Joel Adlen on Piano

(Generalnaya liniya, a.k.a. Staroye i novoye, The Old and the New). Eisenstein's first contemporary, rural subject, The General Line tells of a peasant woman's struggle against superstition, hostility, and greed in her attempt to form a collective and bring to it a bull, a cream separator, and a tractor. Here is one of Eisenstein's most beautiful if least known films, in which he developed his editorial concepts of sensual montage. The General Line is Eisenstein's "Russian Gothic," populated with wonderful types often posed for the camera, and filled with humor and earthy imagery. There is a cream-separator spectacle to rival Busby Berkeley, wheat fields worthy of Tolstoy, marvelous antibureaucratic satire on the level of the Russian Eccentrics, and, despite Variety's observation that the film lacks love interest, a very moo-ving wedding.

Our print of The General Line is archivist Naum Kleiman's partial restoration of the director's cut incorporating what remained of the original footage, with the title and ending as they were before Stalin called for a reedit.

Malevich:

"Eisenstein and Vertov are indeed first-rate artists, with a leftward leaning; the first relies on contrast, the second on the 'display of the object' as such. However, both still have a long way to go to reach Cézanne, to reach Cubism, Futurism, or Abstract Suprematism, and the trajectory of their further artistic development can proceed solely from an understanding of the principles of these schools." (1925)

"We must not forget that the content of our epoch is not exhausted by showing how pigs are fed on a state farm, or how the 'golden crops' are harvested. Our epoch has yet another content - its pure force and dynamics." (1929)