Popular reviews

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 6

  A plea for peace, for solidarity across borders, for something more universal, for something bigger than one nation's revolution, this film looks at the radical shift from tsarist Russia to communist Russia and says, "no, we need more." This is as it should be: never be content until we are all free, all equal. Our surrogate here is Anka, even when she's off screen. It's her compassion that bears the film's ideas; it's her heart we think of when people die. What is borne out is the implication of her compassion, the illustration of what happens without it, the deaths of those we love for the benefit of those who scorn us.

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★

  Macabre humour becomes augmented with some momentously serious concerns in Outskirts, a 1933 Soviet film set in a remote village in Tsarist Russia during the First World War. Co-written and directed by Boris Barnet, it scathingly looks at the war's impact through sliced allegiances between some subtly shaded characters, including Yelena Kuzmina (By the Bluest of Seas) as Anka Greshina. Most of the village residents generally seem rather nonchalant regarding the unrest being wrought by the conflict as it rages on all around them, even after the two sons of the local cobbler become conscripted into the army.

  Barnet's handling of the narrative, which additionally widens to look at the Russian Revolution, has a tonality that brings to mind Jiří…

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  Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★★ 2

  There's more (decadent) Western Humanism in the DNA of this one than I expected to see in a movie from the classic Soviet Realist era; much of the movie is about (gasp) individual human personalities, and they sometimes (gasp) have desires that don't correspond to a dialectical reading of their historical moment.

  Sometimes I think Barnet was taking the piss. A little bit.

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  Review by Hutch ★★★½

  On the western outskirts of Russia, on the eve of World War I, there’s a revolution brewing between the workers and the capitalists. A strike is called, but the workers have to drop their tools and their protests in order to fight the invading German’s. The factory sirens are replaced by the screams of the raining shells. But who is the enemy exactly? 

  It’s a fascinating film given its era and subject matter to see scenes of fraternity between the Russian soldiers and their German counterparts. There are scenes of the men on both sides greeting each other in camaraderie only for their generals to force them apart. And there’s even a sympathetic sub-plot of a German prisoner of war…

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  Review by Reto Hochstrasser ★★

  Unfortunately I only saw the flick in very poor quality on YouTube... but what I saw didn't convince me, I found the acting as well as the editing and the plot all very clumsy.
  I only watched the movie because it's on the 1000 film list of They shoot pictures, don't they - which I don't fully understand.

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  Review by seb ★★★½

  A post-war fable of humanism. Out of the rubbles of war emerges ideological enlightenment - a new communist dream to fight for, encompassing worker solidarity regardless of at-birth assigned statuses like nationality, that hold no serious value. From the Russian perspective, Barnet posits the point that if we (meaning soldiers) allowed ourselves to be couped by the feudal elite, who is to say that the same hasn't happened to all other parties, even the ones who just happened to spend years fighting against us? A man might be German, but above all, he is a worker and is deserving of compassion as a result of it. It's compassion also being the defining reason as to why Stalin disowned the film, despite his international acclaim.

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  Review by Christof ★★★★

  Early sound cinema from the Soviet Union, and even although it centers on World War I, it does not feel like a propaganda piece at all, but rather empasizes the humanity of the German characters in the same way that it does that humanity of its Russian characters. It's quite uplifting in its way.

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  Review by Diogo Serafim ★★★★

  'So what if he is german, he is a shoemaker like us.'

  Humanist tale of our eternal yearning for universal empathy. A lot is usually said about Barnet's formal virtuosity but he also manages to be so much more, his films are gifted with a very particular rhythm and such an ambiguous dramatic conduction while still having so much life even at their harsher spots. Really beautiful, funny and affecting.

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  Review by Michael Glover Smith ★★★★½

  Although active as a director until his death by suicide in 1965, Boris Barnet is probably best known for his silent film work (e.g., The Girl with the Hatbox and Miss Mend). Outskirts (AKA The Patriots) was Barnet’s first sound movie and remains an unjustly underseen masterpiece of its era. The film is a comedy/drama about the residents of an unnamed town in rural Russia in the days leading up to World War I. It starts off as a comedy that boasts a delightful and innovative use of sound (where animals and even inanimate objects are given voice) but becomes increasingly serious after the war breaks out. Most surprising of all is the tender love subplot that develops between a Russian peasant girl and a German POW. Hopefully, Outskirts will someday receive the loving home video release it deserves and become much better known among cinephiles.

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  Review by Patrick Preziosi ★★★★½

  Renoiresque in its controlled chaos, a litany of mini conflicts spread out over crowded spaces. There’s lots of bustle, lots of experimentation with “diegetic” sound, but that shouldn’t imply a lack of visual coherence; you could pause at any point and, like Renoir, land upon a perfect composition. As Barnet navigates varying push-pull relationships (mostly between tolerance and violent patriotism), he also maintains a close proximity between life (romance, humor, collective action, courtship drinking tea, playing cards or checkers) and death (targeted assaults, war, debilitating injury, execution), often within the same scene, sometimes even the same shot, like the one tracking movement through the German prison barracks, where a dying man lays next to two loafs playing a card game that involves flicking your opponent on the forehead when you’ve won.

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  Review by Tim Brayton ★★★★½

  Intoxicating, dizzying avant-garde sound mix, and a deeply humanistic approach to Soviet propaganda like nothing else I've seen. If only the images were as good as the audio, we'd have an all-time masterpiece on our hands.

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  Review by Luke by Luke West ★★★½

  In scenes of war, Barnet uses sound – a relatively recent addition to (especially Soviet) cinema – somewhat expressionistically, to evoke the trenches’ horrors. I couldn’t help but think of Wilfred Owen (any English teacher’s foremost reference point for World War I) with the film’s focus on ‘the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’ and ‘the shrill demented choirs wailing shells.’

  In scenes of peace, we hear a doleful folk song and the plucking of a balalaika carrying through a darkening night, windows still lighted in the village houses, crowned by the domed silhouette of an Orthodox church.

  Okraina is full of richly realised moments such as these – terrible or beautiful. The picture’s heart lies in the scenes in which war and peace overlap – in moments that are terrible and beautiful at the same time.