Mikhail Doller
1889 - 1952Чины и люди
Yakov Protazanov, Mikhail Doller
Mikhail Tarkhanov, Mariya Strelkova
From his early silent works, the great Russian film director, Herr Yakov Protazanov, made literary adaptations from equally great Russian writers, as is the case with "Chiny I Lyudi" ( Ranks And People ) (1929) in which three short stories by Chekhov, "Anna On The Neck", "Death Of A Petty Official" and "Chameleon" were assembled for the silent screen.
Ranks and People
Prostoy sluchay
Mikhail Doller, Vsevolod Pudovkin
Aleksandr Baturin, Yevgeniya Rogulina
As a response to criticism for the allegedly excessive “mass appeal” of his earlier epic STORM OVER ASIA (1928), Vsevolod Pudovkin unleashed his flair for experimentation in what was supposed to be the director’s first sound feature. Everything went wrong: technical problems forced him to complete the film as a silent; viewers were baffled by the lack of a recognizable plot; then, the ideological climate of the Soviet Union changed. He was now being blamed for catering to bourgeois taste! Time has come to set the record straight. Here’s lyrical cinema at its best, deliberately operatic and yet intimate as it matches the characters’ inner life with the solemn rhythms of nature, and depicted through breathtaking black-and-white photography. A sensation at last year’s Pordenone fest, Pudovkin’s long-forgotten swan song to the art of montage is resurrected by Gabriel Thibaudeau’s emotionally charged live music performance. –PCU (USSR, 1930, 75m)
A Simple Case
Суворов
Mikhail Doller, Vsevolod Pudovkin
Nikolai P. Cherkasov, Aleksandr Khanov
Primarily a biographical documentary about the military career of Alexander Vasilvich Suvorov, who was Field Marshal of the armies of Catherine the Great and Czar Paul I. After many military successes during the reign of Catherine, General Suvorov broke with her successor, Paul I, the Mad Emperor, over questions regarding army policy. He went into retirement and wrote "The Science of Victory," containing maxims such as "Swiftness of movement accompanies victory," and "the real general is he who defeats the enemy before reaching him." The czar recalled Suvorov to become the leader of the joint armies of Russia and Austria against Napoleon.
General Suvorov
Саламандра
Grigoriy Roshal
Bernhard Goetzke, Natalya Rozenel
A Socialist Realist distortion of Dr. Paul Kammerer's experiments in the inheritance of acquired character(istic)s -- the (not entirely anti-Darwinian) conjecture that certain changes the environment produces in an individual may spontaneously appear in the next generation. As recounted in Arthur Koestler's The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971), Kammerer (1880-1926) claimed that darkened footpads he had artificially induced in a toad had been passed on to its offspring. When it was discovered that his critical specimen had been injected with ink (though why and by whom is still unknown), his credibility was destroyed and he apparently suicided. Richard Goldschmidt's synopsis of the film in "Research and Politics," Nature (1949), mocks it as Soviet propaganda in support of the inheritance of acquired characters: The importance attached to the subject is revealed by the facts that none other than the then all-powerful [People's] Commissar for [Public] Education, the highly ...
Salamander
Минин и Пожарский
Mikhail Doller, Vsevolod Pudovkin
Aleksandr Khanov, Boris Livanov
Исторический фильм о вторжении поляков на территорию Руси (1611), создании Мининым и Пожарским народного ополчения. Начало XVII века. Уже шестой год русская земля под игом интервенции. Осенью 1610 года польские паны в обманом захватили Кремль и пытались прорваться на север Руси. Повсюду вспыхивали восстания, но хорошо вооруженные интервенты разбивали разрозненные крестьянские отряды. Освободительное движение возглавили нижегородский купец Кузьма и князь Дмитрий Пожарский.
Minin and Pozharsky
