Description
𝘛𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘺, 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘯, 𝘸𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺.
“Of the directors who found fame in the 1920s, Kozintsev and Trauberg (...) made the most successful transition to the Stalin era. Their first film of the 1930s, Alone (1931), had a mixed response, however. (This is sometimes described as the Soviet Union’s first sound film, though it was made as a silent film and had sound added later.) It was about the experiences of Kuz’mina, a female teacher from Leningrad, who is sent to work in the Altai region of Siberia. At first she is devastated. The village is a primitive backwater, ruled over by a ‘shamin’ (a medicine man), a local kulak and a corrupt Party official. Each of these men has a vested interest in preserving the status quo, and sees Kuz’mina as a threat to his own position. Attempts to shatter her nerves are followed by an attempt on her life, when she is lured to the snowy wastes near Lake Baikal and abandoned. She is rescued by a passing aircraft and, as she is taken off to hospital, she pledges to return to the village. In the end, it seems that the village will succumb to the enlightened ideas of the Soviet state. Again, the female hero could be said to represent the new society.
Critics expressed misgivings about lingering formalist pretensions. I Vaisfel’d, for example, pointed to the idealized images of Leningrad at the start of the film, which were meant to convey Kuz’mina’s frame of mind before she knows she has to leave: the streets are too startingly white, he complained, and the trams too resplendently red. He was particularly irritated by the use of a shadow falling across the building in which Kuz’mina gets her job assignment, while sun pours down on the opposite side of the street. He also felt that the images of the Altai were unnaturally severe, from the dead horse’s head at the entrance of the village to the harsh, ascetic shots of the landscape. They contrived to give a negative, pessimistic view of the future. Kozintsev and Trauberg themselves later acknowledged their ‘misguided understanding’ of the epoch, and their tendency to focus on an individual hero pitted against the odds, which they agreed produced a feeling of pessimism about the future. Yet they earned the praise of Boris Shumyatskii, head of the Soviet film industry throughout the 1930s (until he became an ‘enemy of the people’ and was executed in 1938). To him, Kuz’mina was one of the new ‘positive heroes’ of the Stalin era. She was, incidentally, the only woman to appear on his list.”
» https://www.academia.edu/36261091/Lynne_Attwood_ed._-Red_Women_on_the_Silver_Screen
» Red Women on the Silver Screen {1993, Lynne Attwood}