Early Soviet films make up an essential chapter in the history of cinema, marking a period of unprecedented innovation, experimentation, and transformation. These early films show the tumultuous times in which they emerged, due to the Russian Revolution of 1917 bringing about sweeping political and social changes.
1925 | Lev Kuleshov
The Death Ray is one of the earliest full length science fiction films, the first and last reels have been lost. It takes place in an unspecified Western capitalist country where a fascist government is attempting to suppress a socialist uprising. The revolutionary leader is imprisoned by the government but he escapes to the Soviet Union. There he meets the engineer Podobed who invents the “death ray”– a device which explodes gunpowder and fuel mixtures at a distance.
9/15, 2h 5m
1926 | Lev Kuleshov
A five-person team of gold prospectors in the Yukon have just begun to enjoy great success when one of the members snaps, and suddenly kills two of the others. The two survivors, a husband and wife, subdue the killer but are then faced with an agonizing dilemma. With no chance of turning him over to the authorities for many weeks, they must decide whether to exact justice themselves or to risk trying to keep him restrained until they can return to civilization.
9/22, 1h 20m
FRIDAYS 7PM
1929 | Dziga Vertov
Part documentary and part cinematic art, this film follows a city in the 1920s Soviet Union throughout the day, from morning to night. Directed by Dziga Vertov, with a variety of complex and innovative camera shots, the film depicts scenes of ordinary daily life in Russia. Vertov celebrates the modernity of the city, with its vast buildings, dense population and bustling industries. While there are no titles or narration, Vertov still naturally conveys the marvels of the modern city.
11/17, 1h 8m
1931 | Dziga Vertov
Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbas was created to celebrate Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. The film was the director’s first sound film and also the first of the Soviet production company Ukrainfilm. The film’s score is considered experimental and avant-garde because of its incorporation of factory, industrial, and other machine sounds; human speech plays only a small role in the film’s sounds.
11/10, 1h 7m
When they are fed rancid meat, the sailors on the Potemkin revolt against their harsh conditions. Led by Vakulinchuk, the sailors kill the officers of the ship to gain their freedom. Vakulinchuk is also killed, and the people of Odessa honor him as a symbol of revolution. Tsarist soldiers arrive and massacre the civilians to quell the uprising. A squadron of ships is sent to overthrow the Potemkin, but the ships side with the revolt and refuse to attack.
9/29, 1h 6m
Strike is Sergei Eisenstein’s first full-length feature. Set just before the 1905 Bolshevik Revolution, depicts a workers’ strike against their oppressive factory bosses. When a worker is accused of stealing a piece of machinery, he commits suicide, and his fellow employees revolt against the Czarist regime controlling the factory. A strike drags on and government officials grow desperate and struggle to end it.
10/20, 1h 54m
Arsenal, also alternative title January Uprising in Kyiv in 1918, is a highly symbolic and poetic portrayal of the events following the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the subsequent Russian Civil War. The expressionist imagery, camera work and original drama were said to take the film far beyond the usual propaganda and made it one of the most important pieces of Ukrainian avant-garde cinema.
10/20, 1h 10m
1928 | Vsevolod Pudovkin
Storm over Asia, or Heir to Genghis Khan, is set in Central Asia during the Russian Civil War. Both mingle human drama with the epic and the symbolic as they tell a story of a politically naive person who is galvanized into action by tsarist tyranny. Lowly Mongolian trapper Bair (Valery Inkijinoff), shunned by his fellow trappers for fighting with a trader, flees his trading post and joins the Soviet partisans trying to oust the occupying British forces.
11/3, 1h 14m
Zvengoria was Soviet director Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s first film in his Ukraine Trilogy. In it, a grandfather who trades in salt looks after his two grandsons, the idealistic nationalist dreamer, Pavlo, and the industrious Bolshevik worker and soldier, Timoshka. In a surreal, modernist story that leaps back and forth over a thousand years of history and Ukrainian mythology, the grandsons battle each other in a civil war.
10/13, 1h 49m
1927 | Vsevolod Pudovkin
Commissioned to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, The End of St Petersburg depicts the Bolsheviks’ rise to power in 1917. In the film, A Russian peasant boy unwittingly becomes a scab, putting him at odds with a relative leading the strike. The film covers the history of Russia’s involvement in World War 1 to the overthrowing of the Tzar and soviet takover of St. Petersberg, depicted in a celebratory Soviet perspective.
10/27, 1h 30m