Shorin is a sailorfrom the Aurora who jumps ship to spend the night with Valya, a girl hehas met in the Leningrad amusement park, and their clandestine affair isabetted by a sinister petty criminal who also performs at the park as amagician. If the storyline of Kozintzev and Trauberg's first fullfeature sounds more like a French New Wave film of forty years laterthan a venerable Soviet classic, this shouldn't surprise us. That itdoes-and that the work of the FEKS group and Leningrad filmmakers ingeneral has been consistently undervalued alongside the MuscovitesEisenstein and Pudovkin-is a measure of how little early Sovietfilmmaking has been viewed as cinema, rather than as propaganda ortheory. "Better to be a young pup than an old bird of paradise" was theoriginal FEKS slogan in 1922 (borrowed from Mark Twain), and they stoodabove all for a cinema attuned to the interests of young audiencesrather than the straight-laced prescriptions of Moscow administrators.Their witty irreverence attracted a strong following, which soonincluded the leading critics Shklovsky and Tynianov, and provided adynamic working model for a cinema that would be both contemporary andrevolutionary. Shorin and Valya's adventures in the Leningrad underworldlead them to a new sense of responsibility, but the moral never swampsthe message of cinematic discovery. Ian Christie