The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, September 21-27
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927)
Directed by Esfir Shub
In the middle of the 1920s, Shub spent several months in Leningrad, looking at footage shot before the February Revolution of 1917. The result of her labors, along with a carefully documented archive, was The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, a compilation film that scholars have called the first of its kind, and contemporary critics compared favorably to Eisenstein’s October (Shub had wanted to call her movie February). The critics were being, as usual, ideologues; their reason for praising Shub’s film was its apparent effacement of the director, considered more appropriate to the new Soviet art than Eisenstein’s auterism. What Shub had done, at least in the first half of the film, was edit together footage into an overview of the Russian Empire as it was, and never would be again: self-important officials, pompous parades, toiling peasants, gentry having tea in the gardens of their estate, sailors scrubbing a deck while officers, along with their dog, are served by waiters. Fall’s greatest bequest, however, is one that probably neither the critics nor Shub herself expected. It is the curious faces turned toward us—soldiers, peasant women, minor officials, protesters, people who have no awareness of what it is to be filmed, perhaps faced with a camera for the first time—who look into the future with faith, or caution, or mistrust, or occasional awe. Elina Mishuris (September 22, 4pm at MoMA’s Bruce Conner retrospective, as part of a program featuring Conner’s A Movie, Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet mécanique and Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart; September 24, 8:45pm at Anthology Film Archives’s “Woman with a Movie Camera: Female Film Directors Before 1950”)
