Landmarks of Early Soviet Film

This eight-film silent Soviet cinema collection offers a revelatory diversity of entries, from dynamic dramas to witty comedies to striking documentaries. The historical highlights are the pro-collective propaganda drama Old and New (1929), which was Sergei Eisenstein's final silent feature (co-directed with Grigori Aleksandrov); and the first feature-length documentary from newsreel pioneer Dziga Vertov, Stride, Soviet! (1926). But the lesser known productions are equally interesting and often more entertaining for modern audiences. For example, film theorist turned director Lev Kuleshov's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) is a political cartoon of a satire that knowingly spoofs stereotypes of “Bolshevik revolutionaries” while embracing equally absurd American clichés. Kuleshov's By the Law (1926), based on a Jack London story, is a harrowing survival narrative about gold prospectors in the Yukon. Boris Barnet's The House on Trubnaya Square (1928) uses slapstick comedy to slip a lesson about unionization into a very funny, fast-paced tale of a naïve peasant in the big city. On the documentary side, there's Esfir Shub's influential Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927); Victor Turin's Turksib (1930), a compelling piece about the construction of the railroad linking Turkestan and Siberia; and Mikhail Kalatozov's Salt for Svanetia (1930), a stylistically adventurous account of an isolated village in the Georgian Soviet Republic. A couple productions are culled from old video editions, but the majority benefit from excellent, high-quality remastering, and all feature solid musical scores. DVD extras include a booklet with scholarly notes. A well-curated set, this is recommended. (S. Axmaker)