Williamsburg Regional Library

The end of St. Petersburg

eng

videorecording

The end of St. Petersburg

900275404

Originally produced by Kino Lorber Edu in 1930

87

In 1927, Eisenstein and Pudovkin were both assigned to make films commemorating the 10th Anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. The results, October and The end of St. Petersburg, are two of the unforgettable masterpieces of epic filmmaking. Pudovkin's film, the more intensely dramatic and personal of the two, opens on a farm where a peasant must stay in the field and plow as his wife dies in childbirth. Trudging to the city to seek work, he is forced into scab labor. He tragically realizes the consequences of his mistake and violently attacks his employer. After jail, he is forced to join the army. World War I, in the best depiction yet of the horrors of battle, destroys all in its path as the bourgeois speculators grow rich. But the revolution frees St. Petersburg from the brutal yoke of the rich and there is born a new hope for the future. The New York Times remarked that "one feels sometimes as though this film were a remarkable newsreel of the Russian Revolution."

live action