Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:
The first sound film by Boris Barnet, one of the least seen and appreciated masters of the Russian cinema, this 1933 feature follows the impact of World War I on a village. Barnet takes nothing for granted, using sound as no one else had before or since and in the process reinventing the way we experience silence as well as sound. His view of war is expressed in uncanny emotional registers: scenes that begin tragically end comically and vice versa, and one of the more touching story lines involves a woman who falls in love with a German prisoner. Adapted by Barnet and Konstantin Finn from Finn’s novel, this is strong and indelible.

1.86GB | 1h 35m | 722×542 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/A1F7118A124FEA2/Okraina_-_Boris_Barnet_(1933).mkv

Language:Russian,German
Subtitles:English

The post Boris Barnet – Okraina aka Outskirts (1933) 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.

Quote:
Can you find happiness in the big city? The young hat maker Natascha, who lives with her grandfather in a suburb covered in winter snow, has to commute by train from the village to Moscow to deliver her creations to the extravagant Irene’s hat shop. For the administration, Irene claims Natascha to be her subtenant in order to be able to have more living space. The clumsy railway official woos the lovely country girl with his ravishing smile. But she enters into a fictitious marriage with the provincial Ilya in order to get him a room in Moscow. With an apparently worthless lottery ticket, which Irene’s husband gives to Natascha, the entanglements become turbulent. Boris Barnet describes the contrasts between city and country and the new living conditions in Moscow in a stylish and socially critical way. Three great acting talents, Anna Stén, Iwan Kowal-Samborski and Vladimir Fogel, form the triangle of relationships. Originally ordered as a vehicle to advertise the State Lottery, the film made the studio rich and the natural talent director Boris Barnet famous as the founder of lyrical comedy.

1.93GB | 1h 33m | 1280×720 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/0403D129EDF38E7/The_Girl_with_the_Hat_Box.mkv
https://nitroflare.com/view/9ED78D5B24145F3/The_Girl_with_the_Hat_Box.EN.srt

Language(s):Russian (Intertitles)
Subtitles:English

The post Boris Barnet – Devushka s korobkoy AKA The Girl with the Hat Box (1927) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:

Three reporters and an office girl are trying to stop a bacteriological strike by some powerful western business leaders against the USSR.

Quote:

Miss Mend, an action-packed adventure serial in three feature-length episodes, was produced in Russia with the goal of rivaling, and possibly even surpassing, the most entertaining American movies of the 1920s. It features beautiful location photography, impressive stunt scenes; horse, car and boat chases, radio towers, jazz bands and even a spectacular train wreck, interspersed with visual references to German film classics like Nosferatu, Caligari and Dr. Mabuse. The film’s heroine, Vivian Mend, is an elegant urban professional who earns her own living and raises a child without the help of any man. But the film, partially set in an imagined America where everything is new and progressive (from technology to social relations and lifestyles) also includes a few more-than-pointed comments on labor relations, racism, excessive wealth, gratuitous violence and even rape. Based upon a 1923 pulp novel allegedly written by an American, “Jim Dollar” (actually the nom-de-plume of a Russian woman, Marietta Shaginian), the film adaptation is directed by Fedor Ozep and Boris Barnet, each at the start of long and distinguished filmmaking careers. Although it responded to an official call for a new art that could win over mass audiences, Miss Mend was condemned by the Soviet press of the time as ideologically lightweight and a prime example of shameless “Western-style” entertainment. It was nonetheless a huge popular success and after more than eighty years, it remains as exhilarating as it is fascinating.

https://nitro.download/view/1AB034CDD7C499A/Miss_Mend__+Extras_.part1.rar https://nitro.download/view/BDEABA6C0BEBE0A/Miss_Mend__+Extras_.part2.rar https://nitro.download/view/B7FD83B1D705612/Miss_Mend__+Extras_.part3.rar https://nitro.download/view/350E160C32B5D11/Miss_Mend__+Extras_.part4.rar

Language(s):None
Subtitles:English intertitles

The post Boris Barnet & Fyodor Otsep – Miss Mend [+Extras] (1926) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Kazakhstan, the 50s. The main heroine of the film is a nine-year-old girl Alyonka, who is sent to town by her parents to study. The girl meets various companions on her long way. Some of them are telling about the story of their settlement or their attempt to settle in this Far East.

1.87GB | 1h 27m | 762×572 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/1E592FCB6F7FD2F/Alyonka_-_Boris_Barnet_(1961).mkv
https://nitroflare.com/view/3B58926664C3AC2/alenka.en24fps.srt
https://nitroflare.com/view/F6095B7B3DA33EA/alenka.fr24fps.srt
https://nitroflare.com/view/0EE0EDD7EDDC471/alenka.spa24fps.srt

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English, French, Spanish, Russian

The post Boris Barnet – Alyonka (1961) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The son of a kulak has an affair with a poor girl and an eye within the village council so that his father’s interest could be preserved. But a man reveals how the kulak intend to impoverish more the peasants and workers and get freed from taxes.

Quote:
A Barnet film, in an unusual dramatical and political note, but that shows that he can be as visually dynamical, precise and inventive as a Pudovkin, for example, and still able to identify himself to those in a weak position, even when the victims of a fair and justified fury could be kulaks…

	
Ledolom - Boris Barnet (1931).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 4 min
Size: 	1.23 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	704x572 
Aspect ratio:  	1.189
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 730 kb/s
BPP: 	0.282
Audio

https://nitro.download/view/808D45803026DF7/Ledolom_-_Boris_Barnet_(1931).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/3C5DA63BDFA093D/Ledolom_-_Boris_Barnet.en24fps.srt

Language:Russian intertitles
Subtitles:English

The post Boris Barnet – Ledolom aka The Thaw (1931) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Soviet agent Fedotov is air-dropped into Nazi occupied land. He changes over into Mr. Eckert, a German entrepreneur wishing to take advantage of eastern worker slave labor in occupied Ukraine. Eckert (Fedotov) enters into a partnership with a German entrepreneur whose son, Willy, is a high ranking Nazi. Together they go to Vinnitsa, Ukraine and start a factory. Fedotov begins seeking contacts with headquarters, but faces problems when a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator manages to infiltrate the Soviet partisans.

1.68GB | 1 h 31 min | 762×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/8E13DF77B2CDFD8/Podvig_razvedchika_-_Boris_Barnet_(1947).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/6C910EBF962B19F/Podvig_razvedchika_-_Boris_Barnet_(1947).en.srt

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English

The post Boris Barnet – Podvig razvedchika aka Secrets of Counter-Espionage (1947) first appeared on Cinema of the World.