The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film

Alexander Rodchenko, Sports Parade on Red Square, 1936. Gelatin silver print, 11 5/8 × 8 7/8 in. (29.6 × 22.6 cm). Sepherot Foundation, Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

Anatoly Belsky, poster for Five Minutes, 1929. Lithograph, 42 1/8 × 28 1/2 in. (107 × 72.4 cm). Collection of Merrill C. Berman.

Alexander Rodchenko, Stairs, 1929–30. Gelatin silver print, 7 1/2 × 11 1/2 in. (19.1 × 29.2 cm). Sepherot Foundation, Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

Installation view of the exhibition The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film. The Jewish Museum, NY. Photo by: David Heald.

Installation view of the exhibition The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film. The Jewish Museum, NY. Photo by: David Heald.

Installation view of the exhibition The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film. The Jewish Museum, NY. Photo by: David Heald.

Installation view of the exhibition The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film. The Jewish Museum, NY. Photo by: David Heald.

Aelita: Queen of Mars Directed by Yakov Protazanov 1924, USSR, 111 min. The early Soviet science fiction film Aelita tells the story of Los, an engineer who becomes obsessed with a cryptic radio message from Mars. As he builds a spaceship that will take him to the red planet, he is observed through a giant telescope by the Martian Queen Aelita, daughter of the totalitarian ruler Tuskub. When Los and his companions arrive on Mars, Aelita and Los fall in love. The Russians incite the downtrodden Martian slaves to rise up in rebellion. Aelita at first offers to lead the revolution but then forms her own totalitarian regime. Los, disillusioned, tries to stop her, only to wake up and discover that it was all a dream. Widely acclaimed???if hardly understood???upon its release, the film was eventually banned by Stalin???s censors. Based on a novel by Alexei Tolstoy, it has remarkable Constructivist sets and elaborate costumes for the scenes on Mars, designed by Alexandra Exter.

By the Law, or Dura Lex Directed by Lev Kuleshov 1926, USSR, 83 min. Based on Jack London's novel The Unexpected, By the Law is Kuleshov's "Constructivist Western" about five prospectors searching for gold in the remote Yukon. The laborer Dennin, whose job it is to manage the camp, discovers gold, but the other four continue to assign him domestic duties. Dennin snaps and kills two of his companions. The remaining two, a husband and wife, debate how they should deal with him, and eventually decide, strictly "by the law," that they must hang him for his crime. This allegory on the hypocrisy of capitalistic and bourgeois life was made on a very small budget but had great international success, although it was not shown in English-speaking countries until the late 1930s.

Man with a Movie Camera Directed by Dziga Vertov 1929, USSR, 68 min. Man with a Movie Camera is one of the most innovative and influential films of the silent era. Startlingly modern, it features a groundbreaking style of rapid editing, done by Elizaveta Svilova, Vertov's collaborator and wife, and incorporates innumerable other cinematic effects to create a work of great power and energy. Shot in Odessa, Kiev, and Kharkiv over three years, the film captures twenty-four hours in the life of a Soviet city. It presents urban Russian life as a dizzying montage of people at work and play, and the machines that endlessly whirl to keep the metropolis alive. It is also a film about the artifice of filmmaking: Vertov shoots scenes of the cameraman—his brother Mikhail Kaufman—shooting scenes, scenes of film being edited, and even scenes of a film audience. There are recurring shots of an eye seen through a camera lens. Man with a Movie Camera was Vertov's first full-length film, and despite these complexities, his approach is simple, functional, and descriptive. In assembling these fragments of reality he aims to depict deeper ideas than can be seen with the eye alone.

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).

October, or Ten Days That Shook the World Directed by Sergei Eisenstein 1927, USSR, 103 min. Officially produced to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, October traces the fall of the tsar, the rise of Lenin, and the triumph of the Bolsheviks. As in Battleship Potemkin (also screening), Eisenstein experimented in film technique, using explosive montage to evoke the spirit of revolution—in this case, the events in St. Petersburg during the months leading up to the Bolshevik revolt—and deploying space, shadow, movement, and rhythm to convey mood and meaning. A workers' rebellion in the streets, followed by the raising of bridges to isolate their neighborhood, becomes a visual symphony of panic.

