Hollywood east Russia’s Lenfilm Studios at the MFA BY A.S. HAMRAH
	Russian Cinema Past and Present: A Tribute to Lenfilm Studios At the Museum of Fine Arts through October 14.
	In brief . . . This year’s festival features 25 shorts — down from 28 in 2003 — broken up into four packages. As with every year, the entries vary considerably in subject, style, and quality. But that’s the delight of the situation: taking the good with the bad to get a sense of what filmmakers are up to in an under-celebrated genre. Package #1 (September 10 at 7:15 p.m. and September 11 at 3 p.m.; all shorts screen at the Copley Place) is worth seeing for Andrei Aureliano Popescu’s "Dincolo/The Other Side." The premise is horror-movie cliché. A couple’s car breaks down on a Romanian back road on a stormy night; the woman goes into labor; the man needs to find help. But the tension and the ensuing horror transcend trope. Massachusetts native Nancy Stein also makes the package worthwhile with "Joey," one of its two documentaries, a wrenching look at a 13-year-old victim of gang violence in LA. Package #1 is worth avoiding, however, for Bert Klein & Teddy Newton’s animated "Boys Night Out," the slimy Freudian nightmare of a stepdad taking his too-young stepson to a strip club. In Peter Waal’s quirky "Spare Change," an unemployed grass-smoking man (well acted by Dave Nykl) estranged from his wife and kids gets an unexpected visit from a faux enlightened friend from the past. Jeff Dell’s "Dodge City" is a pastiche of war’s toll on children. Produced and directed by BU grads Kevin Nibley and Kate Barry, "Bert Prentice, CEO" depicts the ass-kissing tedium of the corporate world. And in Eyad Zahra’s "Distance from the Sun," a Muslim in the US struggles with traditions new and old. Package #2 (September 10 at 7:30 p.m. and September 11 at 2 p.m.) is physical, with shorts about bodies in various states of motion and decay. Playing the shell of a woman ravaged by cancer, Frances McDormand is almost unrecognizable in Sean Mewshaw’s "Last Night." Her husband (a convincing Jamey Sheridan) has agreed to put her out of her misery, with a young friend to bear witness. What’s remarkable is the level of intensity and the wallop this film packs in just 22 minutes. Amy Wendel’s "The Bodies," also about a woman with cancer, is more understated but less satisfying. Dean Hargrove’s snappy but overlong "Tap Heat," on the other hand, epitomizes health, as two generations of tap dancers — urban and old-time — face off in a dialogue-less dance. Kevin Haverty’s frenetic, dystopic "Notes from the Space Time Continuum," a non-animated Jetsons gone wrong, features a young man’s routine, rebellion, and ruin in a world populated by mannequin bodies with blue-screened microwave heads. Genevieve Anderson’s visually compelling "Ola’s Box of Clovers," told with rod-manipulated puppets, is a woman’s quiet recollection of her dead grandmother. And James Ricker gives a modern, heroin-addled spin to the tale of "The Little Match Girl." Package #3 (September 11 at 7:15 p.m. and September 12 at 1 p.m.) has three of the best shorts in the festival. Zachary Derhodge’s "Moss" gets my blue ribbon. Stunning in its shots of Canadian winter, the film follows Moss, who’s been unemployed for nine years and now spends his time with a rag-tag bowling team, and his wife, Ramona (a brilliant Jayne Eastwood), as they struggle with honor, identity, family, and friendship. Lori Hiris’s animated "The Invisible Hand" is a swirling chalk-on-chalkboard look at greed and corruption in politics and business. Kurt Kuenne’s musical "Rent-a-Person" is about a bathroom attendant looking for love who comes up with a scheme to get out of the men’s room. It gets my prize for funniest short in these programs, which are otherwise marked by the grim and the bleak. Qian Qian Sun’s "Fate," which is about missed connections, Marisol Gomez-Mouakad’s interior, psychological "Rosa," and Rachel Ann Pearl’s "The Shabbos Goy," in which an Orthodox Jewish couple have to deal with the husband’s infertility, don’t reach the same level. Package #4 (September 11 at 5 p.m. and September 12 at 3 p.m.) is solid. Dany Saadia’s "Genesis 3:19" is a story of coincidence and how people are bound together. Josh Gosfield’s manic "The Basement Tapes" describes one man’s descent into despair and his rescue by a garrulous pal. David Marmor’s "Spin" is about a near-fatal bicycle accident and a subsequent obsession with quantum mechanics; it’s compelling in theory but grows repetitive. In Virginie Danglades’s "Sparks," a cleaning woman dances around a hospital with a vacuum and inadvertently saps patients of life. And Martin Bell documents the Twin Days Festival in "Twins," which features tender, funny, and occasionally bizarre interviews with twins young and old. — Nina McLaughlin

Silent and in black-and-white, the movies came to Russia in 1896, the year the Lumière shorts were first shown there. Maxim Gorky reviewed them for a newspaper. "Before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colors — the gray, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life." By the end of his review Gorky had gone from describing this early version of reality TV to predicting its future. It will be put to other uses, the playwright suggested, beyond the arrival of trains at stations. It will mock the arguments of husbands and wives, show women undressing, record the torture of our enemies.

