"Friedrich Ermler (1898-1967) remains one of the shadowy figures of the early Soviet cinema, known if at all only for his psychological parable Fragment of an Empire. But he was a major force among the Leningrad filmmakers of the 1920s and '30s, whose sympathies lay closer to youth and realism than to the monumental frescoes of the Moscow 'masters.' House in the Snowdrifts is typical of many Soviet films of the 1920s that dealt sympathetically with the impact of revolutionary change on the bewildered bourgeoisie. Here a starving pianist finds eventual fulfillment playing for the common people. The Parisian Cobbler tackled an even more controversial theme head-on: the sexual exploitation of women by party activists in the name of 'free love.' When the heroine falls pregnant by her Komsomol lover, she is befriended by a cobbler who, as a mute, knows what it is to be a social outcast. Ermler's spare and uncompromising style reveals the extent to which realism was already on the agenda before it became a repressive slogan in the mid-'30s." Ian Christie