A young and dynamic engineer, Mack Prite, whose talents have helped him rise above humble origins, struggles against an old entrenched capitalist whose oil company’s profits are threatened when Prite develops a plan to turn peat into usable energy.

1.37GB | 1h 22m | 712×356 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/413774B464BCAEE/Proekt.inzhenera.Prayta.1918.Lev.Kuleshov.DVDRip.KG.redandr.avi
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https://nitro.download/view/94A82DF62A0BA0A/Proekt.inzhenera.Prayta.1918-EN_02.srt

Language(s):Silent movie with Russian intertitles
Subtitles:English,German

The post Lev Kuleshov – Proekt inzhenera Prayta AKA The Project of Engineer Prite (1918) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Mr. West was the first feature film that Kuleshov made with a team of actors who had attended his Experimental Cine-Laboratory. For four years, this group had been doing preparatory work as they planned to reform the art of cinema with an eye on montage. Yet, for a long time, their ideas remained dry theory, because the workshop lacked resources to make films. The focus of the Cine-Lab’s practice was on acting études. Details of scenes were story-boarded, photographed, or “framed” by special viewfinders in order to visualize how they might look in an edited film sequence. Thanks to these exercises, the notion of montage that Kuleshov developed was inextricably linked to his ideas on acting and shot composition. What he was aiming for was the aesthetics of American action films. he admired them for their fast pace, well-wrought suspense, athletic performances, as well as narratively efficient framing and editing – in short, for everything that was missing from languid boudoir melodramas, which dominated the Russian screen before the Revolution. Kuleshov’s understanding of “American montage” came down to this essential rule: each scene must be composed of brief sequences, filmed in close-ups or medium shots from different angles, so as to draw attention to the key phases of the character’s movement and the most important details of his environment.

In accordance with this principle, Kuleshov made sure that each frame of Mr. West would be stripped of unnecessary and distracting details and serve as an efficient, unequivocal plot-furthering element. In this way, Kuleshov hoped to economize the spectators’ attention and draw them into the rapidly unfolding narrative. Analogously, the work of actors in various scenes is often composed of several distinct moments, which are shown in close-up. Each shot highlights just one particular gesture, movement, or facial expression – this is especially obvious in Mr. West’s and the bandits’ behavior on screen. The director favored simple trajectories and clear geometry, encouraging his actors to produce expressions that would be immediately readable. He insisted that vectors of their movements should create a “rigid linear ornament” in a montage sequence. Almost like a Constructivist artist, Kuleshov conceived of his editing as graphic design in motion.

Kuleshov’s idea that each actor’s movement should be physically impressive and eye-grabbing often resulted in unnatural and grotesque performances, somewhat reminiscent of the avant-garde theater. Following a meticulous outline of the envisaged montage sequences, all actions were rehearsed in advance. For example, the fights were planned, so that each combatant would know when to strike or to receive a blow. Kuleshov’s priority was amplifying action onscreen. Movement, he argued, was the quintessential property of cinema, and therefore had to be exploited to the maximum. Its visual impact could be effectively amplified by editing. Thus Kuleshov’s rapid intercutting between the fleeing cowboy and policemen on motorbikes boosts the energy of the chase scene by endowing it with a frenetic rhythm.

Thinking in terms of editing also impacted the film’s set design. Since Kuleshov planned to cut from one close shot to another, a large, fully fleshed-out set was unnecessary. This idea was a radical departure from the lavish and decadent sets of the pre-Revolutionary director Evgeni Bauer, Kuleshov’s first mentor. In Mr. West, the guiding design principle was an “American” drive for rationalizing and economizing everything: the viewers’ attention span, the actors’ trajectories, precious film stock, and building materials.

Even though Kuleshov had learned a lot from American films and wanted Mr. West to surpass them, the film’s attitude to its source materials is best described as an imaginative parody. Placing a cowboy in fringed chaps on the snow-covered streets of Moscow and having him lasso an unsuspecting Russian coachman is a strategy that bespeaks Kuleshov’s pursuit of comic defamiliarization. Mr. West was first and foremost an experiment intended to reveal whether he had guessed the know-how of American movies correctly. The goal of montage in this film was limited to packing each second with as much action and thrill as possible. It is true that Kuleshov’s ideas on montage helped achieve narrative efficiency, yet as Sergei Eisenstein remarked, the author of Mr. West was still too attached to the idea of step-by-step building, thinking of his shots as “little bricks.” Eisenstein and Barnet would be much more adventurous in their editing experiments.
–Ana Olenina

1.73GB | 1h 16m | 768×578 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/614F9C86948EF24/Mr.West.1924.WEBRIP.576p.x264.EAC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):Russian Intertitles
Subtitles:English hardsubbed

The post Lev Kuleshov – Neobychainye priklyucheniya mistera Vesta v strane bolshevikov AKA The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Sorok Serdets is a 49 minute politprosvet film centered on electrical power plants, the new beating hearts planned for Soviet society and economy.

The infotainment flick is full of both creative metaphors and rather rude suggestions towards the bourgeois and capitalists, conveying historical materialism in a bombastic way that anyone can understand. The most prominent metaphor, a horse transformed by technology into a factory, connects peasant toil to industrialization. And it goes on to contextualize the early 20s grain famines, NEP, and Stalin’s new 5-year-plan phases, and it gets you on board for the role of electrification in the development of a workers’ state in the Soviet Union.

