Country:Russia

Director:Lev Kuleshov

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Incredibly, Kuleshov restricts himself to the parallel lives of individuals in a single cramped room as the montage graphically isolates each one. Set in a remote, frozen, and often claustrophobic location in the Yukon, the story focuses on a five-person team of gold prospectors in the Yukon who have just begun to enjoy great success when one of the members snaps, and suddenly kills two of the others. The two survivors, a husband and wife, subdue the killer but are then faced with an agonizing dilemma.

Country:Russia

Director:Lev Kuleshov

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Kuleshov in particular was fascinated by Western films of popular culture which he was eager to transform and energize by both embracing them wholeheartedly yet satirizing them with targeted irony. Luch Smert, as it is known in Russian, is made like an adventure serial, fast moving, funny and crammed full of amazing moments. Lann needs the ray of the title to make the revolutionary rising at the helium factory a success while an international gang of reactionaries, headed by Revo, try to get hold of the deadly contraption for themselves.

Country:Russia

Director:Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein and the School of Soviet Montage

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Kuleshov demonstrated the necessity of considering montage as the basic tool of cinema art. In Kuleshov's view, the cinema consists of fragments and the assembly of those fragments, the assembly of elements which in reality are distinct. It is therefore not the content of the images in a film which is important, but their combination.

Country:Russia

Director:Lev Kuleshov

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

Lev Kuleshov was one of the most important theoreticians of the Russian school of the Avant Garde particularly with regard to montage yet each of his feature films suggest unique approaches to very disparate material. The level of irony still apparent and even more pronounced after the fall of the Soviet Union in this comic, yet decidedly propagandistic, film from the silent era provides it with a sardonic resonance. The film chronicles the adventures of an American, "Mr. West," and his faithful bodyguard and servant Jeddie, as they visit the land of the horrible, evil Bolsheviks.