Okraina
Plots(1)
War and poetry, cobbler's nails and revolution. The catastrophe of the First World War descends on a sleepy provincial backwater somewhere in Russia. And the cobbler has always worked there, in this petit-bourgeois hole. On Sundays, the women stroll by the village pond. Russians and Germans live together peacefully alongside one another as next-door neighbours. Suddenly, however, the cobbler's sons have to depart to the front, and the old German has to abandon his house. Not long afterwards, the first prisoners of war arrive. The cobbler's daughter gets involved with one of them, and some of the Russians almost beat the life out of him. But her father needs him: "He is not a German, he's a cobbler!" At some point, the soldiers at the front become tired of fighting: the revolutionary spark ignites the spirit of revolution at home, too. The German and the Russian cobblers march as one. (Berlinale)
(more)Reviews (1)
A film divided between the 1920s and Stalinism - if we are to understand it as a return of Soviet cinema to the waters of conventionally constructed films. Outskirts retains some brisk and original editing, parallel montage, and a willingness to experiment from the avant-garde of the previous decade. However, it is fundamentally different in two aspects. The first, less important one, is Barnet's humor and lightheartedness, which he is not afraid to contrast with serious or politically serious messages. The second and crucial aspect is that Eisenstein and his colleagues’ film placed abstract historical processes and impersonal structures of historical events in place of main characters and declared the motivation of these "characters" to be their own logic - the internal logic of historical changes (of course, from the perspective of Marxist-Leninist theory). This was no longer the case with Barnett as he was already classical, so we only follow the destinies of individual humans against the backdrop of historical events. Stalinism and its "realism" would thus join hands with classical Hollywood in the 1930s, and only their ideological positions differed.
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