The opening sequences of this late silent documentary about the building of the railroad connecting Turkestan and Siberia was a bit off-putting. Was it going to replicate the hysteria of the titles of SALT FOR SVANETIA, with its setting of a problem -- for Svanetia, not enough salt; for Turkestan, not enough water, and access to outside markets and supplies? But no. It shows its problems, and their solutions in images, as a movie should.
And at an increasing editing pace. I don't believe that Russian Academician film making was a marvelous advance; it codified what Western film makers had been doing for twenty years, and offered them in university language that gave the skills of the craftsmen an intellectual patina of respectability. Its major innovation was to quicken the pace of editing, a process that had been going on since George Smith and Williamson in Britain had realized that you could stick two shots together to offer a story. If it seems the message was lost for half a decade with the coming of sound, it was because recording techniques had to catch up before editing could be integrated as fully, and it wasn't until the 1960s that editing paces equaled those seen here. The techniques weren't lost, they were set aside for a few years, and then reintegrated into film making. Looking at 1930s B movies, you see long, dreary takes through 1937 from Poverty Row producers. After that, the techniques were settled, and gradually picked up pace. In Japan and China, where silent movies continued through the middle of the 1930s, there was no barrier, no need to recover and re-establish fast cutting. But Hollywood set the pace, and it would be a third of a century before the cutting speed of this movie would become the gold standard once again.
