Lev Kuleshov

Horizon

A young Lyova travels with the hope of ascent from Czarist Russia to New York. Disappointed, he returns to the young Soviet Union and is glad to have found a simple work.

The Death Ray

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

Sasha

A Russian woman tells the tragic story of her life.

Forty Hearts

The new power stations are beating like hearts to the pulse of modernisation. At gigantic expense and effort, the Soviet Union is rapidly industrialised. The state plan foresees the construction of forty power-generation centres across the country. However, the people must first be enlightened about the nature and use of electrical current. Horses and tractors, households and industry, nature and the world of work, neon signs and the construction of power stations all depend on this miraculous new source of energy. The famous Soviet director Lev Kuleshov masterfully realises this project with documentary shots, acted scenes, and lots of creative trick sequences.

By the Law

After a man kills two members of his Yukon gold prospecting team, the other two surviving members struggle to keep him subdued for the next several months until they can turn him over to the law.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks

An ignorant and prejudiced American’s visit of Soviet Russia goes off the rails after his luggage is stolen and he is separated from his bodyguard.

Taras's Dream

Propaganda movie. Contrasting the cruel orders of the tsarist army with the conditions of service in the Red Army. Taras, a Red Army soldier, accidentally finds a bottle of moonshine. Being tempted, he gets drunk and falls asleep. In his dream Taras sees himself as a soldier of the tsar's army. Having left his post arbitrarily, he finds himself in the apartment of a frivolous girl and here he meets a general.

Siberians

Two six-graders are trying to find the Stalin's pipe and return it to the owner.

Horizon

A young Lyova travels with the hope of ascent from Czarist Russia to New York. Disappointed, he returns to the young Soviet Union and is glad to have found a simple work.

The Death Ray

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

Sasha

A Russian woman tells the tragic story of her life.

Forty Hearts

The new power stations are beating like hearts to the pulse of modernisation. At gigantic expense and effort, the Soviet Union is rapidly industrialised. The state plan foresees the construction of forty power-generation centres across the country. However, the people must first be enlightened about the nature and use of electrical current. Horses and tractors, households and industry, nature and the world of work, neon signs and the construction of power stations all depend on this miraculous new source of energy. The famous Soviet director Lev Kuleshov masterfully realises this project with documentary shots, acted scenes, and lots of creative trick sequences.

By the Law

After a man kills two members of his Yukon gold prospecting team, the other two surviving members struggle to keep him subdued for the next several months until they can turn him over to the law.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks

An ignorant and prejudiced American’s visit of Soviet Russia goes off the rails after his luggage is stolen and he is separated from his bodyguard.

Taras's Dream

Propaganda movie. Contrasting the cruel orders of the tsarist army with the conditions of service in the Red Army. Taras, a Red Army soldier, accidentally finds a bottle of moonshine. Being tempted, he gets drunk and falls asleep. In his dream Taras sees himself as a soldier of the tsar's army. Having left his post arbitrarily, he finds himself in the apartment of a frivolous girl and here he meets a general.

Siberians

Two six-graders are trying to find the Stalin's pipe and return it to the owner.

The King of Paris

The lives of two young men-- A virtuous artist who's renounced a background of riches and a debonair swindler proclaimed by many the King of Paris-- intersect when the artist's mother becomes the target of the kingly charlatan.

Miss Meri

Based on the novel The Man Who Killed by Claude Farrère.

Our Cinema

For Happiness

Since Zoya Verenskaya's husband passed away ten years ago, she has been devoted to her daughter Lee. At present, Lee is in poor health, and she is in danger of losing her eyesight. Zoya's suitor Dmitry wants to get married, but Zoya is determined to wait until Lee is better. Then, on a vacation in the Crimea, they learn Lee's true feelings for Dmitry, and suddenly all of their lives are thrown into turmoil.

The Great Consoler

The Great Consoler is Lev Kuleshov’s most personal film reflecting both the facts of his life and his thoughts about the place of the artist in contemporary reality. It was the only film in the Soviet cinema of those years that raised the question of what role a creative person played in society.

Smelchak

Propaganda film directed by Mikhail Narokov and Nikandr Turkin. Partially lost.

Two-Buldi-Two

Naturally, the circus milieu of 2 Buldy 2 (1929) encourages stunts. A father and son, both clowns, are to perform together for the first time, but the civil war separates them, and the elder Buldy, tempted for a moment to acquiesce to the White forces, casts his lot with the revolution. At the climax Buldy Jr. escapes the Whites thanks to flashy trampoline and trapeze acrobatics; the gaping enemy soldiers forget to shoot.

The Alarm

We from the Urals

A story about two teenagers and their life during WWII in Urals district of Russia.

Incident on a Volcano

Andrei Latonin had jumped with a parachute many times before, but on the day of the holiday he got scared and stayed in the cockpit of the plane. Deeply upset by his failure, Latonin decides to leave his homeland forever and joins a steamship as a sailor. On the way, Andrei meets an expedition group heading for the crater of an active volcano and joins the scientists.

The Kuleshov Effect

An excellent 1969 documentary, S. Raitburt’s The Kuleshov Effect, made about a year before Lev Kuleshov died, and interviewing him at length, both about his filmmaking and his far lengthier career as a teacher (including some fascinating remarks about Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo). Also interviewed is the father of Russian Formalism, Viktor Shklovsky, who worked with Kuleshov as a screenwriter on a Jack London adaptation, By the Law, in 1926.

Your Friend

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.

Kuleshov Effect

An experiment in editing. This entry refers to both the initial, likely lost 1919 experiment, created using footage of Ivan Mosjoukine, and the later surviving recreation featuring two unknown actors.

The Exposure of the Relics of Sergius of Radonezh

This newsreel documentary was shot by Lev Kuleshov in 1919, which once credited to Dziga Vertov. A fragment of this newsreel was shown in the documentary The Kuleshov Effect (1969), where Kuleshov talked about his early film work, claiming this short newsreel as his own work.

Dokhunda

The screen adaptation of the novel by Tadjik writer Sadriddine Aini, telling the story of a tramp who falls in love with a rich girl, was supposed to become the first full-length feature film in Central Asian film history. But the unfinished Dokhunda was banned by the Soviet authorities when film production was already in full swing. No footage survived. This is why Izvolov had to rely on Lev Kuleshov’s draft to study and appreciate the maestro’s vision and the unique aesthetic concept, which was never to be realised during Kuleshov’s lifetime.

Engineer Prite's Project

A man is caught between his friendship with a young engineer wishing to open his peat-powered electric plant and his love for a young woman, whose father owns an oil company.