Thursday, November 27, 2008

Grigori Kozintsev - Novyy Vavilon AKA The New Babylon (1929)



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NEW BABYLON is the glittering climax of Soviet silent cinema (Jay Leyda in ‘Kino’).
The film deals with the defeat of the French in the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71) and the historic Paris Commune and its tragic short existence in the spring of 1871.

Valeriya Gai Germanika - Vse umrut, a ya ostanus ( Все умрут, а я останусь) AKA Everybody Dies But Me (2008)



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Synopsis: One Monday morning Katya, Vika and Zhanna learn that there will be a school disco, their first disco, on the coming Saturday night. The girls feverishly start preparing for the event, which rapidly becomes the most important moment ever in their universe, and looks like the ideal way to escape their daily lives...

Monday, November 3, 2008

Sergei M. Eisenstein & Grigori Aleksandrov - Staroye i novoye (Старое и новое) AKA Old and New (1929)



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REVIEW by Jonathan Rosenbaum (from The Chicago Reader):

This is the most neglected of Sergei Eisenstein's features, his last completed silent picture (1929), also known as The Old and the New. It's a bucolic epic about the Soviet struggle to collectivize agricultural production, and it's far from his least interesting or exciting film, though some critics have made it sound that way by noting that the most famous sequence involves a cream separator. For the record, it is a thrilling sequence--part of Kenneth Anger's Eaux d'artifice is modeled directly after it--but it's far from the only thing this rich, poetic, and sometimes quite funny film has to offer. Recommended.

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Monday, September 8, 2008

Vsevolod Pudovkin - Konets Sankt-Peterburga (Конец Санкт-Петербурга) AKA The End of St. Petersburg (1927)



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Filmed to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Russian revolution, End of St. Petersburg was the second feature-length effort of director V. I. Pudovkin. Utilizing many of the montage techniques popularized by his contemporary Sergei Eisenstein, Pudovkin details the fall of St. Petersburg into the hands of the Bolsheviks during the revolution. Unlike Eisenstein, Pudovkin concentrates on individuals rather than groups (his protagonist is a politically awakened peasant played by Ivan Chuvelyov) humanizing what might otherwise have been a prosaic historical piece. The mob scenes, though obviously staged for ultimate dramatic impact, are so persuasive that they have frequently been excerpted for documentaries about the Russian Revolution, and accepted by some impressionable viewers as the real thing. Filmed just after his 1926 masterwork Mother, The End of St. Petersburg was followed by the equally brilliant Storm Over Asia.- allmovie.com

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Georgi Daneliya - Mimino (Мимино) (1977)



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Description: (using google translate from russian)
Friends name Valiko Mizandari "Mimino" which is translated from the Georgian means "falcon". Working in his native mountain village, a helicopter transports Mimino mail, vegetables, sheep. But he has long been dreaming of this, a large aircraft. Finally he managed to translate his dream into reality. He invited a pilot on international flights and is coming to Moscow. The open and friendly to people, Mimino not very comfortable feel in a big city. Nevertheless, he becomes the pilot of supersonic aircraft, flying all over the world. But zatoskovav to his homeland, he returned home to Georgia, to their friends and relatives, to his friends.

Georgi Daneliya beautiful film, a masterpiece of Soviet cinema.

Aleksandr Sokurov - The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn (1999)



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This is a two-part video portrait of the outstanding Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of famous novels about the Russian revolution and the acclaimed study of the Soviet concentration camps, "The Gulag Archipelago". Solzhenitsyn is of more interest to the filmmaker for his attitudes, thoughts and present life, than for his legendary past. Rather than interviewing some important person, Sokurov creates a monumental image before our eyes.

This remarkable portrait shows us the inner world of this great author whilst his outer world is seen merely through several visual landscapes: park, study, library, and the room in which the writer’s wife work.

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Sergei Parajanov - Tini zabutykh predkiv aka Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964)



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Quote:

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors has often been described as a Carpathian Romeo and Juliet - that is, if Romeo had the tenacity to live after his beloved's death. Sergei Paradjanov prefaces the tragic tale set in the Carpathian mountains as the land "forgotten by God and men", and from the austerity of the environment, it is evident that survival comes at a high price. In essence, the story is incidental to the observations of daily peasant life: the Orthodox order of mass, the rites of spring, the rhythm of the sickle cutting the fields.