Movie train

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An example of a film made by the Cinema Train Brigade (1933)

The film train " Soyuzkino " - three railway cars , which during the first five-year plan were adapted by director A. Medvedkin for the operational development, processing and installation of film, as well as the residence of the entire crew. In one of the cars, a movie shutter was mounted.

Like the armored trains of the Civil War , Medvedkin's movie train made “swift raids on the shock construction sites of the five-year period” ^[1] . Medvedkin saw his goal in creating documentary films in an extremely short time:

Movie in one box! Acute! He who takes the heart! Done quickly, he must cling to the big screen thriller like a bur in the tail of a dog and move with him along any roads of film distribution ^[2] .

The acuteness of the topics being raised and the responsiveness of the response make it possible to put Medvedkin's short films on a par with modern television: “When he arrived at another object, he immediately shot hot scenes, they immediately showed them, mounted them the same day, or at least , demonstrated in a local club or cinema, to the indescribable delight of the audience " ^[1] . The idea was to, revealing the shortcomings, to convince viewers of the need to improve the production process.

Medvedkinskaya the idea of ​​a film train caused a lively response among the French left of the 1960s . The leaders of the Medvedkino group, led by Chris Marker, perceived Medvedkin as “ Che Guevara from cinematography” - “an enthusiast of combat propaganda created almost in a partisan manner, as soon as possible and at the scene of events” ^[3] . All 60 films created in the movie train were considered lost at that time. Only in the 1980s, a young film expert Nikolai Izvolov found some of them in the archive ^[4] .