USSR

Description:
A comedy about a young dentist, who becomes well-known in his town but suddenly loses faith in himself.
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(imdb review)

A masterful, pro-elitist, Tatiesque film from Elem Klimov, 22 April 2006

Author: Niffiwan from Toronto, Canada
This is story about a dentist with the talent of painlessly extracting teeth, and what happens to him as a result of being naturally good at his job. It is told with humour (much of it quite subtle, almost surreal, and in the background – imagine a street scene where everyone on the sidewalk on one side of the road walks in just one direction, and on the other side in the other), poignancy, and a frequent breaking of the 4th wall between the movie and the audience (think of what happens in Shakespeare’s plays, and you’ll be close). It also features some songs by Novella Matveyeva, a famous Russian singer-songwriter (her songs are sung by the leading actress).Read More »

The script is based on Borges’s story “The Gospel according to St. Mark”.
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Quote:
Morning of a silent provincial small town. The sleepy city is exposed silent to capture alien a landing. Newcomers are installed in people, destroying the person and subordinating a body to the new carrier. It is last fantastic film made in the USSR. 1990 – last year before disintegration of the Union.
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Filmed to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Russian revolution, End of St. Petersburg was the second feature-length effort of director V. I. Pudovkin. Utilizing many of the montage techniques popularized by his contemporary Sergei Eisenstein, Pudovkin details the fall of St. Petersburg into the hands of the Bolsheviks during the revolution. Unlike Eisenstein, Pudovkin concentrates on individuals rather than groups (his protagonist is a politically awakened peasant played by Ivan Chuvelyov) humanizing what might otherwise have been a prosaic historical piece. The mob scenes, though obviously staged for ultimate dramatic impact, are so persuasive that they have frequently been excerpted for documentaries about the Russian Revolution, and accepted by some impressionable viewers as the real thing. Filmed just after his 1926 masterwork Mother, The End of St. Petersburg was followed by the equally brilliant Storm Over Asia.
— allmovie.comRead More »

Synopsis:
Wandering minstrel Ashik Kerib falls in love with a rich merchant’s daughter, but is spurned by her father and forced to roam the world for a thousand and one nights – but not before he’s got the daughter to promise not to marry till his return. It’s told in typical Paradjanov style, in a series of visually ravishing ‘tableaux vivants’ overlaid with Turkish and Azerbaijani folksongs.Read More »

Aleksandr Medvedkin’s Happiness, as rowdy as any Soviet silent movie, is a comic parable composed of equal parts of Tex Avery and Luis Buñuel. It satirizes the plight of a Soviet farmer who finds himself providing for the state, the church, and his peers at the expense of his personal satisfaction. A hapless young prole, Khmyr, is tasked by his wife with the goal of going out in the world and finding happiness, lest he end up dead and dissatisfied after a lifetime of toil, like his father. Through stylistic exaggeration and a systematic attack on pre- and post-Revolutionary Russia’s dearest institutions, the movie achieves a wide-ranging, and deeply wounding, attack on the limitations placed on personal freedom in Russian societyRead More »

The first film from Eisenstein.

From allmovie

” Eisenstein’s interest in film began with an appreciation of the work of D.W. Griffith, whose editing style influenced him in the production of his first cinematic endeavor, the 1923 five-minute newsreel parody Dnevnik Glumova. A stint with Lev Kuleshov’s film workshop followed, as did an increasing fascination with the burgeoning avant-garde.”Read More »

“Reflections” is a film created by Henrikas Šablevičius and the national television. Back then, the movie was seen as unconventional in the context of Lithuanian cinema: it employs a surrealistic etude of no clear narrative and has an extreme form. Thus, immediately after the release it was banned and had been unnoticed for almost two decades. By bringing graphic artist Stasys Krasauskas’ works to life in the conditional spaces of “Reflections”, the director, only by means of images, creates a story about human’s duality, the search for self, liberation, accepting the agency of the past and a limited opportunity to choose.Read More »

From Wikipedia:
The Night Before Christmas (Russian: Ночь пе́ред Рождество́м, Noch pered Rozhdestvom) is a 1951 Soviet traditionally-animated feature film directed by the Brumberg sisters and produced by the Soyuzmultfilm studio in Moscow. The film is based on Nikolai Gogol’s story The Night Before Christmas.

The animation features heavy use of rotoscoping, known as “Éclair” in the Soviet Union, and is an example of the Socialist-Realist period in Russian animation.Read More »