The New Babylon
recreated and paid tribute to the 1871 Paris Commune in the most important film ever made for the FEKS (Factory of Eccentric Actors), one which also serves to illustrate an energetically avant-garde acting and visual style that stands in marked contrast to the popular image of the Soviet silent film (too many judgements are based on seeing only Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko). The culmination of years of experimentation in photography, set and costume design, and theoretical work on the part of the FEKS collective, The New Babylon reflected the aims of the young Leningraders of the FEKS movement who wanted to do away with old forms, to find a distinctively modern idiom and style, first in their original poster and theater work, then in the still infant art, cinema.
The New Babylon is made up of different approximations or caricatures of costume, scenes, characters: eight tableaux that describe an epoch - the fat decadent bourgeoisie and upper class, the lean workers on the barricades - are carefully constructed and linked together so that one is led into the action and to the desired conclusion. The story is told through the eyes of a girl who works in a huge department store aptly called The New Babylon during the days of the commune. The actress Kuzmina wrote of her role:
“Louise is not to be found in the literature of the time. We sought her in the whole epoch. This was the synthetic image of a communist girl at the time of the Paris Commune... While working on The New Babylon it was Zola who gave us the most. We read him all the time.”
The inspiration for the photography came from the impressionists - Manet, Degas, Renoir. There are some magnificent scenes shot in fog, shadow, and moonlight. The rhythms set up from the “choreography” of shots approach those of ballet. The film has been called “the danse macabre of the Second Empire and Paris Commune.”

• Directed and Written by Leonid Trauberg and Grigori Kozintsev. Produced by Sovkino-Leningrad. Photographed by Andrei Moskvin, Yevgeni Mikhailkov. Art Direction by Yevgeni Enei. With Yelena Kuzmina, Pyotr Sobolevsky, S. Gutman, Sophie Magarill, Sergei Gerasimov, V.I. Pudovkin. (1929, 90 mins, 35mm, silent, English titles, Print from American Film Institute)

China Express (The Blue Express)
takes us to the Far East in the late 1920s. A train hurtles through the night, carrying an English general and his upper-class Chinese allies along with Chinese workers and peasants.
The Chinese workers revolt, seize the train and break it through to the frontier. This film whose dramatic situation was to be repeated many times, as in von Sternberg's Shanghai Express, was the second film directed by Ilya Trauberg, the younger brother of Kozintsev's partner. His first film, a documentary called Leningrad Today, made in 1927, gave him the opportunity to work with Eisenstein on October. When given the opportunity to work on his own he proved himself capable of directing an exciting story and developing a beautiful montage.

• Directed by Ilya Trauberg. Produced by Sovkino-Leningrad. Written by L. Ierkhonov, I. Trauberg. Photographed by B. Khrennikov, Yuri Stilanudis. With Sun Bo-Yang, Chou Hsi-Fan, Chang Kai, Sergei Minin, N. Arbenin. (1929, 90 mins, silent, English intertitles, Print from The Museum of Modern Art)