Potemkin

Just twenty five years old, Brazilian cinema novo force Glauber Rocha wrote and directed this impressive feature addressing socio-political problems within his country–and indeed, anywhere it may apply. It is the 1940s, during another drought in the Brazilian sertao, when ranch hand Manuel is fed up with his situation. His boss tries to cheat him of his earnings and Manuel kills him, fleeing with his wife, Rosa. Now an outlaw, Manuel joins up with a self-proclaimed saint who condones violence and preaches disturbing doctrines. It is now Rosa who turns to killing and the two are on the move once again. And so it goes, the two running from one allegience to another, following the words of others as they attempt to find a place in their ruthless land. Blending mysticism, religion, and popular culture in this symbolic and realistic drama, Rocha insists that rather than follow the external and obscure dogmas of culture and religion, man must determine his path by his own voice.

Federal agent Elliot Ness assembles a personal team of mob fighters to bring Chicago crime boss Al Capone to justice using unconventional means during the mob wars of the 1920s. This fictionalized account of the arrest of Al Capone is heavy on style and gunfire. The end shootout combines a baby carriage and stairs with a nod to Eisenstein's _The Battleship Potemkin_.

From Intolerance to The Silence of the Lambs, motion pictures show crowds and power in complex, usually antagonistic, relationships.

Imagine that you visit Odessa, the pulsating harbor city on the Black Sea, stroll down the Potemkin Stairs and along the fashionable boulevards until you finally land in morbid alleys and discover a bar. A woman's voice is heard from an open door in the dim light. She sings in English at times—you seem to recognize a standard—as well as in her Ukrainian mother tongue at times, and sometimes she emits strange sounds or ones that sound like an instrument without lapsing into old, well-known scat patterns of the American school. Interesting.

Jolly Fellows, also translated as Happy-Go-Lucky Guys, Moscow Laughs and Jazz Comedy, is a 1934 Soviet musical film, directed by Grigori Aleksandrov and starring his wife Lyubov Orlova, a gifted singer and the first recognized star of Soviet cinema.

I.B.Tauris is delighted to announce the reissue in paperback in three volumes of the definitive, most comprehensive edition, in the finest translations and fully annotated, of the writings of this great filmmaker, theorist and teacher of film - and one of the most original aesthetic thinkers of the twentieth century. The name of Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) is synonymous with the idea of montage, as exemplified in his silent classics such as 'The Battleship Potemkin' (1925) and 'October' (1927).