1919)

First screen adaptation of Gorky's " Mother"

Yakov Protazanov - Chelovek iz restorana aka The Man From Restaurant (1927)

Based on story by Ivan Shmelev.
The movie action starts very close before February democratic revolution in Russia in 1917.
Fate is cruel to waiter of capital city restaurant Skorohodov: his son dies on front, his wife perishes from grief, his daughter is excluded from grammar school because of lack of money to pay tuition.
Skorohodov decides to rent one of rooms in his poor apartment to a decent young man named Sokolin who is working as a courier in war industry committee .
The lodger and a girl fall in love with each other and soon decide to get married.
In meantime the father appoints his daughter as a violiinist in restaurant orchestra.
But rich factory owner Karasev rudely molests young blonde violinist and through blackmail expects to make her his mistress.

Kote Mardjanishvili - Komunaris chibukhi aka Trubka komunara aka Pipe of Communard (1929)

movie about living and fighting of Paris Commune and fate of the little boy - Communard.
based on Ilya Ehrenburg novel.

Yakov Protazanov - Don Diego i Pelageya aka Don Diego and Pelageya (1928)

Anatoli Dolinov & Aleksandr Panteleyev & Donat Pashkovsky - Uplotneniye (1918)

The first scenario work of Anatoliy Lunacharsky.

The first Soviet kinopostanovka Petrograd kinokomiteta (now - Lenfilm Studio).

November 7, 1918 - the date of the first issue on the screens of Soviet films. On this day it was released four paintings, three of them - campaign.

In order to seal one of the rooms of Professor relocated from raw basement working with his daughter. Flats start attending the factory workers. Guests are becoming more and more, and the professor begins to read popular lectures in the workers' club. Between the younger son of a professor and his daughter working there is a feeling and the characters decide to get married ...

Friedrich Ermler - Parizhskii sapozhnik AKA The Parisian Cobbler AKA Paris Shoemaker (1927)

Friedrich Ermler (1898-1967) remains one of the shadowy figures of the early Soviet cinema, known if at all for his psychological parable Fragment of an Empire. But he was a major force among the Leningrad filmmakers of the 1920s and '30s, whose sympathies lay closer to youth and realism than to the monumental frescoes of the Moscow 'masters.' The Parisian Cobbler is impossible to hide from inquisitive looks and gossips in a small provincial town. Film tackled a controversial theme head-on: the sexual exploitation of women by party activists in the name of 'free love.' Hapermill worker, Young Communist Leaguer Katya and Andrei are not hiding their love. All of a sudden Katya’s radiant hopes break to pieces: Andrei is indignant to hear the news that Katya is expecting a baby. He does not want “to change diapers”, this “trivial life” will interfere with his plans to “build bright future”. Katya is befriended by a cobbler who, as a mute, knows what it is to be a social outcast. Ermler's spare and uncompromising style reveals the extent to which realism was already on the agenda before it became a repressive slogan in the mid-thirties. As usual with Ermler, the film is not only about a problem, but is also about everyday life.

Dziga Vertov - Kinoglaz AKA Kino-eye (1924)

Quote:

Dziga Vertov, whose renegade approach to cinema is best remembered in the legendary Man With a Movie Camera and his series of Kino-Pravda newsreels, demonstrates his mastery of montage in this 1924 feature previously unseen in the U.S.

An outspoken critic of the purely plot-driven motion picture, Vertov challenged other filmmakers to rebel against the Western story-oriented cinema. Vertov argued that filmmakers should use their camera to capture "the chaos of visual phenomena filling the universe" and through clever editing, develop these random images into a more honest, more genuine record of the Soviet experience.

Dziga Vertov - Kino-pravda no. 13 (1922)

Kino-Pravda (“Film Truth”) was a newsreel series by Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, and Mikhail Kaufman.

Working mainly during the 1920s, Vertov promoted the concept of kino-pravda, or film-truth, through his newsreel series. His driving vision was to capture fragments of actuality which, when organized together, showed a deeper truth which could not be seen with the naked eye. In the “Kino-Pravda” series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences, eschewing bourgeois concerns and filming marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes with a hidden camera, without asking permission first.

Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky - Papirosnitsa ot Mosselproma aka The cigarette girl of Mosselprom [+Extras] (1924)

Review
Though many casual film fans are of the opinion that the Russian silent cinema began and ended with Montage and Propaganda, several charming romantic comedies and dramas emanated from the Soviet film industry of the 1920s. The Cigarette Girl of Mosselprom tells the tale of a young man who falls in love with the title character (Yulia Solnsteva). She becomes a famous film star, and herself falls in love--not with the hero, but with her cameraman. No one ever gets what he or she truly wants in the story, though they continue to pursue their lost dreams to the bitter end. Revelling in The Unexpected throughout, Cigarette Girl of Mosselprom is capped by an adroit surprise ending. (Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide)

