Videoteca

location_onMoscow, RSFSR, USSR publicSU

Katerina Izmailova 1966 star_border 3.7
Katerina Izmailova is a filmization of Dmitry Shostakovich's long-suppressed 1936 opera. Galina Vishnevskaya stars as Katerina, a bored 19th century farm wife. At the behest of her grungy lover, Katerina murders her husband and her father-in-law. She and her new beau are both sent to Siberia, where the lover almost immediately takes up with a younger woman. Banned by Stalin for its bleak portrait of Soviet life, Katerina Izmailova was not given a Russian staging for over 40 years; its Metropolitan Opera debut did not occur until 1994. Dmitri Shostakovich also wrote the screenplay for the screen version of Katerina Izmailova.

There is the Metro! 1935
Early documentary about the Moscow metro: the early project, the development and the people working on it.

Shame 1932 star_border 4.4
Shame or Counterplan is a 1932 Soviet drama film directed by Sergei Yutkevich and Fridrikh Ermler. The film’s title-song called "The Song of the Counterplan", composed by Dmitri Shostakovich, became world famous and was adapted into "Au-devant de la vie", a notable song of the French socialist movement of the 1930s. This film could be considered as a Stalin propaganda film. The plot involves an effort to catch "wreckers" at work in a Soviet factory. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Two mothers 1931
The tragic story of a young woman named Yulia, who fell in love with a married man and lost her only child.

The Rout 1931
In 1921. With the help of Japanese interventionists, the White Guards defeat a Shaldyba partisan detachment. The remnants of the defeated detachment pour into Levinson's detachment. Partisan intelligence soon finds that the Japanese has surrounded the detachment. To save the main forces from defeat, Levinson decides to break through the chains of enemies.

Cain and Artem 1930 star_border 7
Pavel Petrov-Bytov was an enfant terrible of the highbrow Leningrad Sovkino film factory. He was notorious for his article “We Have No Soviet Filmmaking,” in which he criticized all the achievements of the Soviet avant-garde. In spite of his beliefs and his scandalous struggle with “bourgeois” and “formalist” filmmaking, Petrov-Bytov directed an aesthetically refined work, shot entirely on set with masterful chiaroscuro lighting: a perfect example of “Soviet expressionism.” Based on a Maxim Gorky story, the plot of Cain and Artem provides a wake-up call to the Russian people to overcome alcoholism and religious factionalism, as it spotlights the (many) drunken denizens of a typical village and their disregard for the Jewish shoemaker Cain.

The Ghost That Never Returns 1930 star_border 5.8
The rebel leader Jose Real is allowed to leave prison for one day to visit his family. But it is a ruse to make him reveal the whereabouts of his rebel gang. This existential drama disguised as a saga about the proletarian struggle presents a lonely and insecure individual who is challenged to act more heroically than he is prepared to, but who constantly questions his confidence and loyalties.

Blue Express 1929 star_border 3.4
Chinese workers start a rebellion, arm themselves and take over the train on which they are travelling and manage to break through the frontier.

The Post 1929 star_border 4.9
A boy is sitting at a table, writing a letter for Boris Prutkov. The cartoon follows the journey of this letter from Rostov to Leningrad, where its addressee Prutkov has just left for Berlin; when the letter arrives in Berlin, Prutkov has just departed for London; as the letter arrives in London, Prutkov is already on a steamboat to Brazil, and once the letters is delivered by postman Don Basilio, Prutkov is already on his way back to Leningrad– where the letter, having followed Prutkov around the world, finally reaches him. The film sings a song of praise to the global postal services and to the reliability of the postmen, but it also tells the story of a journey around the world, returning once more to the new Soviet capital: Leningrad.

Ill Nerves 1929
Director of a Soviet-era enterprises, Baturin, spends days and nights in his private office. Inability to arrange work day and overwork caused Buchanan severe form of neurasthenia. Small, endless quibbling, swearing, threats, Buchanan has turned into a nightmare life of his wife and child. The Director suffers from insomnia. Finally he went to the clinic. On the advice of Professor Buchanan, after going into a rest home, began to exercise, running around on skates, went skiing. A month later, wife and child met quite healthy, mature person.

Hoy ( Segodnya ) 1929

Fragment of an Empire 1929 star_border 5.8
Director Frederick Ermler’s last silent feature and the last of four collaborations with actor Fiodor Nikitin. Nikitin plays an officer who spends a decade after the Great War as a shell-shocked amnesiac, until a glimpse of a woman through a train window sparks the return of his memory. He makes his way back to St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, a man out of time who struggles to make sense of the new society brought about by the revolution.

The General Line 1929 star_border 6.5
Also known as The Old and the New (Staroye i Novoye), The General Line illustrates Lenin’s stated imperative that the nation move from agrarian to industrial culture in an epic ode to farm-collectivization progress.

The Last Attraction 1929 star_border 6.5
A travelling circus troupe during the Civil War. A kommissar tries to transfer the wagon into an agit-prop van. The Whites conquer the town. The kommissar hides among the artists.

Chyornyy parus 1929
The struggle of the Komsomol members against private speculators for the surrender of fish to the state.

Solovki 1929
Depicts life in the Solovki prison camp as a vacation at a holiday resort, pointing at the authorities’ efforts to humanise the re-education of criminals via an aesthetics of normalcy.

Today 1929 star_border 6.4
A visual composition of the world.

Her Way 1929
When Praskovya’s new husband attempts to hurt her on their wedding night, she fights back, and when he’s called away to fight in World War I not long after, she tends to their farm on her own, determined to make the best of a bad situation.

Heart of Asia (Afghanistan) 1929
This Russian documentary offered tantalizing glimpses of Afghanistan, which in 1929 was still one of the few heavily-populated areas in the world where the residents continued to live as they did in the Middle Ages. A progressive new leader named Amnullah tries to "Westernize" the country, meeting plenty of resistance from native reactionaries.

Mutiny 1929
Central Asia during the Civil War. The Jarkent battalion of the Red Army, located in the Verny (now Alma-Ata), receives an order from Frunze to go to the Fergana region to fight the Basmachi. A group of kulaks, with the support of local merchants and beys, incites the unconscious, wavering mass of the Red Army to revolt. The anti-Soviet agitation of counter-revolutionaries, demagogically exploiting the mood of war weariness, provokes an open mutiny in the battalion.

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