Alexander Medvedkin served with the Red Cavalry beginning in 1917, and was eventually promoted to the rank of general and placed in charge of propaganda for the entire Soviet Army. Medvedkin gave up his rank to produce movies for soldiers, including the hygiene film Watch Your Health. Stalin's five-year plan began in 1928, and by the early 30s, Medvedkin was placed into service. He designed the Cine-Train - a film laboratory, an editing room, an animation stand and a projection room built into a passenger train. The goal was to travel the Soviet Union to instruct or assist in the kulkak's maintenance of the kolkhoz (collective farms) and industrial facilities. Medvedkin and a crew stopped the train in towns all over the Soviet Union, shot film, immediately processed the footage and screened the results to the towns people. Films like Journal Number 4, How Do You Live Comrade Miner?, and The Conveyor Belt presented cinematic propaganda as quickly as possible given the available means. The films presented best practices in harvesting or steel production to provide those in lagging collective forms and industries with side-by-side examples of how things were not supposed to operate. The animators created captions ("Comrades this can't go on") and the Cine-Train mascot: a disapproving animated camel that was paraded across the screen for the benefit of workers that failed to meet their goals. The aforementioned films all appear on Disc One of the Icarus DVD set.
Once the Cine-Train came to a halt, Medvedkin made the 1934 tragic-comedy Happiness. In his travels throughout the Ukraine, Medvedkin came across a kulkak whose expectations did not conform with life in the collective farm. This peasant's plight inspired the film's story of Khmyr, a man whose life is squeezed from all sides by the monarchy, the state and the church. Khmyr has simple dreams of happiness but like his ancestors, basic comforts elude him. Khmyr attempts to commit suicide but the aristocrats, the army (all of whom wear the same ghoulish grinning mask), and the church descend on him. "Who gave you the right to an improvised death?" they ask. Khmyr is eventually shown the way to happiness by his wife, who embraces the life of the farm by mastering the machines and techniques necessary to make the system work. The film's knowing portrayal of peasant life, its brutal representation of the Tsarists and the Russian Orthodox Church, and the flashes of eroticism can be found in works like Alexander Dohvenko's Earth and what exists of Eisenstein's Behzin Meadow. The surreal mix of gallows humor and Buster Keaton-style physical comedy, however, seems unique amongst works of this era.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LGx3n3I_LE
Alexander Medvedkin served with the Red Cavalry beginning in 1917, and was eventually promoted to the rank of general and placed in charge of propaganda for the entire Soviet Army. Medvedkin gave up his rank to produce movies for soldiers, including the hygiene film Watch Your Health. Stalin's five-year plan began in 1928, and by the early 30s, Medvedkin was placed into service. He designed the Cine-Train - a film laboratory, an editing room, an animation stand and a projection room built into a passenger train. The goal was to travel the Soviet Union to instruct or assist in the kulkak's maintenance of the kolkhoz (collective farms) and industrial facilities. Medvedkin and a crew stopped the train in towns all over the Soviet Union, shot film, immediately processed the footage and screened the results to the towns people. Films like Journal Number 4, How Do You Live Comrade Miner?, and The Conveyor Belt presented cinematic propaganda as quickly as possible given the available means. The films presented best practices in harvesting or steel production to provide those in lagging collective forms and industries with side-by-side examples of how things were not supposed to operate. The animators created captions ("Comrades this can't go on") and the Cine-Train mascot: a disapproving animated camel that was paraded across the screen for the benefit of workers that failed to meet their goals. The aforementioned films all appear on Disc One of the Icarus DVD set.
Once the Cine-Train came to a halt, Medvedkin made the 1934 tragic-comedy Happiness. In his travels throughout the Ukraine, Medvedkin came across a kulkak whose expectations did not conform with life in the collective farm. This peasant's plight inspired the film's story of Khmyr, a man whose life is squeezed from all sides by the monarchy, the state and the church. Khmyr has simple dreams of happiness but like his ancestors, basic comforts elude him. Khmyr attempts to commit suicide but the aristocrats, the army (all of whom wear the same ghoulish grinning mask), and the church descend on him. "Who gave you the right to an improvised death?" they ask. Khmyr is eventually shown the way to happiness by his wife, who embraces the life of the farm by mastering the machines and techniques necessary to make the system work. The film's knowing portrayal of peasant life, its brutal representation of the Tsarists and the Russian Orthodox Church, and the flashes of eroticism can be found in works like Alexander Dohvenko's Earth and what exists of Eisenstein's Behzin Meadow. The surreal mix of gallows humor and Buster Keaton-style physical comedy, however, seems unique amongst works of this era.