This page is to book ONLINE access to the presentation of OKRAINA. To attend to this presentation in person please reserve your seat HERE.
In “the backwaters of tsarist Russia,” life exists at a sleepy remove: ducks feed in murkily reflective water; a man dozes in his spindly coach as his horse shakes its head, the epithet “Good God!” seemingly coming from it, but as likely coming from its come-to offscreen master; a smiling girl, alone on a bench, noting couples—and an alternate possibility of her future: an unhappy unattached woman. From the outdoor leisure of strolling couples, the camera cuts to a shoemaking workshop: an unseen woman’s foot is measured; the sounds and sights of speedy mass labor. Thus begins Boris Barnet’s inventive, comical Okraina (literally, Outskirts, a.k.a. Patriots), an early Soviet sound film, and a brilliant antiwar film.
Two things rouse the town: a factory strike, compelling the cobblers to stop cobbling and join their comrades in solidarity; German invasion and war. The latter is a touchstone of the plot regarding the girl on the bench and her father, one of whose tenants is a German friend with whom he plays checkers. War sets them to bickering, the tenant moves out and they are friends no longer. Later, the daughter becomes infatuated with a German prisoner-of-war, stealing him into the boarding house before, roused from sleep, her father tosses him out. The boy, the one shoemaker in town willing (and eager) to work, is beaten up by folk, as though the town were the front. Meanwhile, the scenes at the front are trenchant, disclosing the horror of war. An extreme long-shot of one surrenderer and a man from the other side coming peaceably together, each followed by a flurry of soldiers, is surpassingly moving, as is the weary march of prisoners-of-war into town. Gorgeous lyrical inserts of Nature mark the 1917 revolution.
Tsarist Russia is no more.
This page is to book ONLINE access to the presentation of OKRAINA. To attend to this presentation in person please reserve your seat HERE.
In “the backwaters of tsarist Russia,” life exists at a sleepy remove: ducks feed in murkily reflective water; a man dozes in his spindly coach as his horse shakes its head, the epithet “Good God!” seemingly coming from it, but as likely coming from its come-to offscreen master; a smiling girl, alone on a bench, noting couples—and an alternate possibility of her future: an unhappy unattached woman. From the outdoor leisure of strolling couples, the camera cuts to a shoemaking workshop: an unseen woman’s foot is measured; the sounds and sights of speedy mass labor. Thus begins Boris Barnet’s inventive, comical Okraina (literally, Outskirts, a.k.a. Patriots), an early Soviet sound film, and a brilliant antiwar film.
Two things rouse the town: a factory strike, compelling the cobblers to stop cobbling and join their comrades in solidarity; German invasion and war. The latter is a touchstone of the plot regarding the girl on the bench and her father, one of whose tenants is a German friend with whom he plays checkers. War sets them to bickering, the tenant moves out and they are friends no longer. Later, the daughter becomes infatuated with a German prisoner-of-war, stealing him into the boarding house before, roused from sleep, her father tosses him out. The boy, the one shoemaker in town willing (and eager) to work, is beaten up by folk, as though the town were the front. Meanwhile, the scenes at the front are trenchant, disclosing the horror of war. An extreme long-shot of one surrenderer and a man from the other side coming peaceably together, each followed by a flurry of soldiers, is surpassingly moving, as is the weary march of prisoners-of-war into town. Gorgeous lyrical inserts of Nature mark the 1917 revolution.
Tsarist Russia is no more.