Three Soviet Classics (Earth / The End of St. Petersburg / Chess Fever)
by Vsevolod Pudovkin, Mikhail Doller
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Aleksandr Chistyakov, Aleksei Davor, Ivan Chuvelyov, Vera Baranovskaya, Vladimir FogelDirector: Mikhail Doller, Vsevolod Pudovkin
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Russian (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 186 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-05-13
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Kino Video
Movie Reviews of Three Soviet Classics (Earth / The End of St. Petersburg / Chess Fever)
Movie Review: The machine brought the dream of happiness and a tragic death
Summary: 5 Stars
That sure is beautiful filmography. It is still a silent film and it has to express the worst and deepest feelings with only the body and the face, at most some gestures. But, and that is the difference with German or English or American films of that time, the Soviets do not use the traditional symbolic gestures or face expressions. They do use those gestures that go along with the communist vision of things, with the revolutionary attitude the film defends and advocates. But the feelings themselves, like love or sadness, or suffering are exclusively expressed by natural facial language. A smile is a smile and it is not forced as it is too often in the American comic films or the German dramatic films of the time. It wants to be realistic to the last little detail. And that gives to the film a tremendous force. The story itself is of course ideological if not political but it is simple and probably true too in some respect. That the son of one of the collective farm workers is killed by the young landowner in the village is no surprise. This film is there in 1930 to justify the first purge Stalin imposes, a purge that went through without that much uproar from the world: the landowners were either willing to give their land or their land was taken away and they had to disappear in a way or another. But the joy of these collective farm workers when the first tractor arrives is so true with the dream of finally producing more with less exhausting work. That dream too is political in a way, but it is the dream of all men in the world, to produce more not by working less but by making work easier. The dream of progress, be it American or Russian or Chinese or Indian is always the same: to live better and to enjoy life, work and rest alike. This dream is painted in numerous close-up shots on faces and their expressions and that is marvelous, something to watch and appreciate. Can we still do that, or are our cinema actors more trite or concentrating more on language, even when it is dubbed afterwards? Silent films were making the actor the very center of the screen in the Soviet Union that was generally very tragic, which was less true with Fritz Lang or Laurel and Hardy, or at least in no way as realistic as with the Soviets.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
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