USSR

  • Various – Animated Soviet Propaganda (1924 – 1984)

    AnimationPoliticsUSSRVarious

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    CONTENTS:

    DISC 1: AMERICAN IMPERIALISTS

    BLACK AND WHITE (1933) Whenever the collection criticizes American racism, its credibility goes way up. We start with this shocking, graphic exaggeration (?) of America as a land where slavery still rules.

    MISTER TWISTER (1963) This poem-based tale uses cute animation to tell the story of a racist American who rejects a St. Petersburg hotel room because a black man is in the next room. This is a fine film, except for the fact that racism can be found in any country. I don’t see why Russia should call herself an exception.Read More »

  • Sergei M. Eisenstein – Ivan Groznyy II: Boyarsky zagovor (Иван Грозный. Боярский заговор) AKA Ivan the Terrible Part 2 (1958)

    Drama1951-1960ClassicsSergei M. EisensteinUSSR

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    His wife dead from poisoning and his chief warrior, Kurbsky, defected to the Poles, Ivan is lonely as he pursues a unified Russia with no foreign occupiers. Needing friendship, he brings to court Kolychev, now Philip the monk, and makes him metropolitan bishop of Moscow. Philip, however, takes his cues from the boyars and tries to bend Ivan to the will of the church. Ivan faces down Philip and lets loose his private force, the Oprichniks, on the boyars. Led by the Tsar’s aunt, Euphrosyne, the boyers plot to assassinate Ivan and enthrone her son, Vladimir. At a banquet, Ivan mockingly crowns Vladimir and sends him in royal robes into the cathedral where the assassin awaitsRead More »

  • Sergei M. Eisenstein – Bezhin lug AKA Bezhin Meadow (1937)

    1931-1940DramaSergei M. EisensteinShort FilmUSSR

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    This short film is only still-image restoration of an unfinished film.

    What is one to make of Bezhin Meadow? What is one to make of Sergei Eisenstein? The questions are in many ways the same as this film maudit and its maker are in much the same boat these days – lost to history both artistic and political. Filmed between 1936 and 1937 Bezhin Meadow was to signal Eisenstein’s return to the Soviet fold after his sojourn in America and the debacle of Que Viva Mexico. What resulted was an even greater debacle in that no sooner had the film neared completion than it was attacked and banned from view – with Eisenstein contributing to the banning by penning an essay in which he ‘confessed’ to the ‘mistakes’ of Bezhin Meadow. Finally adding injury to insult, the sole surviving print of Bezhin Meadow was destroyed – supposedly in a bombing raid during World War II, but just as likely burned outright. Then around 1968 a ‘reconstruction’ of the film was engineered when splices from the editing table, saved by Eisenstein’s wife, Pera Attasheva, were discovered. Cobbled together with a track of Prokoviev music, intertitles fashioned from the original script and cutting continuity and a brief spoken introduction, it exists today as a 35-minute silent film-cum-slide show. Of obvious interest to film scholars, and doubtless pleasing to those who share Roland Barthes’ preference for still images over moving ones, Bezhin Meadow once again begs the question of Eisenstein’s actual value – once the myth of the Great-Individual-Artist-Suffering-at-the-Hands-of-Stalin is scraped away. For all the ups and downs of his career Eisenstein was always Stalin’s favorite filmmaker, never meeting the fate of his teacher Vsevolod Meyerhold. Internationally celebrated, a linchpin of Soviet propaganda, photographed more than any other director in the history of the cinema, Eisenstein was a Movie Star – first, last and always.Read More »

  • Sergei M. Eisenstein – Sergei Eisenstein and Montage ()

    BooksSergei M. EisensteinUSSR

    14 pages about Sergei Eisenstein and Montage.
    Read More »

  • Sergei M. Eisenstein – The psychology of composition (1988)

