The New Babylon

Novyy Vavilon

Soviet Union

1929

120 Min

Black and White

1.33:1

Russian

Currently 3.9/5 Stars.
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DIR Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg

SCR Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg

CAST David Gutman, Yelena Kuzmina, Sofiya Magarill, A. Arnold, Sergei Gerasimov

In the beginning of the industrial revolution, the Paris Commune was established in 1871 against the rich and the powerful, and violently repressed by the army that remained faithful to a tamer form of Republicanism. How could the love story between a young sales girl and a soldier unable to decide if he was pro or against the radical fashion? Two short months were needed for the answer to be found – in blood and tears, and under rain that washes all past memories. Any day, a New Babylon shop will open with frilly things for the bourgeois girls. The washerwomen will be there to wash them. –IMDb

Director

Grigori Kozintsev

Grigori Mikhailovich Kozintsev (Kiev, 22 March [O.S. 9 March] 1905 – Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, 11 May 1973) was a Soviet Russian theatre and film director. He was named People’s Artist of the USSR in 1964.

He studied in the Imperial Academy of Arts. As a theatre director he was part of Eccentricism, a modernist avant garde movement that spanned Russian futurism and constructivism, which included the theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein. Kozintsev contributed the “Salvation in the Trousers” section to the Eccentric Manifesto, published on 9 July 1922 (the other contributors were Leonid Trauberg, Sergei Yutkevich and Georgii Kryzhitskii) and was involved with the Factory of the Eccentric Actor group. Some of his early films were launched under the FEKS label.

He began making films in 1921. His silent features, including The Overcoat (1926) and The New Babylon (1929), had a ring of Expressionism, while the early sound film Alone… read more