Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47346 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-08-20
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Black & White, Full Screen, PAL, Silent, Special Edition
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 88 minutes

Special Features
4:3 Full Frame
Region 2
Mono
Chapter Selection
The End Of St Petersburg A Movie Essay

Synopsis
In a film designed to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, V.I. Pudovkin again portrays the dawning of political awareness. THE END OF ST. PETERSBURG stars Ivan Chuvelyov as a young peasant working a moribund farm. When his wife dies in childbirth in 1914, the young man heads for St. Petersburg, hoping to get help from his cousin (Aleksandr Chistykov), a factory worker. He's stunned by the pace of the city and awed by the mountainous buildings. His cousin is too preoccupied with the strike he's leading to be of any help to the lad, and the man's wife (Vera Baranovskaya) suggests he should return whence he came. The farmer unwittingly joins a group of strike breakers and naively tells the factory manager that the strikers he's curious about have been meeting at his cousin's house. Deaf to his attempts at atonement, his cousin's wife angrily tosses him into the street. Seeking revenge against the factory manager, the young man rolls through his office like a malefic tsunami before the police take him away. His education has begun. The second of Pudovkin's troika of 1920s masterworks, this film might be more incisive as an antiwar film than as a call to revolution, evincing the director's recent combat experience. In a film full of unforgettable images, the cross-cutting of the jingoistic cries to arms with the frantic speculation of the war profiteers is a sequence of genius.

Customer Reviews

The End of St Petesburg is a Masterpiece
The End of St Petersburg (Russian: Êîíåö Ñàíêò-Ïåòåðáóðãà, Konets Sankt-Peterburga) is a 1927 silent film directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin and produced by Mezhrabpom. Commissioned to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, The End of St Petersburg was to be Pudovkin's most famous film and secured his place as one of the foremost Soviet montage film directors.
This film is brilliant if you loved Battleship Potemkin you will like this very much

Hope is blooming from the earth when the tractor arrives
That sure is beautiful filmography. It is still a silent film and it has to express the worst and deepest feelings with only the body and the face, at most some gestures. But, and that is the difference with German or English or American films of that time, the Soviets do not use the traditional symbolic gestures or face expressions. They do use those gestures that go along with the communist vision of things, with the revolutionary attitude the film defends and advocates. But the feelings themselves, like love or sadness, or suffering are exclusively expressed by natural facial language. A smile is a smile and it is not forced as it is too often in the American comic films or the German dramatic films of the time. It wants to be realistic to the last little detail. And that gives to the film a tremendous force. The story itself is of course ideological if not political but it is simple and probably true too in some respect. That the son of one of the collective farm workers is killed by the young landowner in the village is no surprise. This film is there in 1930 to justify the first purge Stalin imposes, a purge that went through without that much uproar from the world: the landowners were either willing to give their land or their land was taken away and they had to disappear in a way or another. But the joy of these collective farm workers when the first tractor arrives is so true with the dream of finally producing more with less exhausting work. That dream too is political in a way, but it is the dream of all men in the world, to produce more not by working less but by making work easier. The dream of progress, be it American or Russian or Chinese or Indian is always the same: to live better and to enjoy life, work and rest alike. This dream is painted in numerous close-up shots on faces and their expressions and that is marvelous, something to watch and appreciate. Can we still do that, or are our cinema actors more trite or concentrating more on language, even when it is dubbed afterwards? Silent films were making the actor the very center of the screen in the Soviet Union that was generally very tragic, which was less true with Fritz Lang or Laurel and Hardy, or at least in no way as realistic as with the Soviets.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines