Explore the work of celebrated Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the context of his times with screenings and lectures by Eisenstein expert Anne Nesbet.
Read full descriptionA wealthy matriarch juggles her two daughters (one adopted) against a merchant and a dashing prince in this chamber melodrama from one of silent Russian cinema’s great stylists, Evgenii Bauer.
A fearful American and his cowboy bodyguard find themselves in over their heads in Soviet Russia in Lev Kuleshov’s frantic, absurdist comedy. With Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda No. 21.
BAMPFA Collection Print / BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!
A strike by a group of factory workers and its brutal suppression form the backbone of Eisenstein’s agitprop masterpiece of ferocious montage. With short Glumov’s Diary.
BAMPFA Collection
Eisenstein’s classic can be appreciated for “not only the perfection of its form, but the humanitarianism and enthusiasm that impregnated its revolutionary subject” (Georges Sadoul).
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A panel of visiting scholars—all experts in the field of early Russian and Soviet cinema—joins Moscow-based scholar and archivist Peter Bagrov for this program of rare shorts and excerpts from the BAMPFA Soviet Cinema Collection.
BAMPFA Collection
Originally banned for its excess and aestheticism, and inspired by Impressionists like Monet and Degas, this visually magnificent avant-garde extravaganza tracks a shopgirl and a soldier in the 1871 Paris Commune.
Archival Print
An exploited peasant suffers through the horrors of war and capital before awakening to the possibility of revolution in Vsevolod Pudovkin’s epic made to mark the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. With clips from Esfir Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty.
Digital Restoration
Made to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, October fictionally recreates the revolution’s power and fury: so well, in fact, that some of its scenes have been reused in documentaries as the “real thing.”
Digital Restoration
An army veteran moves in with his old buddy and his wife in a crowded Moscow flat—with predictably disastrous results—in this daring early Soviet film.
BAMPFA Collection
Eisenstein’s “Russian Gothic” tells of a peasant woman’s struggle against superstition, hostility, and greed in her attempt to form a collective.
BAMPFA Collection
Ukrainian villagers take on their rich overlords in order to collectivize in this startlingly poetic work from the legendary Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko.
See Mexico through Eisenstein’s eyes in this compilation of footage shot in 1931, intended for an epic hybrid of documentary and fiction that the director never finished. With short Bezhin Meadow.
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!
Eisenstein’s first completed sound film has a score by Sergei Prokofiev to propel its tale of a thirteenth-century hero confronting foreign invaders.
In sixteenth-century Moscow, the newly crowned Czar Ivan battles both the nobility and the church in an effort to unify Russia. Scored by Sergei Prokofiev, Eisenstein’s painterly film is like a fresco come to life.
The second part of Eisenstein’s unfinished trilogy follows Ivan’s return to the throne and his ruthless opposition to the schemes of the nobility to keep Russia divided among its princes and foreign interests.
BAMPFA collection print
Directed by the Belarusian Yuri Tarich, this extraordinary 1926 Soviet silent film set in the sixteenth century was influential in the direction of Eisenstein’s two-part Ivan the Terrible (1944-46).