The New Babylon, 1929

Новый Вавилон, 1929
movie poster
(source: wikimedia)
no copyright infringement intended

Written and directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, The New Babylon (Новый Вавилон) is a Soviet silent movie from 1929, dedicated to the Paris Commune. A tragic story of love (somehow calling in mind Zola's Débâcle - here in the movie the two lovers are in opposite camps) - only it's treated very quickly, as there are many other events to be presented. An out-pour of things, that happened in the Paris of 1871 - things big scale and things small scale - all dramatically important to understand what happened. There is a Revolutionary pathos in the movie, only it is created very differently from what Eisenstein and the other masters of the epoch were doing. Here in The New Babylon the artistic technique is the one used by street performers or circus jugglers. You have to watch the movie to understand this. It's the Constructivist vanguard of the 20's, however of a special flavor: the eccentrism.

Shostakovich wrote a score for this movie, a musical composition with a long history of its own, lost after the premiere and retrieved only after the composer's death in 1975. Maybe this score can be of help in understanding the artistic universe of the movie. Shostakovich was by that time an ardent partisan of eccentrism, aiming to dissolve the borders between music-hall, circus, theatre, movie, opera, and here he used motifs from Revolutionary songs (Marseillaise, Ça Ira, Carmagnole) in unexpected forms (can-can, waltz, gallop), sometimes juxtaposed contrapuntally with very different themes, to get the necessary artistic effect.

The cast includes Vsevolod Pudovkin, Sergei Gerasimov, and Tamara Makarova, among many others.

Новый Вавилон, 1929
(video by Faces of Classical Music – 1)

(Kozintsev)

(Musica Nova)

Grigori Kozintsev

Grigori Kozintsev
1905-1973
(image source: mubi)
no copyright infringement intended

Soviet theatre and film director who started from the universe of puppet theatre and street performance and created a new direction in the modernist movie art of the twenties (called  eccentrism: I will try to present here some of his silent movies, to make an idea of what it means); in his endeavors Kozintsev worked together with Leonid Trauberg; also other well known artists (among them Sergei Yutkevich, Sergei Gerasimov and Dmitri Shostakovich) joined the effort; all of them would become much respected classics, but then, in the twenties, they were just enthusiastic youngsters in search of new ways; later in life Kozintsev would also become a classic in his own right, leaving us two solid Shakespearean adaptations (Hamlet and King Lear), along with an amazing Don Quixote.

• The New Babylon, 1929

(Filmele Avangardei)

(Russian and Soviet Cinema)