Staroye I Novoye

This is the most neglected of Sergei Eisenstein s features, his last completed silent picture (1929), also known as The Old and the New. It s a bucolic epic about the Soviet struggle to collectivize agricultural production, and it s far from his least interesting or exciting film, though some critics have made it sound that way by noting that the most famous sequence involves a cream separator. For the record, it is a thrilling sequence--part of Kenneth Anger s Eaux d artifice is modeled directly after it--but it s far from the only thing this rich, poetic, and sometimes quite funny film has to offer. Recommended.