“Steel Way (Turksib)” is a Soviet black-and-white documentary film .
| Steel Way (Turksib) | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Genre | documentary |
| Producer | Victor Turin |
| Author script | Efim Aron Viktor Shklovsky |
| Operator | Boris Francison Evgeny Slavinsky |
| Composer | Vissarion Shebalin |
| Film company | Vostokkino |
| Duration | 57 min |
| A country |  the USSR |
| Tongue | Russian |
| Year | 1929 |
| IMDb | ID 0020523 |
Content
Story
The film tells about the construction of the Turkestan-Siberian highway and its role in the development of the Seven Rivers . The directors of the film managed to show the builders' enthusiasm and the amazement of the desert inhabitants at the sight of a train going along the tracks laid on the sand.
The film begins with a caption explaining the importance of Turksib to the entire Soviet Union, as the way in which cotton will be delivered from Turkestan . The tape itself is divided into five “actions”. The first action focuses on how important water is for Turkestan and how rare it is there. Frames of the cracked earth are replaced by scenes of melting snow in the mountains and streams flowing into the valleys (this scene was then repeated in American and French films). The second action shows impractical and slow traditional modes of transportation ( camels and donkeys in the middle of the Central Asian samum and horse-drawn sleighs in Siberia), focusing on the need for new vehicles to deliver grain over thousands of kilometers. The third act shows how topographers, the “vanguard of civilization”, scout the area, how they are met in the local nomads and how the route of the future road is developed in Almaty . The fourth act shows the process of laying the paths through the sands and rocks, the completed road and nomads from the local tribes, racing with the train. The fifth action is a brief repetition of the previous ones and a message that the works will be completed in 1930 , in the last year of the first five-year plan [1] .
Recognition
The film is on the list of the fifty most outstanding documentaries of the 20th century [2] . Turksib was especially appreciated by the classic British and Canadian documentary films John Grirson , who prepared his English version for showing [1] . This version was restored and released by the British Film Institute in 2011 with a soundtrack written by Guy Bartel of the British group Bronnt Industries Kapital.
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 Jack C. Ellis, Betsy A. McLane. A new history of documentary film . - New York, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005. - P. 37—38. - 385 s. - ISBN 0-8264-1751-5 .
- ↑ Turksib in art, film and literature (Inaccessible link) . Date of treatment November 20, 2010. Archived July 16, 2011.
Links
- Turksib (1931) on the site "Encyclopedia of the national cinema"
- Review of Filmreference.com