    1981-1990BooksSergei M. EisensteinUSSR

    ‘Watson and Scotland Yard always work along the line of direct
    logic, Sherlock Holmes works not by logic, but by dialectics’. This
    dialectics, in its turn, draws on ‘the whole fund of prelogical,
    sensuous thought’ that ‘serves as a fund of the language of form’ that
    Eisenstein defines as ‘readable expressiveness’. Eisenstein’s
    elaborate study of a method of art rooted in ‘the twilight stage of
    primitive thought’ moves from folk tales to Shakespeare, Balzac,
    Gogol, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Mayakovsky, to come eventually to
    the detective story, ‘the most effective genre of literature’ and ‘the
    most naked expression of bourgeois society’s fundamental ideas on
    property’, as it is told by Poe, Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery
    Queen, and Hitchcock in Spellbound.
    Writing while he was making Ivan, Eisenstein opens up, in his
    characteristic manner, a whole area of thinking on ‘the psychology
    of composition’. Published in English for the first time, these lectures
    and lecture notes have been assembled and translated by Jay Leyda
    and Alan Upchurch.Read More »

  • Mikhail Kalatozov – Soy Cuba aka I am Cuba [+Extras] (1964)

    1961-1970ArthouseClassicsMikhail KalatozovUSSR

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    Synopsis (From IMDB)
    Four vignettes in Batista’s Cuba dramatize the need for revolution; long, mobile shots tell almost wordless stories. In Havana, Maria faces shame when a man who fancies her discovers how she earns her living. Pedro, an aging peasant, is summarily told that the land he farms has been sold to United Fruit. A university student faces down a crowd of swaggering U.S. sailors and then watches friends shot by police when they try to distribute a pro-Castro leaflet. The war arrives on the doorstep of peasants Mariano, Amelia, and their four children when Batista’s forces bomb the hills. Mariano wants peace, so he seeks out the guerrillas to join the fight.Read More »

  • V. Chubisov – A Montage Lesson: Sergei Eisenstein ()

    DocumentarySergei M. EisensteinUSSRV. Chubisov

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    Description: This is not Eisenstein’s film, but a series of montage lessons by V. Chubisov using Eisenstein’s films for examples…

    levchin specifies

    Quote:
    that the filmmaker is Vadim CHUBASOV, not Chubisov, who taught at the Kiev Theater/TV/Film Institute for many years, and died recently. Moreover, the title of this film is Lessons in Editing, not A Montage Lesson.
    No one seems to know when it was made. Judging by the video style it must be the ’80s. Clearly this is an instructional film, commissioned and produced by the Karpenko-Kary film school in Kiev.

    Credits, Production and Release Information
    Director, Scenario: Vadim Chubasov
    Comissioned and produced by: Karpenko-Kary film school (Kiev)Read More »

  • Yevgeni Sherstobitov – Tumannost Andromedy (1967)

    1961-1970CultSci-FiUSSRYevgeni Sherstobitov

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    plot:
    Film is set in the future. A spaceship named “Tantra” is exploring the unknown part of the
    Universe, and gets trapped by the “Iron Star”. It’s powerful force of gravity is to hold the
    spaceship for 20 years. The crew is facing a very tough survival challenge, being surrounded
    by the invisible predators. The predators can eat human flesh right through the heavy
    spacesuit. Only the light can scare them away.Read More »

  • Andrei Yermash – Konets vechnosti AKA The End of Eternity (1987)

    1971-1980Andrei YermashSci-FiUSSR

    Quote:
    Based on a novel by Isaac Asimov, the film deals with the idea that some people could get immortality by means of controlling the time periods inside the special lab-city called “Vechnost”. They look like people but they are trained to work for Vechnost forever, as a part of its mechanism. They correct time holes, help people from other times to solve their problems by means of a special mind operating system. Everyone from Vechnost is immortal and they live in a very futuristic looking place in the center of time . As some periods of time get blocked from them, two engineers are sent to solve the problem but the operation starts to go wrong.Read More »

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