Directed by Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei Eisenstein
My rating: 2 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Flicker Alley)
Russian peasants struggle for survival when their land is divided by fences and everyone is out for themselves. However, a young Bolshevik shows them another way: start a coop farm! Soon, they are reaping mounds of wheat, buying a prize bull and living in nice houses instead of crumbling huts. They have trouble buying a tractor from the big city bureaucrats, but that is eventually sorted out. The final montage shows an army of tractors plowing over those dividing fences. Socialist propaganda aside, it is brimming with stunning visual imagery, the directors certainly know how to capture and frame faces of the workers, bad teeth and all. Despite the imagery, it lacks a compelling story and we never get to know any of the characters, not to mention numerous scenes of animal suffering.
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