1960: Letter Never Sent (Mikhail Kalatozov) Brad Weismann December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema A Subversive Affirmation: Letter Never Sent Neotpravlennoe pismo (Letter Never Sent, Mikhail Kalatozov, 1960) is a curious document that bears a lot...
1957: The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov) Masha Shpolberg December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Humanising the Soviet Subject: Letiat zhuravli (The Cranes Are Flying) When Letiat zhuravli (The Cranes Are Flying) was released in late 1957, it cam...
1929: The New Babylon (Grigori Kozinstev and Leonid Trauberg) Michael Cramer December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema “We’ll Come Back to Paris!”: The New Babylon Novyy Vavilon (The New Babylon, 1929) is the fifth feature film produced by the FEKS (“Factory of the E...
1979: Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky) Brad Weismann December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema I could go on and on about Tarkovsky. Thousands have. Some directors seem made for critical fodder. Hitchcock, Welles, Ford, Kurosawa, and others ...
1926: One Sixth of the World (Dziga Vertov) Josh Alvizu December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema This Land Belongs to You and Me: One Sixth of the World (Dziga Vertov, 1926) The year 1926 was the starting point for a two-year period that would ma...
1933: The Deserter (Vsevolod Pudovkin) Tadas Bugnevicius December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema International Melancholia: The Deserter To the trio of Pudovkin’s films considered his best – Мat (Mother, 1926), Konets Sankt-Peterburga (The End of...
1930: Salt for Svanetia (Mikhail Kalatozov) Natalie Ryabchikova December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Ethnography vs. Modernisation: Salt for Svanetia (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1930) The first independent film by the future master of Letiat zhuravli (The Cr...
1965: Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures (Leonid Gayday) Andrey Tolstoy December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema The People’s Secret Speech: Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures, 1965 Of the twenty highest-grossing films in the history of the Soviet box off...
1977: The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko) Barbora Bartunkova December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Facing Death, Confronting Human Nature: The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977) Larisa Shepitko’s black-and-white feature film Voskhozhdeniye (The Ascent,...
1928: Storm Over Asia (Vsevolod Pudovkin) John Mackay December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Fetishism and Revolution: Storm Over Asia (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1928) The Mezhrabpomfilm production Storm over Asia (1928; sound version made in 1949) ...
100 Years of Soviet Cinema: Introduction Daniel Fairfax December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema There is a provocative dimension, perhaps, in the title of this dossier: one hundred years of Soviet cinema? How is this possible, if the USSR itself,...
1997: Brother (Aleksei Balabanov) John Mackay December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Cinema as Salvage Operation: Brother (Aleksei Balabanov, 1997) One of the “accursed questions” of Russian cinema, at least from the early Soviet peri...
1969: We (Artavazd Peleshian) Paul Macovaz December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Negentropic Montage: We (Artavazd Peleshian, 1969) “The crowd grips the land with its polycephalic claws. A façade of watchers sees across time into...
1927: The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Esfir Shub) Anastasia Kostina December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Compiling History for Masses: The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty In August 1926, Sovkino, the Soviet state body in control of cinema production, commiss...
1966: A Long Happy Life (Gennady Shpalikov) Alena Lodkina December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Dangerous Lyrical: A Long Happy Life (Gennady Shpalikov, 1966) Not much really happened: a man and a woman met by chance on a bus heading to a regula...
1962: The Wild Swans (Mikhail Tsekhanovsky and Vera Tsekhanovskaya) Mihaela Mihailova November 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Avant-Garde Animation in the Shadow of Disney: The Wild Swans (Mikhail Tsekhanovsky and Vera Tsekhanovskaya, 1962) In the West, Mikhail Tsekhanovsky ...
1924: Aelita: Queen of Mars (Yakov Protazanov) Lisa K. Broad November 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 film, Aelita, begins in December of 1921 with the worldwide transmission of a cryptic message. An iris revealing a set of powe...
1925: Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein) Helen Grace November 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin, 1925, USSR, 75 mins) Dir: Sergei Eisenstein; Writer: Sergei Eisenstein and Nina Agadzhanova Shutko;...
1926: Mother (Vsevolod Pudovkin) Cara Marisa Deleon November 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema This article examines Pudovkin’s 1926 silent classic in regard to the central image of mother in both Soviet ideology and Russian society of the time.