776MB | 49m 06s | 730×548 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/BA9EB998567E08C/Sorok_Serdets_(Forty_Hearts)-KG.mkv
https://nitroflare.com/view/F132CFEA1F4F0B2/Sorok_Serdets_(Forty_Hearts)-KG_v3.srt

Language:Russian/Silent
Subtitles:English

The post Lev Kuleshov – Sorok serdets AKA Forty Hearts (1930) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“A father and son, both clowns, are to perform together for the first time, but the civil war separates them, and the elder Buldy, tempted for a moment to acquiesce to the White forces, casts his lot with the revolution. At the climax Buldy Jr. escapes the Whites thanks to flashy trampoline and trapeze acrobatics; the gaping enemy soldiers forget to shoot. Even Kuleshov’s more naturalistic films show flashes of kinetic, stylized acting. A partisan listens to a boy while draping himself over a door. A Bolshevik official answers the phone by reaching across his chest, twisting his body so the unused arm can hike itself up, right-angled, to the chair.”
by David Bordwell

930MB | 1 h 4 min | 765×574 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/130A4E72D37495B/Dva-Buldi-Dva.(Two-Buldi-Two).TVRip.x264-Zog.mkv

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English

The post Nina Agadzhanova & Lev Kuleshov – Dva-Buldi-dva aka Two-Buldi-Two (1929) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Barbara Wurm, Edition Filmmuseum wrote:
Po zakonu (also know as Dura Lex) was the cheapest film produced in Russia (perhaps even still today); at the same time an absolute masterpiece, the greatness of which stems from its very minimalism. The minimum effort required for the story-development (Kuleshov constantly claimed, he happened upon Jack London’s story “The Unexpected” quite by chance), the minimum number of characters (just three for most of the film), a minimum of inter-titles and lines of dialogue, a minimum of locations; a clearing not far from Moscow (posing as “Alaska”) and a cabin–the perfect setting for a stripped-to-basics chamber play. Even if the juggling of shot composition and length (Kuleshov’s notorious “Americanism”) is not as artistically ambitious as in his previous work, it is still apparent how close-ups dominate inside, whilst outside, in the snowy landscapes and riverscapes, long shots reign, seemingly to the point of halting all movement.

One can label Po zakonu as much an “irrlicht tale” in the “catacombs of exaltation” (Leo Hirsch) as a formalist action film, a Western psychodrama or an experimental study in bigotry. When it comes to taking artistic styles and genre conventions and playing around with them, Kuleshov remains the master. There is as much of the silent Westerns of John Ford as there is Erich von Stroheim’s Greed and Charles Chaplin’s The Gold Rush in Po zakonu.

Aleksandra Khokhlova, Lev Kuleshov’s life partner was by Po zakonu already the “postergirl” of his experimental Actor-Laboratory. The critics–especially the Germans–praised her “courage to be so repulsively ugly” and her “unrestrained will of expression”. Bernard von Brentano, for instance, writes: “Khokhlova is not beautiful. One is even frightened of her upon first glance. However, one soon longs to see her again, having been deeply touched. Thus, she has triumphed over every opposition. Her face is thin and hard. But her eyes shine like her hair. […] If I were a director, I would travel to Moscow and book the actress Khokhlova.”

1.20GB | 1:18:30 | 576×432 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/50F27A4B46D2FC2/Po_zakonu_(1926-su-Kuleshov).avi
https://nitro.download/view/CF942F46407CC41/Po_zakonu_(1926-su-Kuleshov).Deutsch.srt
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https://nitro.download/view/855D187434F5FE5/Po_zakonu_(1926-su-Kuleshov).Francais.srt

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English, German, French – srt

The post Lev Kuleshov – Po zakonu AKA By the law (1926) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The Great Consoler is Lev Kuleshov’s most personal film reflecting both the facts of his life and his thoughts about the place of the artist in contemporary reality. It was the only film in the Soviet cinema of those years that raised the question of what role a creative person played in society.

The film takes place in America in 1899, and in its principal plot depicts Bill Porter, who is the great consoler of the title, in prison. His writing skills earn him privileges from the governor and he is spared the inhumane treatment meted out to other prisoners. Porter is very much aware of the brutality around him but, mindful of his better conditions, refuses to write about prison life. He prefers to console his less-well-treated friends, and indeed all his readers, with excessively romantic fantasies in which good invariably triumphs.

One of these stories, “The Metamorphosis of James Valentine,” creates an alter-ego for a wrongly imprisoned convict friend, who suffers the worst injustices of the prison and is dying of tuberculosis. The story flatters Valentine with an unrealistic degree of attractiveness, charm and intelligence. With his endless optimism, Porter tries to make this story come true by brokering a deal between the governor and Valentine, which will give the latter a pardon. The governor, however, deceives Valentine, who dies in prison. Furious, Valentine’s friend, Al, starts a riot and the film closes with Porter’s admission that his artistic philosophy has failed.

The film is nominally based on three text sources: a biography of the American author O Henry by his fellow prisoner, Al Jennings, Beating Back: Through the Shadows with O Henry, and two works by O Henry himself, “A Retrieved Reformation” and “An Unfinished Story.” O Henry was the nom de plume of William Porter and there is a character who appears under both names in the film.[13] Al Jennings also plays a role in the character of Al.

1.22GB | 1h 31mn | 640×480 | avi

http://nitroflare.com/view/B31400F5B47F830/The_Great_Consoler.avi
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http://nitroflare.com/view/659F836A5DA7D35/The_Great_Consoler_fr.srt
http://nitroflare.com/view/BC7B02AEB6145ED/The_Great_Consoler_ita.srt

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English, Francais, Deutsch, Italiano

The post Lev Kuleshov – Velikiy uteshitel aka The Great Consoler (1933) first appeared on Cinema of the World.