Another quotation from Russian history, from Lenin in 1919: "The cinema is for us the most important instrument of all the arts." Between Gorky’s review and Lenin’s pronouncement, Russia had become the Soviet Union. Less than 10 years later, a guy named Pavel Bykov, who had, according to film director Leonid Trauberg, "personally signed the death sentence of Czar Nikolai II and the rest of the Romanov family," was in charge of Russia’s second-largest film studio, Lenfilm, in Leningrad. They still make movies at Lenfilm (although Leningrad is St. Petersburg again), and during the course of the next six weeks, the Museum of Fine Arts will present 10 that were made there between 1926 and 1997, in a series called "Russian Cinema Past and Present: A Tribute to Lenfilm Studios."

One of the strengths of the Russian cinema is that it’s never had a Hollywood. Under the Soviets, film studios were located throughout the country, not just in Moscow. St. Petersburg (then Petrograd, before it became Leningrad after Lenin’s death, in 1924), the birthplace of the Russian revolution, saw the birth of the Soviet cinema, too. The filmmaking team of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg were instrumental in moving the Russian cinema into its Soviet heyday, and their fifth feature, 1929’s The New Babylon/Novyi Vavilon, starts the MFA series with a bang today, Thursday (it repeats September 23 at 4:40 p.m.).

In Kozintsev and Trauberg’s film, "The New Babylon" is the name of an haute-bourgeois department store in the Paris of 1870. "Le Babylone Nouvelle" is the jumping-off point for this anarchic, pre–Duck Soup version of the Franco-Prussian War, the events leading up to the 1871 formation of the Paris Commune, and its brutal suppression after a two-month experiment in government by the people.

Kozintsev and Trauberg came to prominence as revolutionary theater directors. They and their collaborators were known collectively as FEX, the Factory of the Eccentric Actor. They spearheaded a Dada-inflected kind of art production they called Eccentricism, and The New Babylon is a culmination of their work as well as a last pinnacle of Soviet silent cinema.

The film begins in a Paris that calls to mind Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge but with a point, all sparkles, smoke, and theatricalized poses meant to spoof capitalists. Into this scene walks Yelena Kuzmina as a soon-to-be radicalized "midinette," a modernist goth-chick prototype, familiar from Helena Bonham Carter’s last-gasp version in Fight Club. As Kozintsev and Trauberg move Kuzmina through this dandified slice of pre-revolutionary history into the fall-of-Paris war zone, her performance becomes wilder. By the time she and the Commune meet their tragic ends, the filmmakers have flung her off a roller coaster into oblivion. The final scenes take place near mass graves in a heavy rain that seems to use the history of the Commune to predict the Soviet Union’s future, as if Kozintsev and Trauberg had glimpsed the empty, muddy fields that the revolutionary carnival would leave in its wake.

Fittingly, Lenfilm was an amusement park before it was a movie studio. German bombs partially destroyed it during World War II. Production was moved to Alma Ata, in Kazakhstan, so filming could continue during the war. Trauberg, by then co-head of production with the director Friedrich Ermler, did not fare well when the studio returned to Leningrad. Charged with "cosmopolitanism," a Stalinist euphemism for being Jewish, he saw his career flounder as his partner Kozintsev’s flourished. Kozintsev went on to make Shakespeare adaptations such as 1970’s King Lear/Karol Lir (September 5 at 3:15 p.m. and September 9 at 1:30 p.m.), an overawing Lear "of the nuclear age."

Ermler’s movies Katka’s Reinette Apples/Katka-bumazhny ranyet (1926, co-directed with Edouard Ioganson; September 25 at 12:45 p.m.) and House in the Snow Drifts/Dom vsogrobakh (1927, September 25 at 2:15 p.m.) are naturalistic in a style that comes from Griffith but is untempered by Eisensteinian dialectical montage. The Leningrad filmmakers pursued their own agendas. Like Kozintsev and Trauberg, Ermler is untheoretical. House in the Snow Drifts is valuable for its impressive shots of a devastated, snowbound landscape and indispensable for its views of what the USSR looked like in the winter of 1927 (here, playing the winter of 1919). House in the Snow Drifts tells three stories set in one house as the Bolsheviks fight the White army. Its macabre dead-cockatoo scene links it to the Stroheim of Greed, as does a scene in Katka in which a gambler at a roulette table suddenly removes the upper plate from his mouth to use as a bet. Ermler is interested in elemental things: the way men put on their pants and boots, bridges at night, people’s faces in two-shots. His cinema is healthy, balanced, adult.

Moving ahead 60 years, Aleksandr Sokurov’s The Second Circle/Krug vtoroy (1990; September 8 at 4:30 p.m. and September 9 at 6 p.m.) continues the series’ semi-apocalyptic vein. Sokurov, now known for his Hermitage-based movie Russian Ark (2002), is one of the last Soviet filmmakers. He replaces the quick shots of the 1920s with a distended long-take style in which everything is blocky and heavy and seen through an intrusive, floating eye, as if when watching the film you are being watched, too. The Second Circle seems as if it were made by a ghost, maybe the protagonist’s dead father, whose corpse is the film’s co-star.

Of the other films in the series, Aleksei Gherman’s Twenty Days Without the War/Dvadstat dnei bez voiny (1976; September 23 at 12:30 p.m.) is certainly worth seeing, and his My Friend Ivan Lapshin is one of the best films of the 1980s. It extends the work of Ermler into a fraught world of Soviet entropy.