Cine::: RusClub

The selection for RusClub#2 is:

Lullaby poses the question: what is happiness? Its responses are motherhood and October, shown as opening up all paths to women’s development. In order to convince us of this not terribly self-evident association, the film uses a range of means to associate joyous motherhood with the revolution. In essence, the method employed is a development of the earlier documentary approach. The ongoing importance of documentary reference for the film is clear from the many drafts for the scenario, where initially the main characters had real prototypes and were named. However, this was increasingly allied to the idea of the film as a [removed];

Tractor Drivers is a fascinating work that manages to combine three Soviet obsessions of the 1930s: the enormous popularity of musical films, the Soviet glorification of technology, and the preparations for an impending war. Recently demobilized, Klim returns to his Ukrainian collective only to find his intended, Mariana, now a famed tractor driver complete with many male admirers. Klim bears down and masters tractor driving as well, and after a series of pratfalls and misunderstandings, the couple gets back together. But then the order goes out: all the young men are ordered back to their army units, where they’ll apply their tractor driving skills to the brand-new high-speed tanks fresh off the Soviet assembly lines. With music by Dmitry Pokrass, Tractor Drivers became the template for a considerable number of girl-boy-tractor romances, as well as the subject of innumerable parodies.