Two things made Prince Potemkin proverbially famous: the legendary fake village he is said to have devised in 1787 in order to make the Russian landscape look better than it was, and the famous film made in 1925 about the rebellious warship bearing his name. There are side effects to any fame, and as fate would have it, the unfading glory of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin played the same trick on many a filmgoer that Potemkin once had on the non-inquisitive Empress of Russia. Rapid cutting, heroic sailors, jumping lions, fat fabricants, fierce Cossacks, strikes and stormings: cinema with political fists, as Eisenstein defined it, came to stand for the whole landscape of silent filmmaking in Russia. It is this tourist-guide façade of Russian film history that our five-night retrospective intends to look behind. Our aim is to discover amplitudes behind apparent flatnesses; pensiveness behind heroic action; the everyday behind enthusiasm; smiling, not only righteous, faces. We begin with what, by wisdom of hindsight, has become known as Russian “pre-revolutionary” (1914-1917) cinema; leap past the first half of the 1920s—dominated by major figures like Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin—and land in the period between 1927 and 1933, the years in which other names and faces—Abram Room, Boris Barnet, Oleksandr Dovzhenko—loomed large.

Aside from being more culturally diverse and richer in genres and themes than is usually admitted, the early history of Russian/Soviet cinema displays an amazing amplitude of styles. Slow or “contemplative” cinema is, nowadays, a pet term inside the festival circuit of art films. Its polar opposite—the super-fast editing style of modern Hollywood action movies—emerged, as is well known, from within the Soviet (“classic”) school of montage. Fast cutting was, indeed, de rigueur for Eisenstein and his circle. What is less known (and is worth exploring) is that Russian cinema was, once upon a time, the slowest and most contemplative cinema on Earth. Films by Evgenii Bauer and Yakov Protazanov (the ones we are showing are those made between 1914 and 1918) belong to slow cinema in the old sense. Their slowness draws upon the unhurried Russian prose and the thoughtful Russian stage; these films are slow because Bauer wants you to enjoy the environment in which his characters move (or not), or because Protazanov wants to revive the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ dignified kinetics. As film director/historian Kevin Brownlow once said, Russian pre-revolutionary cinema knew but two speeds: slow and stop. What else, if not an experience of slowness, could be a better way for us to re-experience the full-speed power of films like Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin?

Civil war heroes return home to confront the misery of peaceful life; a quiet peasant girl is caught in the tram-crazed life of modern Moscow; how to retrofit the political today into the mythic past of rural Ukraine—such (and suchlike) were the problems Soviet filmmakers came to tackle around 1927, ten years after the ten days that shook the world in October 1917. It was owing to Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora that Soviet cinema acquired a new—off-metropolitan—ethnic and cultural dimension; Barnet added to it his signature mix of lyricism and humor in The House on Trubnaya Square and Outskirts; and it was Abram Room (Bed and Sofa) who had the nerve and talent to go against the grain of the then-powerful, avant-garde inspired current of thought that swept away anything having to do with rooms and kitchens, marriages and divorces, and other nuisances of everyday existence. You cannot think Soviet cinema without Battleship Potemkin; yet it is as wrong to set Potemkin apart from the rest of Soviet films.
– Daria Khitrova, Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard