Новый Вавилон (1929)

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The New Babylon is a 1929 silent historical drama film written and directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. The film deals with the 1871 Paris Commune and the events leading to it, and follows the encounter and tragic fate of two lovers separated by the barricades of the Commune.

Production

The New Babylon was staged with members of the "Factory of the Eccentric Actor" (FEKS), an avant-garde artists' association founded by Kozintsev and Trauberg in 1922 that sought to create new paths in the performing arts. FEKS first began as a theater group, but in the following years, many of its members shaped the Russian-Soviet film history when working as actors, outfitters, and cinematographers.

FEKS were influenced by street art and their cinematic preference was D. W. Griffith and Chaplin, not German expressionistic cinema of the early 1920s. "Yesterday: salons, obeisances, barons. Today: yells of newsboys, scandals, policeman's truncheon, noise, scream, stomping, running," declared Kosintsev and Trauberg in their Manifesto of the Eccentric Actor.

Like Kosintsev and Trauberg, twenty-two year old Dmitri Shostakovich was a member of the film group of "FEKS", dedicated to the abolition of the borders between theater, film, circus, music hall and opera. In his musical score he used various musical forms: dance and operetta melodies as well as French folk music and revolutionary songs: "Ça ira", "La Carmagnole" and "La Marseillaise"; it served as a leitmotif for the reactionary bourgeoisie and…

The score, which bears the Opus number 18, was lost shortly after the premiere, and was only discovered again shortly after Shostakovitch's death in 1975.

The Russian premiere of The New Babylon took place on 18 March 1929 in Leningrad. It was one of a number of Soviet silent films rejected by the British Board of Film Censors, but was passed with a U certificate in 1982.

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