Fridrikh Ermler

A docudrama presenting the events which explain how and why Charles Spencer Chaplin made alterations to his original ending of the famous movie “Modern Times” following his encounter with the Soviet director Fridrikh Ermler.

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“The Magic Beam” is a film essay woven together from newsreels and documentary material from different decades, fragments of hundreds of non-fiction and fiction Soviet films of the 1910s-1960s.

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The teenager Misha Polyakov, being with his mother in a Ukrainian village on vacation with his grandmother and about to return home to Petrograd, offers his best friend Genka to go with him. Suddenly, a white gang of Nikitsky bursts into the village and attacks Misha’s house, where Commissioner Polevoy lives. The purpose of Nikitskiy (aka Nikolskiy) is a dagger located at Polevoy. Saving the commissioner, Misha learns from him the history and secret of the weapon, and receives it for storage with a request to solve the secret. Having returned with adventures to Petrograd, Misha Polyakov with friends begins to unravel the riddle of the dagger, in the handle of which is encrypted text.

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A man invites people to a dinner party, but a dream and his forgetfulness get in the way.

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Professor Lavrov, a student and follower of Michurin, is trying to refute the discoveries of the theory of heredity and is successfully working on developing a new breed of chickens with high egg production and productivity. The brave experimenter is supported by the Central Committee of the CPSU in the person of Comrade, who arrived at the experimental poultry farm.

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A story of true love set during the WWII.

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A musical romantic comedy set in Soviet Union during the first years of WWII.

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Kotovsky, who went a long revolutionary way and became the recognized military commander of the cavalry troops: commander, brigade commander, commander. Six times he escaped from prison, was sentenced to death, and again escaped to become one of the most ardent warriors of the revolution. His famous equestrian brigade fought with the enemy near Kiev and the Belaya Tserkov, at Nikolaev and Odessa, and did not know defeat anywhere.

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A story about a Secretary of the Communist Party District Committee who is leading partisans in their fight with the Nazis during WWII.

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In the summer of 1932, Sergei Lukonin, a young man from Saratov, leaves his hometown for the distant city of Omsk to attend tank school. His fiancée, Varenka, who soon became an actress, remained in Saratov. In 1936, Sergei went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He was wounded, taken prisoner, escaped, and returned to training battles, with June 1941 looming ahead.

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Brecht's play Fear and Misery of the Third Reich consists of a series of playlets, portraying National Socialist Germany of the 1930s as a land of poverty, violence, fear and pretence. Nazi antisemitism is depicted in several of the sketches, including "the Physicist", "Judicial Process", and "the Jewish Wife".

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Before the attack on the village, captured by the Nazis, the commander decides to carry out a distraction — a concert of the front-line brigade of artists. Chef Antosha Rybkin is assigned to play the role of... a German corporal. Dressed in an enemy uniform, he gets to the rear of the enemy and helps his liberate the village.

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Anton Ivanovich Voronov is a highly respected professor at the Moscow Conservatoire, who places the music of Bach above everything else and regards it as the ultimate yardstick by which other musical accomplishments must be measured. His daughter, Serafima, is an aspiring singer with great potential, and her father’s anger is aroused when she begins singing in the operetta composed by Aleksei Mukhin, thus abandoning what he considers the higher calling of opera. Mukhin’s work, however, demands a high level of ability from his soloist, and Anton Ivanovich is persuaded of the legitimacy of operetta as a musical genre when, in a dream, he is visited by Johann Sebastian Bach himself, who tells him that ‘people need all kinds of music’.

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Short propaganda film released to raise army morale during first months of war. Civil War hero and Red Army commander Vasily Chapayev (killed in 1919 by White Army officers then drowned in the Ural river) swims ashore but it's the summer of 1941. Chapayev asks who are Soviets fighting off this time, hears that it's Germans once again and then gives an inspiring speech. He is played by Boris Babochkin who famously portrayed Chapayev in 1934 biopic.

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A biography drama about Sergey Kirov, a prominent early Bolshevik leader in the Soviet Union.

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The peaceful life of an exemplary collective farm is being rent asunder by shortages and dissent, and a commissar is sent to uncover the source of the problems, unaware that their is actual sabotage involved.

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The story of an effort to catch "wreckers" at work in a Soviet factory. The film’s title-song called "The Song of the Counterplan", composed by Dmitri Shostakovich, became world famous and was adapted into "Au-devant de la vie", a notable song of the French socialist movement of the 1930s.

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Director Frederick Ermler’s last silent feature and the last of four collaborations with actor Fiodor Nikitin. Nikitin plays an officer who spends a decade after the Great War as a shell-shocked amnesiac, until a glimpse of a woman through a train window sparks the return of his memory. He makes his way back to St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, a man out of time who struggles to make sense of the new society brought about by the revolution.

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