Word: amkino
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Fragment of an Empire (Amkino). No picture has more intelligently shown the connection between the War and the new era in Russia than this story of how a shell-shocked soldier reclaims his life. Bearded Fedor Nikitin as Sergeant Filimonov loses his memory for four years and gets it back when he sees his wife's face at a train window. In a moment of anguish everything he had forgotten floods through his mind. He leaves the country station where he has been doing odd jobs, goes back to Moscow to take up life again. More than half the picture...
...Amkino). Not long before his death Anton Chekhov, Russia's greatest short story writer (see p. 64), married Actress Olga Knipper of the Moscow Art Theatre. While he was ill in Yalta, writing stories "feebly, sometimes not more than five or six lines a day," she went on playing her roles and corresponding with him about the child they were expecting. But Olga Knipper had a miscarriage, and the Chekhov who plays a waiter in this picture is not-as the arrogance of the famous name he uses without modifiers seems to proclaim-Chekhov's son, but Chekhov...
...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...