Word: amkino
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Babylon (Amkino). In mood and technique, this makes pictures like General Crack look like amateur theatricals, but it is inferior as entertainment. The difference is a matter of intention. The Amkino producers were not interested in making this product salable but in expressing a dogma passionately clear and important to the patriots of new Russia. The setting in France of 1870 is adventitious. The storyless argument lacks sequence. The vivid symbolism, used at first coherently to show what happened in the rebellion that followed the German invasion, becomes disordered and tedious. Best shot: French troops stimulated to attack doomed rebels...
Caucasian Love (Amkino). There is further angry propaganda in this one, directed now at the Cossacks whom the Tsar sent to drive the people of Tersk out of their village. The situation is presented less consciously and vehemently than in The New Babylon (see above). Good shots: the illiterate Chechens signing a document by pressing it with thumbs first rubbed on a sooty pot; a crowd of people on a mountain road; villagers squatting with bowed heads in the road as they await a charge by cavalry...
...Siberia (Amkino). A sly, shriveled fellow with the stealth of a fox and the cruelty of a eunuch arrives at a Siberian prison in the Tsar's time and begins to run things the way he wants them. The picture is not a story but a description of the way the imperial prisons are said to have been. There is propaganda in it, but that is kept out of sight. Its horror, too is kept out of sight, brought to life by suggestion until it becomes a mood as palpable as a sound, like something howling. This would...
...Full name of Amtorg is American Trading Organization. Ask curly-haired Saul George Bron, Am-torg Board Chairman, if Amtorg is a Russian governmental agent and he will become voluble in explaining that it is a U. S. corporation, organized in 1924, and no Soviet arm. Nevertheless, Amtorg, like Amkino, Am-Derutra, and many another Russian trading corporation, acts with the approval and the co-operation of the Soviet government, or specifically, with the Soviet Supreme Economic Council...
...Village of Sin (Amkino). People have learned to expect in any modern Russian film a cast of well-chosen actors and actresses with difficult names, acting competently and intelligently without makeup on their faces, so that they do not look like actors and actresses but like men and women. People have learned to expect photography so quietly beautiful or so imaginative that the best effects of Hollywood technicians seem artificial or flamboyant by comparison. They have also learned to expect doses of tedious propaganda extolling communism and episodes in which unnecessary impressionism takes the place of ordered storytelling. This picture...