Russian
Articles and Essays on Russian Films
Man with the Movie Camera (1929)
“Never had I known that these mechanical noises could be arranged to sound so beautiful. Mr. Dziga Vertov is a musician,” stated Charlie Chaplin after he first witnessed Vertov’s early film Enthusiasm in London. And still Vertov took the language of sound to an even greater level when making his masterpiece Man with the Movie Camera (also called Man […]
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Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Sergei Eisenstein’s revolutionary propaganda film Battleship Potemkin is one of the fundamental landmarks in the history of the cinema. Critics, film scholars and movie directors over the years have endlessly quoted and referenced the film, that most younger viewers most likely have seen the parody before seeing the original. Upon its original release Battleship Potemkin was banned in it’s native […]
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Cranes Are Flying, The (1957)
Any realistic portrayal of World War II wasn’t permitted when the Soviet Union was under the strict and dominating control of Joseph Stalin. “The effective prohibition on any honest depiction of the war until Stalin’s death paralyzed cinema,” wrote Josephine Wall. Stalin controlled the film industry with an iron fist and used fear, murder and […]
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Mirror, The (1975)
The great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s transcendent autobiographical poem The Mirror is a film that blends the themes of childhood memories, dreams, emotional abandonment and loss of innocence with slight touches of documentary footage which can be looked at as a political commentary on Russian history and of its people. The film shifts from three different timelines […]
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Come and See (1985)
I’ve always heard that you can’t create an effective anti-war film because its war scenes would be considered too exciting and thrilling for an audience. And yet they’re films that proved to break that barrier like for instance Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. But there was a Russian film that accomplished that even […]
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