Topic

The Russian Revolution

1917, and the seventy years the world spent arguing about it.

8: in film
13:00: average
104 min: in total
19: across the network

The Russian Revolution across the network →

All briefs8

13:00

The Last Command

Josef von Sternberg · 1928

The Last Command (1928), directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Emil Jannings, follows a fallen Russian grand duke reduced to working as a Hollywood extra. When cast to play his former self, memory and reality blur, culminating in a fatal breakdown on set. Shot in five weeks with Bert Glennon’s precise cinematography, it is a tightly wound study of identity, power, and performance — awarded the first Best Actor Oscar and preserved in the US National Film Registry.

13:00

Two Prosecutors

Sergei Loznitsa · 2025

Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors follows a young Soviet prosecutor in 1937 as he attempts to investigate the wrongful imprisonment of an Old Bolshevik during the Great Purge. Shot in a 1905 Riga prison and anchored by Aleksandr Kuznetsov’s restrained performance, the film unfolds with procedural exactness, refusing catharsis or moral simplification. Its power lies in accumulation: of silence, delay, and the quiet absorption of dissent into state machinery.

13:00

War and Peace

Sergei Bondarchuk · 1965

Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (1965–67) is a four-part, 432-minute adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel, produced by Mosfilm with unprecedented state support. Shot on Soviet 70mm stock, it deploys over ten thousand soldiers as extras, authentic period artefacts, and vast battlefield choreography to realise Tolstoy’s world—not his ideas. While lauded for its monumental realism and awarded the 1969 Oscar for Best International Feature, it streamlines the novel’s philosophical arguments and relies on physical presence over psychological nuance. Its value lies in endurance, not explication.

13:00

Arsenal

Oleksandr Dovzhenko · 1929

Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s 1929 silent film Arsenal reimagines the 1918 Kiev Arsenal Uprising as a mythic struggle, using expressionist imagery, non-linear editing, and stark physical performance. Shot by Danylo Demutskyi and edited by Dovzhenko himself, it privileges gesture over exposition and symbol over summary. Though demanding and historically dense, it remains a landmark of Ukrainian avant-garde cinema — less a history lesson than a visceral, rhythmic invocation of collective will.

13:00

Battleship Potemkin

Sergei Eisenstein · 1925

Battleship Potemkin (1925) is Sergei Eisenstein’s landmark Soviet silent film dramatising the 1905 mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin. Made as political art rather than historical record, it uses radical montage—especially in the iconic Odessa Steps sequence—to generate collective emotion and ideological conviction. Shot by Eduard Tisse and Vladimir Uralsky, edited by Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, it relies on non-professional actors, symbolic types, and rhythmic editing over psychology or narrative. Though its revolutionary certainty feels schematic today, its formal mastery remains potent and instructive.

13:00

Doctor Zhivago

David Lean · 1965

David Lean’s 1965 adaptation of Pasternak’s novel follows physician-poet Yuri Zhivago across Russia’s collapse, centring his love for Lara amid revolution and war. Filmed mostly in Spain with Freddie Young’s wintry cinematography and Maurice Jarre’s iconic score, it prioritises atmosphere and endurance over exposition or ideology. Though criticised for length and historical vagueness, its tactile realism and emotional restraint have secured its place as a benchmark of romantic epic filmmaking.

13:00

October: Ten Days That Shook the World

Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergei Eisenstein · 1927

October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1927) is a Soviet silent film commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, it dramatises the uprising through intellectual montage — juxtaposing images to generate ideas rather than narrative. Eduard Tisse’s stark cinematography and Eisenstein’s rigorous editing construct revolution as rhythm, mass, and inevitability. Though criticised at the time for opacity and formalism, it remains a foundational work of avant-garde cinema and political filmmaking.

13:00

The End of St. Petersburg

Vsevolod Pudovkin, Mikhail Doller · 1927

The End of St. Petersburg (1927), directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin and Mikhail Doller, traces a peasant boy’s journey from rural innocence to revolutionary clarity across four years of upheaval in pre-Soviet Russia. Shot in stark, rhythmic montage by Anatoli Golovnya and edited by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, it avoids individual psychology in favour of systemic analysis — linking factory exploitation, imperial war, and bread riots to the fall of Tsarism and rise of the Bolsheviks. Commissioned for the October Revolution’s tenth anniversary, it is a didactic, formally rigorous work of political cinema.