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Mother

Live Piano Accompaniment Composed and Performed by Yakov Gubanov
Screening on Film
Directed by V.I. Pudovkin.
With Vera Baronovskaia, Nikolai Batalov.
USSR, 1926, black & white, silent, 90 min.
Russian intertitles with English subtitles.

As with Eisenstein’s Potemkin, V.I. Pudovkin’s Mother, from the proletcult novel of Maxim Gorky, deals with anti-Czarist stirrings during the faltered 1905 Revolution. A worker son goes to prison because of his mother’s political inexperience. Afterward, the son attempts to escape, while his mother is attacked by horsebacked cavalry when she joins a workers’ demonstration. This is certainly Pudovkin’s most accessible work, prime Social Realism punctuated with his masterly montage.

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Rosine Mbakam, 2025 McMillan-Stewart Fellow