Earth/The End of St. Petersburg/Chess Fever

This Kino single-disc collection is certainly a bargain, offering not only two early Soviet classics by important contemporaries of Sergei Eisenstein but also a lesser-known short as a bonus. Vsevolod Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg (1927), made to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, is an account of the bourgeois-proletarian conflict in Petrograd that, under stress of war, led to the seizure of the Winter Palace from the Kerensky government in 1917. While its recreation of events is impressive, the film's narrative and cinematic techniques seem somewhat prosaic today. Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Earth (1930), on the other hand, is a hauntingly poetic, though often visually excessive and logically opaque, study of Ukrainian peasant life, masquerading as a paean to agricultural collectivization. Both are propaganda pieces, of course, but stylistically very different. Pudovkin's Chess Fever (1925) is an unlikely addendum--an amusingly deadpan half-hour riff on the Russian obsession with the game, notable for an appearance by the Cuban world champion, José Raul Capablanca. Since the transfers, made from Soviet-era restorations, are at best adequate, this can be recommended only with reservations. (F. Swietek)