Mixture of documentary and fiction about the dictatorial 1930s, loosely based on the utopian fantasies of Fritz Lang and about the forbidden passionate love affair between a photographer and his model.

Russian iconoclast Oleg Kovalov’s absurdist indictment of totalitarianism mixes live action, cartoons and archival footage from pre-Perestroika Russia and the Third Reich to tell the story of eccentric St. Petersburg poet Daniil Kharms. Kharms was a misunderstood Futurist who wanted to fashion his life into a work of art but instead was tossed into the gulag for distracting his comrades from their industrial duties and the Proletarian ideal. Direcor Kovalov (best known in the West for his documentary Sergei Eisenstein: Autobiography) uses a playful touch and striking, sometimes bizarre set pieces to tell his tale. In the process he leaves the viewer with many exquisite images (like an enigmatic, stockinged woman dressed in a man’s hat, suit coat and glasses astride a stylized camera dolly) to add to his or her mental scrapbook. Kovalov's first feature is a paranoid grotesque picture of the totalitarian Soviet past, based on the life and work of Daniil Kharms. Motifs from the life and work of Absurdist writer Daniil Kharms inspired Kovalov to create a paranoid and grotesque picture of the totalitarian past. In a Leningrad communal house in 1939 hangs the scent of a suppressed sexuality that obsesses all the characters: from the weak and shy Poet to the Judge who tries on the mask of Helmut Berger from Visconti's The Damned. The hallucinogenic images that result can only have one result: massive aggression, an armada of bombers, armed crowds that fling themselves into the struggle with the fury of spermatozoids. The film is full of newsreel footage from the time of Stalinism and the Third Reich that are cut very ingeniously through the feature fragments. With a typical mixture of aversion and affection, irony and amazement, Kovalov manages to evoke the insanity of this period.

The great Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, whose Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible stand as masterpieces of world cinema, is the subject of this eccentric and puzzling production. Though based on memoirs Eisenstein wrote before his death in 1948, most of this film is barely a documentary at all, but rather a composite of images, many of which are fascinating and arresting. Eisenstein himself was known for startling and memorable images (perhaps the most famous of which is the shot of the baby carriage rolling down the steps in Potemkin), so memorializing him with clips from his own films interspersed with readings from his memoirs seems somewhat appropriate. But the voice-over in Russian (with English subtitles) is quite sparse, and at times the images onscreen, which include clips from Buster Keaton films and Hollywood musicals from the 1930s, are utterly mystifying.. --Robert J. McNamara

Film about the tragic, legendary Russian film star Vera Kholdnaya (1893-1919) is compiled from countless films from that age. The Island of the Dead is a film about the demise of the Russian Epocha Modern (a trend analogous to Western variations such as Art Nouveau and Jugendstil). The symbol of this culture was the legendary Russian film star Vera Kholodnaya (1893-1919), who evoked a poetic image of the young urban woman on the silver screen (for instance in films by Yevgeni Bauer). Her death in Odessa in 1919, shrouded in tragedy and mystery, put a symbolic end to the pre-Revolutionary period. The Island of the Dead is composed of fragments from numerous films from this period, juxtaposed with other contemporary artistic expressions such as music and painting. Kovalov shows convincingly how the fragile beauty of the Russian Epocha Modern had to make way for the pressure of Futurism, Constructivism and other 'progressive trends', and how these '-isms' were then also relegated to the melting pot to be remoulded by totalitarian norms.