The Train Rolls On: Alexander Medvedkin was the director of an extraordinary group of Red Army veterans who, inspired by Dziga Vertov, formed a Cine Train, a studio on wheels that traveled to remote, poorly organized areas of the populace, made satirical films about the conditions they found there, and showed the films to enthusiastic local audiences. The Train Rolls On is the first of two films on and with Medvedkin, made twenty years apart, by Chris Marker. Marker interviews Medvedkin, intercuts materials from the Cine Train, and provides his own inimitable commentary for a thoughtful study of one of the cinema's great agitational filmmakers, by the cinema's premiere cinema-essayist. "A little masterpiece" (Richard Roud). (32 mins, English narration and subtitles, B&W, 16mm, From New Yorker Films) The Last Bolshevik: In an interview filmed in 1984, the Russian filmmaker Alexander Ivanovitch Medvedkin turns to the camera to affectionately berate an old friend: "Chris, you lazy bastard you, why don't you ever write?" Eight years later-five years after Medvedkin's death-the friend, Chris Krazykatovitch Marker, finally gets around to it. These six "letters" by Marker explore the little-known career of a man who was the driving force behind the "film-trains" of the early years of the October Revolution and a perennially censored pioneer of early Soviet cinema. In this filmmaker of rare artistic integrity, Marker finds the figure of a "pure communist in the land where all communists faked being communists." A superb and profound film, full of documents rescued from the Russian film archives and testimonials of people who knew Medvedkin; and stamped with Marker's idiosyncratic editing and voice-over which blends humor and a sense of the tragic dimension of history.-Jean-Pierre Gorin "Best Ten Films, 1993," Georgia Brown, Manohla Dargis, Village Voice.