Various - Kino-nedelya 31-35 AKA Kino-Week 31-35 (1919)

Kino-nedelya was directed by Dziga Vertov, Vladimir Gardin, Lev Kuleshov and others

Quote:
In 1918 Mikhail Koltstov, who headed the Moscow Film Committee's newsreel section, hired Vertov as his assistant. Among Vertov's colleagues was Lev Kuleshov, who was conducting his now legendary experiments in montage, as well as Edouard Tissé, Eisenstein's future cameraman was Lev Kuleshov, who was conducting his now legendary experiments in montage, as well as Edouard Tissé, Eisenstein's future cameraman. Vertov began to edit documentary footage and soon was appointed editor of
Kinonedelya, the first Soviet weekly newsreel

Mikhail Kalatozov - Jim Shvante (marili svanets) aka Salt For Svanetia (1930)

by ramencity (Portland, Oregon)

Many visually stunning scenes--it's the superior of Turksib, which is on the same video release. Incidentally, Svanetia is not part of the Ukraine, but is in the northwest of the Georgian Republic, in the Caucasus, not the Carpathian, mountains. This area is still very remote. The Svan language is distantly related to Georgian; there are only a few thousand speakers left.

Yakov Protazanov - Sorok pervyy AKA The Forty-First (1927)

The Forty-First, Boris Lavrenyev’s novella, written in only two days, has proven enduringly popular. It tells the story of a young woman snarpshooter fighting with the Reds in Turkestan. She misses her forty-first victim, a handsome White lieutenant, and ends up escorting him, by boat, into captivity across the Aral Sea. A storm, however, strands the two on an island. Sick with pneumonia, the lieutenant is nursed back to health by his Red escort, and the two fall in love. At the last, however, Mariutka shoots him dead when he tries to escape, thus making him "the forty-first."
Sorok pervyy had been filmed as a silent, from the author’s own script, by Yakov Protazanov in 1927.

Yakov Protazanov - Belyy oryol AKA The White Eagle (1928)

Synopsis:
Lash of the Czar was one of several English-language titles for the Russian film Belyi Orel. The film was 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 Czar 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. Anna Sten, who in 1934 was brought to the U.S. as Sam Goldwyn's "answer" to Greta Garbo, appears as the governor's wife. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Aleksandr Dovzhenko - Zemlya - versions of 1930 & 1971 (The Cultural Heritage [Disc 3]) (1930)

Earh (1930) 59 min.
Poetic cinema story about events related to collectivization in Ukraine at the end of 20th years of the last century, about creation of the first of a collective farm communes, about class enmity on a village.
The best film Dovzhenko and one of the best films in history world to the cinema.
A film "Earth" on the World exhibition in Brussels of 1958 was adopted among the twelve best films of all times and people as a result of questioning, conducted Belgian cinematic among 117 film critics andconnoisseurs of the films from 26 countries of the world. During many subsequent years "Earth" was multiple included in the various lists of the best films of the world of XX century.

Aleksandr Dovzhenko - Arsenal (The Cultural Heritage) [Disc 2] (1928)

In Arsenal, Alexander Dovzhenko, perhaps the most radical of the Soviet directors of the silent period, altered the already extended conventions of cinematic structure to a degree greater than had even the innovative Sergei Eisenstein in his bold October. The effect of this tinkering with the more or less accepted proprieties of motion picture construction produced a work that is actually less a film than it is a highly symbolic visual poem. For example, in a more linearly structured piece like October, the metaphors, allusions, and analogies that arise through the construction of the various montages replace rather than comment on essential actions within the film. In Arsenal, however, the symbolism is so purposely esoteric, with seemingly deliberate barriers established to block the viewer's perception, that the relationship of individual symbols or sequences to the various actions of the film is not immediately clear.

Aleksandr Dovzhenko - The Cultural Heritage [Disc 1] (1926 - 1928)

Love's Berries 1926
The mistress of hairdresser Jean Kovbasyuk throws a baby up to him. Jean decides in any method to be delivered from a "natural" child...Getting a call to the judicial investigator, Kovbasyuk is given up to search a child. A mistress labours for in the court of people's "justice". However much it turns out after registration of marriage, that Jean and in actual fact was not the father of child. But lately...

The Diplomatic Pouch 1927
A soviet embassy in England sends to Leningrad (presently Saint Petersburg, Russia) of two diplomatic couriers with diplomatic mail. A political police tries to intercept documents.Couriers perish, but documents of get are to Inspector-England, that passes them on a steamship to Leningrad. A police hears that on the English steamship hide soviet diplomatic mail, but can not intercept it.

Dziga Vertov - Shagay, sovet! aka Forward, Soviet! (1926)

Quote:
Commissioned by the Moscow Soviet as a documentary and information film for the citizens of Moscow prior to municipal elections, film is a tableau of Soviet life and achievements in the period of reconstruction following the Civil War of 1917-1921.