Das Alte und das Neue / Die Generallinie

After centuries of serfdom, world war, civil war and confiscations during ‘war communism’, a Russian village is on the brink of collapse. A farm girl calls on the farmers to cooperate. While helping them overcome their scepticism, inertia and alcoholism, she enlists the help of an agronomist to obtain a separator for skimming milk and opens a cooperative. A sovkhoz gives the farmers a breeding bull – a ‘bull cooperative’ is formed. Workers help them to avoid sabotage by Soviet bureaucracy and obtain their first tractor. Half documentary, half feature film, conceived by Sergei Eisenstein as a ‘cry about the catastrophic situation of the village,’ but crushed by the ‘tractor of the next turn in politics.’ On Stalin's orders, who replaced cooperation with collectivisation, The General Line was censored, renamed The Old and the New, and then banned altogether. (N.K./A.S.)

At the piano: Gerhard Gruber