Thursday, December 17, 2015
6 – 7:30 pm
Exhibition Galleries

Mother Directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin 1926, USSR, 89 min.

Mother, based on a novel by Maxim Gorky, depicts a woman’s fight against tsarist rule during the 1905 Revolution. She is not, at first, politically aware, but becomes involved in the struggle when her husband and son take opposite sides during a workers’ strike. Her husband dies in the strike; her son is arrested, summarily tried, and sentenced to hard labor in a prison camp. Awakened, she joins the revolutionaries, who attempt to free the camp’s prisoners. In the climax, tsarist troops suppress the uprising, and both mother and son are killed. Pudovkin uses crosscutting to enhance his narrative, in contrast to Eisenstein, who employs the technique to achieve dissonance. Mother was the first of Pudovkin’s trilogy of Revolution-inspired films, followed by The End of St. Petersburg and Storm over Asia (also screening).

Free with Pay-What-You-Wish admission.