Popular reviews

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★

  Necessities of technology, and the deficiencies of the natural world. The world in and of itself is not enough for human needs, so you build around it. One of the most beautiful films ever made

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 13

  this is like the opposite of satantango -- an anti-religious film in love with the poetic romance of machinery and industrialization and vitalism, almost pagan imagery of fertile animals and ecological issues. i share many political stances with eisenstein, but the hyper-aggressive secular atheism of the soviet ideology (and marxism in general) has always placed me in an odd position, as i agree with the critique of religious institutions in works like this or potemkin, but i don't think that faith itself is harmful to the working class -- this is obviously a masterwork, the best film i've seen thus far from eisenstein, but i wonder sometimes if what is valuable in cinema has indeed been split between two poles…

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  Review by Tyler ★★★★★ 2

  Let’s talk about how Eisenstein made a movie about Cow Gods spraying the land with their milk and peaceably bringing the city and country together as one. But first, some Saturday morning socio-agrarian history for us all: At the time Eisenstein made The General Line, agricultural collectivization was planned across Russia as a more gradual schema, one that would unfortunately intensify under Stalin's scrutiny, leading eventually to the mass-incarceration of rebellious farmers, a horrific famine, and the starvation death of millions of peasants. And while Stalin may have viewed collectivization as a mere means to establish Soviet power in the Russian countryside, Eisenstein seems to be on a completely different wavelength. The theory of thought here stems from compassion and…

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  Review by Dane Coopernick ★★★½

  REVIEW IN SPANISH
  Seccion de Peliculas q estoy viendo y reseñando para mi examen de convocatoria de la carrera de Cine (y de las cuales el libro menciona estas peliculas) y ojala logre aprovar este examen xd.

  Hay magníficas metáforas y críticas sociales (analfabetismo, burocracia, religiosidad) que encajan perfectamente en la película, es una buena película de propaganda y tiene importancia histórica, las combinaciones de montaje como encadenamientos aleatorios q no se desvian del significado en escena sino q refuerzan mas los paralelismos q estas combinaciones de montaje hacen. The general line Es una epopeya bucólica sobre la lucha soviética por colectivizar la producción agrícola, y está lejos de ser su película menos interesante o emocionante de SergEI eisenstein.

  
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  Review by Lee Does Not Exist सब्बे सत्ता सुखी होन्तु ★★★★★

  Attention, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not at all our task to descend to the level of the “working masses.”

  VI Lenin

  Painterly and poetic landscapes populated by avant-garde montages of labour and machinery, driven by the common goal of love and community. Good news if you love cows, theres a lot of them here!

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  Review by Brood_Star ★★★★

  "Those who love Godard and/or Kenneth Anger will particularly delight in the bull's marriage ceremony, in which the animal's semen fertilizes the universe, though my favorite is the daringly masturbatory cream-separator scene." (Bill Marx, The Boston Phoenix)

  most likely the weirdest eisenstein, wherein his use of montage almost atypically approaches being more poetic than functional. in addition to the great bull marriage sequence, there's also another that rapidly intercuts a worker's scythe against a tractor's against a grasshopper

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  Review by Stephen Gillespie ★★★★★ 2

  Some of the most spellbinding imagery ever put to film. This charts an individual as a way of providing and arc to the narrative of progress. The film is about mechanisation, a technological revolution based on output. In the modern world, tech is brought in to make us busier and more productive, and thus more and more is pushed on us. Here, technology is a tool of liberation as the goal is kept central. 

  It’s deeply expressive, at one point there’s the greatest cow sex scene in cinema, I challenge you to find a better one. The rest of the film is in love with details: expressive faces and intricate machinery. The closeups are mixed into montage, often used for…

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  Review by seb ★★★★

  “It condensed!”

  A rural symphony: seldomly, perhaps only in Vertov, where man is literally machinized, is one to see such reverence for the mechanical, such belief in technology. Of course, industry, in general, holds a notoriously negative position in cinema, but in Eisenstein, all doubt is eschewed; each new tool finds itself ennobled and celebrated via technical innovations, be it the near orgasmic milk centrifugation where white rays of hope beam over elated faces, or the perfect symmetry of the marching tractors in the end. All serve the purpose of the eventual symbiosis between the mechanical and natural. Eisenstein is often unjustly branded with the adjective “serious”, but what could be more playful than the superimposed dream image of a giant cow overlooking the farmland, or spending nearly 30 minutes shooting the marriage, and consummation thereof, between two cows, as if the film was only ever about them.

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  Review by Zachary Goldkind (aka, Chaim Kindergelt) ★★★★★

  Had to rewatch a majority chunk of  the film once after on silent, as the score of this copy made the film actively worse than it is. A goddamn crime that is.

  These are some of the most important images I’ve seen - an ode to collective unity and dialectical development: an industry built together atop and with the land we work and care for. What is so often perceived in a binary dichotomy contemporaneously, likely as to imprint passive moralism onto the generic monolith of industrial capital, is instead orchestrated as collective struggle towards a socialist future. Real ideology here, real futurity and hope. This could be considered a utopian film from the estranged perspective of 2022’s late capital. In its glory of images, in its poetic reconvening with land and machine in montage, it’s simply one of the more inspiring and moving works I’ve seen thus far.

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  Review by 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐚 ★★★★

  Sovietember: 22/☭

  "hurrah for collective work! on a collective land!"

  filled with evocative and stunning imagery of 1920s soviet rural landscape, animals and people, with a sharp and repeated focus on their faces and physical movements to convey their emotional state and how important the struggle is to them. it being collectively working towards the transformation of the agrarian into the industrialized to secure their livelihood and raise their standards of living. the score adds an interesting third layer here as it fits into a more contemporary notion of progress with its modern sound (could just be the copy i watched), but found it oddly fitting and engaging.. the cow god and marriage scenes are quite amazing, beautifully highlighting the…

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  Review by Krautsalat ★★★★½

  More montages than Rocky IV, plus cow porn and scythe POV shots.

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  Review by Audrey ★★★★★ 1

  simultaneously a refutation to years and years of capitalist programming, a formal achievement that has never been surpassed, and eisenstein’s most human film. there is pleasure in working for a collective that will never come from working for individual gain (which is required to survive under capitalism), the knowledge that your labor is helping the people around you is enough. the film collapses boundaries between class, gender, land; we are all just human in the end. communism is the future of society, eisenstein is the future of cinema. there are sequences in here that melted my brain and body, the formal constraints of cinema completely erased, a new vision of what cinema can be. it also rocks because it’s mostly just people hanging out in beautiful landscapes (probably eisensteins strongest on a compositional level), working and building a better society. me and who???