La Mère

In wintry 1905 Russia, "Mother" Vera Baranovskaya (as the Mother) toils over housework, while son Nikolai Batalov (as the Son) sleeps. Hard-working husband and father Aleksandr Chistyakov (as the Father) arrives home to drunkenly slap his wife around. In the opening minutes, these three characters are clearly drawn. The younger man represents collective (striking) workers while his father sides with the (oppressive) establishment. "Mother" Russia must balance love and duty. Her final decision should come as no surprise. This film highly regarded but sometimes difficult to follow. Director Vsevolod Pudovkin moves the story effectively, with quick shots. This should help you stick with it for the excellent final thirty minutes.

******* Mat (10/11/26) Vsevolod Pudovkin ~ Vera Baranovskaya, Nikolai Batalov, Aleksandr Chistyakov, Ivan Koval-Samborsky

The top three directors of Soviet Era during the Silent Era were Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Dovzhenko, and Vesevolod Pudovkin. While Eisenstein is still readily available in quality home video offerings, the same could not be said of the other two. All three were previously issued on DVD by Kino back around the turn of the century and this Flicker Alley edition is an upgraded version of those releases. While MOTHER and THE END OF SAINT PETERSBURG are virtually the same, STORM OVER ASIA has improved sonic and picture quality thanks to a digital restoration.

MOTHER (1926) was Pudovkin's first feature film and it follows the fate of a poor Russian woman who is married to a drunken, brutal husband and whose son hopes for a better life. The setting is 1905, the date of the aborted first Russian uprising and it pits father against son. Both work at the same factory but take different sides in the conflict. Finally the mother becomes involved in the conflict with tragic results. Pudovkin's use of faces and especially his montage editing (inspired by D. W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE) create a powerful drama with the proper pro-Soviet viewpoint.

THE END OF SAINT PETERSBURG (1927), which was made to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, is more abstract in style following the example of Sergei Eisenstein in his films STRIKE and BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN. It focuses on two Russian peasants who go to St Petersburg in search of work only to wind up fighting in World War I before getting caught up in the Revolution. While the imagery, especially those of trench warfare is astonishing, the story is very persuasive Soviet propaganda. The trademark use of montage editing is really utilized in the film's finale.

The crown jewel of the set as far as I am concerned is STORM OVER ASIA (1928) which should have kept its original title of THE HEIR TO GENGHIS KHAN. This story of a young Mongolian nomad who is believed to be descended from Genghis Khan is far less a polemic than a character study not only of him but of the Mongolian people. The film records an authentic Buddhist ceremony that still has the power to astound and enthrall over 90 years later. We follow the main character from nomad to Soviet fighter to a potential pawn of the British Empire as a puppet king. The so-called "storm" doesn't occur until the very end. Bonuses include a 16 page booklet, audio commentary, features on montage editing, and Pudovkin's short comedy CHESS FEVER...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.

Vsevolod Pudovkin makes a thunderous debut with this adaptation of the Gorky novel of the same name that takes place immediately before the revolution of 1905. Steeped in the traditions of Soviet montage, Pudovkin's film explores the consequences of a mother's desire to protect her revolutionary son with a style that is both strident and unrelenting, but which avoids Hollywood-style sentmentality while never losing sight of the tale's human perspective.

Soviet filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin had produced a number of short films displaying his adapt handling from the teachings Moscow Film School instructor Lev Kuleshov on the messaging of montage editing. In 1926, Pudovkin embarked on reworking Maxim Gorky's 1906 novel, 'The Mother,' to illustrate the heroics of a mother whose son joins factory strikers in the face of brutal Tsarist troops. The October 1926 "Mother" proved to be one of cinema's most visible example of using editing techniques to fully explain the inner motivations of individual characters. Pudovkin's work departed from his film colleagues who implemented the montage to illustrate just the surface incidents leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolution.

When "Mother" kicked into high gear with action, Pudovkin implemented super-quick edits to portray the shown events as chaotic. He didn't waste even a nano-second of empty framing to lengthen these scenes. "Whenever we noticed some dead place at the edge of a shot," Pudovkin related, "we would eliminate it, to have nothing useless or superfluous in the composition." Fellow Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein noticed Pudovkin's focus on the individual, how the characters changed within the fluid social revolution. "He puts real living men in the center of his work," described Eisenstein. "His films act directly through their emotional power."

The Mother, Pelageya Vlasova (Vera Baranovskaya), is Pudovkin's focal point; she loses her abusive husband to a revolutionist who accidentally shoots him. Shortly afterwards, she turns in her son, who is storing arms for the rebels, thinking he'll rethink his position and eventually side with the Tsarist government. Her plan doesn't work-he receives a harsh life sentence of hard labor. He escapes from prison by crossing an ice-flow river, reminiscent of D. W. Griffith's 1920 "Way Down East's" exciting conclusion. While all this action unfolds on the screen, Pudovkin uses his lessons from Griffith to cross-cut his montage sequences with shots of a calming nature, ice flows, and the concluding calvary charge, among other scenes.

Camara positioning was equally important to Pudovkin as his editing. To show the transformation of the Mother, he initially positions the camera high looking downwards to show an oppressed, humiliated wife in the face of her aggressive husband psychologically dragging her down. Towards the finale, the director does the opposite with the camera as she gains awareness to her self and Russia's political ramifications: he positions it low looking up towards the confident and inspired Mother who faces an onrushing horde of Tsarist calvary.

During the filming, actor Nikolai Batalove, as The Mother's son, refused to walk on the ice flows in the dramatic escape sequence. Mikhail Dollar, Pudovkin's assistant director, took the clothes from the actor and proceeded to step confidently on the flows, capturing the heart-pounding athletic feat on film. Dollar was also instrumental in creating the factory crowd frantic scene where the mounted police were overrunning the strikers. At first the 700 extras looked lethargic as they ran down the street. Dollar and Pudovkin decided to turn around the two horses they were riding and gallop just out of frame against the throng of extras. The members of the crowd didn't hesitate to run for their lives, turning into a stampede of people, just as Pudovkin had scripted.

"The Mother" is the first in what later critics labeled Pudovkin's revolutionary trilogy. In the next two years the director proceeded to produce two additional classics along the lines of this classic film debut.

Set in Russia during the harsh winter of 1905. A mother finds herself caught in emotional conflict between her husband and son when they find themselves on opposite sides of a worker's strike. The son is a supporter of the workers but the father has been blackmailed into supporting the bosses and blacklegs. Despite the grief which follows the mother gradually comes to support the strikers and eventually is prepared to risk everything in standing up to police and Cossak troops in a demonstration endangering both herself and her precious son.