The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty

In the early 1920s, Esfir Shub, director and editor at the state film commission Goskino, Dziga Vertov's close friend and Sergey Eistenstein's mentor, began a long study of Russia's pre-revolutionary history. She searched for footage and found it in all remote corners of the Soviet Union, including unique images that had once been shot by the film crew of the czar himself. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty is a passionate, highly detailed and politically motivated compilation of footage with which Shub reconstructs the years 1912-1917, when the Russian czar and aristocracy made way for the Russian revolution and the arrival of Lenin. The documentary is the first part of a trilogy that later would be complemented by The Great Road (1927) and Lev Tolstoy and the Russia of Nicolai II (1928). The historical images are linked by intertitles that make Shub's loyalty to the new leaders abundantly clear, but nevertheless provide a fascinating overview of the balance of power in World War I. The film proves that the moving image can have tremendous power as a period document. Esfir Shub would proceed to make the first Russian documentary with sound in 1932. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)