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AELITA: QUEEN OF MARS
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Our Price: $24.99
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One of the most remarkable discoveries of the Soviet silent cinema, Aelita is a stunning big-budget science fiction spectacle.
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ARSENAL
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Our Price: $24.99
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A true masterpiece of form and content, set in the countryside and at the front during the final years of World War I and the beginnings of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Arsenal depicts the struggle in Kiev as the arsenal goes on strike and the strikers are defeated. Its great sequences include the symbol of a starving horse, and the death of the Revolutionary hero who, as he struggles forward with open shirt, is riddled with bullets by the Whites. "...in many ways his most dazzling silent picture...Dovzhenko's view of wartime and battlefront morality is too ambiguous and multilayered to fit comfortably within any propaganda scheme" (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader). Silent with music track, English titles. Alexander Dovzhenko---USSR---1929---75 mins.
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BED AND SOFA / CHESS FEVER
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Our Price: $24.99
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A landmark of cinema, this brilliant silent social comedy centers on a menage-a-trois in the midst of a housing shortage in Moscow. The film rejects politics and symbolism for sense of humor and naturalism. It is supposedly based on details in the life of the great poet Mayakovsky; Ludmila Semyonova is the extraordinary actress at the center of the triangle. Her decision at the end of the film symbolizes the liberation of women in the new Soviet Abram Room---USSR---1927---73 mins.
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DEATH OF SWAN/ DER STERBENDE
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Our Price: $16.95
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A very rare 1917 film made by Yevgeni Bauer, who came to directing from design and excelled at getting great performances from actors. Prolific--he directed some 20 films each year--Bauer focused on contemporary subjects for his films rather than classical themes, and according to historian Jay Leyda, insisted on dressing all of his heroes and heroines in beautiful dress, no matter whom they portrayed. Also known as The Dying Swan. Silent with German titles. Yevgeni Bauer---Russia---1917---49 mins.
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EARTH- ALEXANDER DOVZHENKO
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Our Price: $24.99
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A masterpiece. The last silent film by Dovzhenko is a lyrical evocation of his native Ukraine, the theme of the life cycle of man developed through constant juxtaposition and intertwining of images of life and death. The film charts the conflict between peasants and a landowner in a film poem of inestimable beauty. "A picture for filmgoers who are prepared to take their cinema as seriously as Tolstoy took the novel" (James Agee). Silent with English title Alexander Dovzhenko---USSR---1930---88 mins.
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EARTH/ END OF ST. PETERSBURGH
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Our Price: $29.95
Out of Stock
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A masterpiece. The last silent film by Dovzhenko is a lyrical evocation of his native Ukraine, the theme of the life cycle of man developed through constant juxtaposition and intertwining of images of life and death. The film charts the conflict between peasants and a landowner in a film poem of inestimable beauty. "A picture for filmgoers who are prepared to take their cinema as seriously as Tolstoy took the novel" (James Agee). Silent with English title Alexander Dovzhenko---USSR---1930---88 mins.
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LA DAME DE PIQUE/ QUEEN SPADES
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Our Price: $39.95
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Known best for directing Aelita, Yakov Protazanov's mounting of Pushkin's short story and later Tchaikovsky's opera is an ambitious production. A compelling Ivan Mozzhukhin stars as Herman, an army officer, who, over a card game, learns of a countess, the Queen of Spades, with knowledge of an ingenious gambling trick. Somewhat obsessively, he goes about courting the countess' naive granddaughter in order to learn her secret. Also known as La Dame de Pique. Silent with French intertitles. Yakov Protazanov---Russia---1916---63 mins.
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LA MAISON DE LA RUE TROUBNAIA
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Our Price: $39.95
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Boris Barnet, student of Kuleshov and director of Girl with the Hatbox, filmed this light, but impressive comedy about contemporary social manners. Also known as Dom na Trubnoy and Parasha. Silent with French Boris Barnet---USSR---1928---64 mins.
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LANDMARKS OF EARLY SOVIET FILM
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Our Price: $69.99
In Stock
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From Flicker Alley comes this collection of eight groundbreaking films from the Soviet silent era, including films by Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Victor Turin, Esther Shub, Boris Barnet, Mikhail Kalatozov, and Lev "The Effect" Kuleshov. With new musical scores and original Russian intertitles with English subtitles.
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LE FANTOME QUI NE REVIENT PAS
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Our Price: $39.95
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Soviet filmmaker Abram Room followed Bed and Sofa with The Ghost That Never Returns, or Privideniye, Kotoroye ne Vozvrashchayetsya, based on a novel by French communist Henri Barbusse. The inmates of a Mexican pena l colony are given a day of leave to see their families, but Jose Real (Boris Ferdinandov) organizes a worker's union to counteract the encroaching capitalists. Silent with French intertitles. Abram Room---USSR---1929---67 mins.
