*--Two movies illustrate some of the similarities and differences in the revolutionary Soviet and depression-era US views on the "land" and the "salt of the earth"—the agriculturists who work the land, those who produce the food. Click on this SAC entry to locate these  movies

AGONIIA [Agony] (110m) D:Klimov,Elem S:Lungin,Semen & Nusinov,Ilya P:Kalashnikov,Leonid M:Shnitke,Alfred (conductor, Eri Klas) C:Petrenko,Aleksei Romashin,Anatolii Line,Velta Freindlikh,Alise. The controversy over Rasputin's influence on the tsar is portrayed through a combination of modern drama and historical film footage

DERSU UZALA D:Akira Kurasawa 124m 1976. The film is set in 1902-1910, in the Ussuri and Amur River basin administered by the Russian Empire out of the city Khabarovsk. The film raises significant intellectual or "spiritual" issues about humans in nature, a philosophical "environmentalism", but it also touches on the question of intercultural relations. The surveying crew is Russian. The hunter Dersu is Nanai (he names his tribe by the older name "Goldi"). With Dersu as their guide, the surveying crew is saved in an Udege hut from starvation and, perhaps, being frozen to death. The film was made in a time of tension between the Chinese People's Republic and the USSR. We meet three different representatives of the Chinese = a tragic old hermit, a vigilante band, defenders of law and order in the Ussuri region, and a gang of bandits which the vigilantes pursue after they rape and pillage a local settlement. The film was a joint Russian-Japanese project, and the famous Japanese film maker, Akira Kurosawa, directed. One critic wrote, "Dersu Uzala is an allegory for the environmental toll of civilization, a testament to a profound, enduring friendship, and a heartbreaking portrait of aging and obsolescence" The film lasts just over two hours, and that's fine, but time might force you to stop and rewind before the film ends. In this case, I recommend you watch for about an hour and twenty or, better, an hour and forty minutes. The last 20 minutes portray the difficulties of an aging noble-savage (Dersu) trying to live in the city Khabarovsk, returning to the wilds after all, and perishing there.

DISCOVERING RUSSIAN FOLK MUSIC (VT1534) 22m 1975 [cf. FOLKLORE]  This is a very authentic feeling presentation by a UCLA fold music group, though not all performances presented here are by musicologists.  Look for UO's own music professor Mark Levy.   The first ten minutes or so establish the ties between the music of the Russian village and the elaborate, polyphonic liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church

OKTIABR Sergei Eisenstein 100m 1927| It is said that more died making the film of the October Revolution than were killed in the actual event

PROSHCHANIE (160m) Based on Valentin Rasputin's nostalgic, biting story about life in the Siberian countryside under conditions of Soviet "modernization"

RUSSIA: CZAR [sic!] TO LENIN 16mm film. (30m) 1966 b/w.  This is an amazing collection of original film footage from 1896 into the earliest days of Soviet power

RUSSIAN [Ukrainian, Central Asian (Uzbek), Siberian (Omsk) & Moldavian] FOLK SONG & DANCE 70m 1980.  This video represents Soviet-style hokum, reflecting   what happens when authentic folk creativity is kidnapped by power elites, much as when Lawrence Welke's orchestra does Polkas or the Norman Luboff Choir sings "Ole Man ribba".  Watch the Omsk choir and try to imagine an actual remote village.   About mid point in the tape, however, a not-half-bad historical account is given of the origins in the 1910s of the Piatnitskii folk ensemble.  Here we can enjoy some decent simulations of peasant wedding ceremony

STACHKA [the strike] VHS 66m 1924.  Silent movie Writer and director Sergei Eisenstein’s debut film in six parts; chronicles a pre-revolutionary strike among factory workers and the owner’s retaliation with the help of mounted police.   This film was made in the famous Petrograd Putilov Factory and its barracks-like workers quarters

Many fascinating movies about the lives of workers were made in the early epoch of Russian and Soviet filmmaking [SAC]

TIKHII DON (And Quiet Flows the Don)| D:Gerasimov,Sergei (240m) Based on Mikhail Sholokhov's historical novel about the effect of World War One and the 1917 revolutions on a Don cossack community; a portrait of a rural community caught up in cataclysmic events, 1913-1918

UNFINISHED PIECE FOR PLAYER PIANO D:Nikita Mikhalkov [after Anton Chekhov] (115m).  What can I say?  This is a fabulously touching account of daily-life experiences of a seemingly impotent intelligentsia elite on the eve of revolution

URGA (Close to Eden) (109m) 1991.  I had never seen a Mongol shepherd butcher a sheep before I saw this film.  The theme is culture clash:  Russian truck driver and Mongol family interact against the haunting beauty of the Mongol highlands