Bruce Loeb on Piano (Staroye i novoye). Our print is a restoration of the director's cut of The General Line-including the original ending, as it was before Stalin called for a re-edit. Taken from a negative found stored in the Mosfilm vaults, which was then transferred to the State Archives (Gosfilmofund), this version has not been available for export until very recently. The General Line, in any of its many incarnations, is the least seen of Eisenstein's works, and his only completed film based on a contemporary subject. Made for Soviet audiences in support of the mechanization of agriculture, the story tells of a peasant woman's struggle against superstition, greed and hostility in her attempt to form a collective and bring to it a bull, a cream separator, and a tractor. Jay Leyda, in Kino, recounts the long search by Eisenstein and his team for the faces that seem so emblematic of the rural locale- "some brought to the country from Leningrad's flop-houses. It was only when I became a part of this great casting apparatus on a later film...that I realized how this search for the precisely 'right' face was as important to an Eisenstein plan as the montage-list or a shot-composition." In The General Line, Eisenstein developed his editorial concepts of "overtonal montage," or "sensual montage" leading to a filmic "fourth dimension." In France, as Ado Kyrou notes, the film's banning coincided with the L'Age d'or scandal.