Моя Родина (1933)

Authentic diamond within a metamorphic rock; If the cinematography as well as the formal cuts of the style were polished and restored then we would have pure beauty, but we would strip it of the best, of its uniqueness, of its rustic "beauty." Compare the scene in vignette 3, when the Red Army soldier is shaving his comrade Malyutka and evokes his memory of the war in 1916 - the way in which "we went to die, so to speak for that Fatherland", we see them for Soviet territory against the Chinese Kuomintang, we see them, chilled by the cold and the unbearable blizzard, jumping from the trench or outpost while the war chants can be heard in the distance approaching in the middle of the night, they rush out shouting be careful and stop, the shrapnel shots and the close up of the dog that howls truly scared and you can see snow frost with the sinister hiss of bad weather. I could also notice it in vignette 1 at the beginning, when the smiling young man - perhaps a minor and an affectionate dancer - a Chinese laborer is unexpectedly recruited for the war when the army bursts into the area - probably a red light district - surrounded by prostitutes and overcrowded. of field workers. I'm almost sure that he is the same accidentally recruited teenager who appears in vignette or part 4, when the troops are passing by and the laborer is still unrepentant and when passing near a huge broken mirror he contorts himself and laughs while posing. The boy named Van will not lose his innocence - so to speak - until he accidentally, hidden, witnesses the abusive and violent way in which Captain Alyabyev, a member of the pro-Kuomintang White Army, interrogates the communist prisoner of the Red Army by beating him.