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LE PERE SERGE/ FATHER SERGIUS
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Our Price: $39.95
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One of the few surviving films from before the October Revolution, Father Sergius introduced an anti-religious element into Russian cinema in its realization of Tolstoy's story about an officer who became a monk on the eve of his wedding and suffered tortures of the flesh thereafter. Silent. Yakov Protazanov---USSR---1917---81 mins.
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LES 26 COMMISSAIRES/ COMMISSAR
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Our Price: $39.95
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One of the most significant films from the "silver age" of Georgian cinema, Nikolai Shengelaia's pro-Bolshevik drama The 26 Commissars was based on actual events that transpired in Azerbaijan during the Russian Civil War. "Admired by both Eisenstein and Pudovkin...established Shengelaia as the founder of Georgia's most important film family" (David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film). Also known as Dvadtsat Shest Komissarov and 26 Komissarov. Silent with French intertitles. Nikolai Shengelaya---USSR---1932---109 mins.
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LES GRADES ET HOMMES/ RANKS &
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Our Price: $39.95
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A silent Protazanov (Aelita) picture based on several Anton Chekhov stories, including "Anna on the Neck," "Death of a Petty Official," and "Chameleon." Also known as An Hour with Chekhov. Silent with French Yakov Protazanov---USSR---1929---65 mins.
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MAD LOVE: FILMS EVGENI BAUER
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Our Price: $29.99
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A trio of rare, silent films by the prolific Russian director Yevgeni Bauer, who came to directing from design and excelled at getting great performances from actors. Includes Twilight of a Woman's Soul (1913), Bauer's film about a young woman whose husband leaves her after she kills her rapist; After Death (1915), adapted from a story by Ivan Turgenev, explores the psychological hold that the dead have on the living; and The Dying Swan (1917), looks at an artist obsessed with a mute ballerina. All three films restored by the Russian state archive Gosfilmofund and feature new scores by the British Film Institute. Includes a 37-minute documentary film essay by Russian film scholar Yuri Tsivian and a stills gallery. Yevgeni Bauer---Russia---1913-17---114 mins.
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MISS MEND: AN ADVENTURE SERIAL IN THREE PARTS
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Our Price: $39.95
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Made in the tradition of French mega-serials like Les Vampires and Fantomas, this silent Russian serial offers excitement in every installment, along with some pointedly pro-Soviet propaganda. Three reporters and an office girl attempt to stop a bacteriological strike against the U.S.S.R. by some powerful western industrialists. Director Fyodor Otsep broke into film with his screenplay for 1916's Queen of Spades. Star Boris Barnet also collaborated on the screenplay and served as an assistant director. Featuring new English title translations and newly recorded orchestral score by Robert Israel.
Fyodor Otsep---USSR---1926---250 mins.
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MYSTERY OF LEAPING FISH/CH
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Our Price: $29.95
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Two silent film parodies. One of Sherlock Holmes, the other about the Soviet national pastime. Douglas Fairbanks is the scientific detective Coke Ennyday in the bizarre Mystery of the Leaping Fish, written by Tod Browning. The second short is a Russian look at the perils of total devotion to a board Vsevolod Pudovkin/John Emerson---USA/USSR---1916-25---64 mins.
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SELON LA LOI DURA LEX
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Our Price: $39.95
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In this silent Russian classic based on a short story by Jack London, a team of gold prospectors in the Yukon has just begun to enjoy success when one suddenly snaps and kills two others. The survivors, a husband and wife, subdue the killer but are then faced with an agonizing dilemma. With no chance of turning him over to the authorities for many weeks, they must decide whether to exact justice themselves or to risk trying to keep him restrained until they can return to civilization. "By the Law achieved an extraordinary blend of emotional intensity and geometrical stylization on the smallest budget ever allocated for a Soviet feature film...probably influenced the style of Carl-Theodor Dreyer's La Passion d'Arc" (David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film). Also known as Po Zakonu and Dura Lev Kuleshov---USSR---1926---60 mins.
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STORM OVER ASIA
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Our Price: $24.99
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Pudovkin's epic of an exploited Mongolian fur trader who becomes involved in the Mongolian uprising against the British during the Civil War period. It is "the film of the destiny of the Occident, although its action takes place in the heart of Asia, on the plateaus of Tibet" (Robert Desnos). Notable for Pudovkin's lyrical/psychological montage which ends in an incredible storm scene which contains "all the dust and debris that Pudovkin could imagine. But how else was Pudovkin to end a film whose attraction for him had been its fable and exotic imagery, except by hyperbole?" (Jay Leyda). With Valeri Inkizhinov, I. Inkizhinov and A. Chistiakov. Silent with music track. Vsevolod Pudovkin---USSR---1928---70 mins.
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ZVENIGORA (1928)
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Our Price: $24.95
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Ukrainian director Dovzhenko's first major work lyrically captures the entire history of the Ukraine through a series of folk myths stretching from the Viking invasion to the 1919 Civil War. Silent. Alexander Dovzhenko---USSR---1928---73 mins.
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