“A Bomb into the Lap of Mother Russia”: Little Vera (Vasiliy Pichul, 1988)
In May 1989, an issue of the American magazine Playboy caused a furore in ...
A Cinephile in the Land of the Bolsheviks: The Death Ray (Lev Kuleshov, 1925)
Lev Kuleshov’s Luch smerti (The Death Ray, 1925) is wedged between the ...
A Soviet Fairy Tale: Ironiya sudby, ili S legkim parom! (The Irony of Fate, or I Hope You Have a Nice Bath!, Eldar Riazanov, 1976)
Canon formation te...
The Master’s Debut: Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1924)
As Eisenstein himself described it years later, Stachka (Strike, 1924) had been “Awkward. Angula...
Balabanov’s Law: Cargo 200 (Aleksei Balabanov, 2007)
Throughout his short but prolific career, Aleksei Balabanov (1959-2013) produced an oeuvre – mos...
Historical Rapture: The Old and the New (Sergei Eisenstein, 1929)
Sergei Eisenstein’s fourth silent feature, General Line, which was released under t...
The Excesses of Power: Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014)
Heralded as Russia's greatest cinematic accomplishment in recent years, Andrey Zvyagintse...
Before Empire Come: Mother and Son (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1997)
The story of a mother slowly dying while in the care of her son, Mat i syn (Mother and S...
From Failed Propaganda to Timeless Masterpiece: Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
In 1927 while Soviet cinema was celebrating the tenth an...
Adapting the Cinema to Shakespeare: Hamlet (Grigori Kozintsev, 1964)
It is perhaps a measure of the state of Soviet film culture in the Khrushchev er...
Hope in Despair, and Beauty in Revulsion: Trudno byt bogom (Aleksei German, 2013)
Labeled as one of the biggest perfectionists among his peers, Russi...
Autocrat as Messiah: The Fall of Berlin
Padenie Berlina (The Fall of Berlin, Mikheil Chiaurelli, 1950) is the epitome of the politically correct fil...
