Grigoriy Aleksandrov

A group of oppressed factory workers go on strike in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Matthew Rovner, Jewish Daily Forward wrote:
On February 13, 1948, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency announced that film director Sergei Eisenstein, “the son of a Jewish merchant,” was dead at the age of 50. Eisenstein’s father was a prosperous German Jew and his mother Russian Orthodox. Eisenstein grew up highly assimilated, though he was aware of his Jewish heritage. He was friendly with Isaac Babel, and he learned to use Yiddish slang and humor. But Eisenstein’s Judaism had always been marginal to his work as an artist. In his first feature, “Strike,” a serious propaganda film, there is humor, although it is influenced more by Charlie Chaplin than Sholom Aleichem.Read More »

Synopsis:
Yelena (Mariya Strelkova), a well-off would-be singer who can’t carry a tune, mistakes shepherd Kostya Potekhin (Leonid Utyosov) for a famous Italian conductor of a jazz orchestra and invites him to an elegant party held in her house. He plays his pan flute, which attracts the herd of animals from his kolkhoz to the dining tables. Yelena’s servant Anyuta (Lyubov Orlova) falls for Kostya. But Kostya is attracted to Yelena, and when she turns him down following the discovery of his real identity, he is very upset. He leaves for the city to try himself as a professional musician and finds himself in many comical situations. Eventually he joins a jazz band consisting of young “jolly fellows”. Read More »

Marie Seton wrote:
When he made Potemkin in 1925, Sergei Eisenstein was not only a man with his total personality dedicated to creative work — albeit a creative work aimed at destroying all orthodox concepts of ‘art’ — but he was also a revolutionary fighter, a propagandist for the Russian Revolution. Thus, his work had a utilitarian purpose as well as an artistic one. He was educator and artist. At its most obvious level, Potemkin was regarded as propaganda for the Revolution; at a deeper level it was a highly complex work of art which Eisenstein thought would affect every man who beheld it, from the humblest to the most learned.Read More »

IMDB:
A drab woman scientist, working on machine to harness solar energy, and a pert concert singer look-alike being courted to play her in a movie swap identities and find personal growth, professional success, love, and happiness.Read More »

Description: Footage of the aftermath of the January 14 1931 Earthquake in Oaxaca, Mexico.Read More »