Already faced with mounting criticism of his overly avant-garde tendencies, Eisenstein stepped out of his usual practice by building Old and New around an individual protagonist. Meant to glorify the Soviet practice of merging single farms into large collectives, the film focuses on a young woman who seeks to convince her neighbors that collectivization will benefit them all. Out of potentially dry subject matter, Eisenstein constructs a warmly folkloric film with genuine charm. The film also contains masterful montage sequences and evinces Eisenstein’s fascination with the subsistence of the primitive pagan world beneath modernity, a theme that would come to the fore in the plans for his Mexican film.