Salt for Svanetia Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov 1930, USSR, 55 min. Criticized when first released for its hyperbole and naturalism, Salt for Svanetia is now regarded as one of Kalatozov's best films. A drama about the struggle for survival of a small, isolated community in the Caucasus, the film is shot in a documentary, ethnographic style. The daily work of the villagers is recounted, and their ancient ways of farming recorded. High in the mountains, the people lack salt until the Soviet government builds a road to reach them. The camera becomes part of the story through dynamic movement, a characteristic of Kalatozov's later films. The director traveled to Svanetia to shoot another film, The Blind Woman, which was never released because it was accused of formalism. Today that film is lost, but Salt for Svanetia is composed of discarded footage from it.

Storm Over Asia Directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin 1928, USSR, 125 min. In Storm Over Asia, the last film in Pudovkin's trilogy on the Revolution, an ailing Mongolian hunter sends his son to a trading post to sell a valuable silver fox fur. When a British trader cheats him out of the fur, the young trapper fights back and is forced to flee. He joins a band of Bolshevik partisans fighting the occupying British army. He is captured and sentenced to death, but a document found in an amulet around his neck leads his captors to think that he is a descendant of Genghis Khan. The British hope to install him as a puppet ruler, but he rebels and leads his people to victory over their oppressors. The film was shot largely on location in Mongolia, with panoramic views of vast landscapes, and has a documentary feel, despite its melodramatic plot. Several scenes featuring the historically inaccurate British occupation of Mongolia were cut from the original film print.

The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty Directed by Esfir Shub 1927, USSR, 87 min. Shub is perhaps the best known among the women filmmakers of the Soviet avant-garde. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty is a powerful documentary of tsarist Russia from just before World War I until the 1917 Revolution. Her technique is itself revolutionary: the film is stitched together from archival and found footage, including selections from forgotten films she discovered in storerooms and cupboards all over the Soviet Union. She tracked down footage that had been sold to the United States, as well as newsreels and home movies made by the tsar's film crew. These are interspersed with long intertitles that link the fragments of film and place them in historical context. A pioneer of editing, Shub spliced key images and fragments to contrast the privileged life of the imperial family with the backbreaking labor of the masses.

he House on Trubnaya Directed by Boris Barnet 1928, USSR, 84 min. This comedy follows the trials and tribulations of Parasha, a healthy peasant girl who finds romance and political consciousness after moving to Moscow. Six screenwriters collaborated on the film, considered among the best of the Soviet silent comedies. As the film begins, Parasha, clutching a duck, is searching for an address, only to be led in all the wrong directions by passersby. The duck escapes and our flustered heroine takes after it. Moscow is a maze of tramlines, and the duck, standing in the middle of the tracks, faces imminent danger. But an intertitle interrupts the scene with the words "Freeze frame" and the film jumps back in time to a country railway station, where the girl is boarding a train for the city. Another intertitle tells us that she intends to stay in Moscow with her uncle, but as the girl bids farewell to her mother and her train departs, another arrives, and the uncle alights. Barnet fuses the popular with the avant-garde while satirizing Moscow life during the NEP period in a series of comic scenes that verge on the absurd.

The Overcoat Directed by Grigory Kozintsev 1926, USSR, 66 min. The Overcoat is based on Nikolai Gogol's tragicomic story of the same title. It was produced by the experimental collective FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor), known for its stylized acting and expressionistic cinematography, which turns the overcoat itself into a main character. An impoverished clerk in the tsarist government, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, embarrassed by the threadbare condition of his overcoat, saves his pennies to have a fine new one made. One evening a group of thugs attacks him and steals it, leaving him desolate. He seeks help from the bureaucracy, but is rejected. His world collapses and he begins to lose his grasp on reality. The film is distinctive for the use of enveloping shadows, strong contrasts, silhouettes, and radical camera angles.

Turksib Directed by Viktor Turin 1929, USSR, 57 min. A stirring chronicle of the building of the Turkestan-Siberia railway, Viktor Turin's Turksib had a major influence on British and American documentary films in the 1930s. The film recounts the construction of this important transportation link, one of the Soviet Union's earliest grand construction and modernization projects. In addition to camerawork with an epic sweep, Turin incorporates newsreel footage and stock shots from previous Soviet propaganda films into his documentary. Memorable scenes include a harrowing sandstorm, filmed at great personal risk to the camera crew. The M.I.T.-educated Turin learned the movie business at the Vitagraph Studios in Hollywood and became a fan of westerns before returning to the Soviet Union to direct this career-defining film.