Anna Chekulaeva

Working with children led Barskaya to create superb direct sound and an inspired style of shooting. Don’t look for conventional cinematic syntax here. The film is chaotic in the way that Soviet films still knew how to be, and Langlois couldn’t help but be seduced by its rebellious spirit, its anarchy and love of children, comparable to Vigo’s Zero de conduite. As well as being a film made with and for children, it offers a complex take on Western society. Pre-Nazi Germany is not named as such but is carefully reconstructed, possibly under advice from Karl Radek, and children offer a playful reflection of class struggle – doubly excluded, as proletarians and as minors. “They play in the same way that they live”, one intertitle says. The interaction between their comical games and the yet more ludicrous ones played by adults is developed on several levels.

In a capitalist country, workers are heavily repressed but manage to get a Death Ray to fight back. Partially lost movie.

Educational film on why corporal punishment is unacceptable in children's upbringing and is a relic of the past.

An agit-film about the struggle of Ukrainian peasants against the White Poles. A young woman, the daughter of a blacksmith taken prisoner by the White Poles, and a Red commander organise a partisan unit. One scene depicts the capture of a Polish landowner attempting to elude capture. He had been hiding from the Red Army soldiers in a barrel. The peasants nailed the barrel shut and, having inscribed the words: ‘To Warsaw – to Mr Piłsudski’, threw it into the Dnieper. Lost film.

In an unnamed English-speaking capitalist land, a young engineer invents inexhaustible giant robots to replace the fragile human workers on high-volume assembly-lines, and soon finds his invention co-opted by the military-industrial complex.

Khokhlova, a girl-reporter on a Moscow newpaper, falls in love with factory manager Petrovsky. To her he's the epitome of manliness--virile, decisive, strong-minded. Conversely, she rejects the sensitive, diffident editor Vasilchikov, who's in love with her, as unmanly. Her infatuation affects her work, and she is fired.

A down on his luck peasant goes to fight in World War I and returns home a hero. Partially lost.

A feature film that depicts scenes from the census of Imperial Russia in 1882 and the upcoming census of the Soviet Union as of January 17, 1939. The census takers interview citizens, fill out census forms in the homes of urban residents, collective farmers, and among the guests of the "Moscow" hotel.

As a response to criticism for the allegedly excessive “mass appeal” of his earlier epic STORM OVER ASIA (1928), Vsevolod Pudovkin unleashed his flair for experimentation in what was supposed to be the director’s first sound feature. Everything went wrong: technical problems forced him to complete the film as a silent; viewers were baffled by the lack of a recognizable plot; then, the ideological climate of the Soviet Union changed. He was now being blamed for catering to bourgeois taste! Time has come to set the record straight. Here’s lyrical cinema at its best, deliberately operatic and yet intimate as it matches the characters’ inner life with the solemn rhythms of nature, and depicted through breathtaking black-and-white photography. A sensation at last year’s Pordenone fest, Pudovkin’s long-forgotten swan song to the art of montage is resurrected by Gabriel Thibaudeau’s emotionally charged live music performance. –PCU (USSR, 1930, 75m)

The brave son of a woman inthe political underground tries to save her from Nazi stormtroopers.