Silent Film Research Articles

Note from the Editor

Editorial| April 01 2023 Note from the Editor: Producing Film History Jennifer M. Bean Jennifer M. Bean Jennifer M. Bean is the Robert Jolin Osborne Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and adjunct associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her publications include A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Duke University Press, 2002), Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s (Rutgers University Press, 2011), and the award-winning Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana University Press, 2014). She is currently at work on a multimedia collection of essays on queer feminisms, affect, and early US cinema as well as a more traditional book study, Junking Modernity: Early Cinema and the Question of History. On January 1, 2020, she assumed the position of editor in chief of Feminist Media Histories. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2023) 9 (2): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer M. Bean; Note from the Editor: Producing Film History. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2023; 9 (2): 1–7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search It is June 2022. I am sitting in the middle row of a plush theater on the campus of Columbia University in New York City, surrounded by curators, collectors, scholars, artists, and educators gathered from diverse corners of the world. It is the final day of archival screenings at Women and the Silent Screen XI (WSSXI), a biannual conference organized under the auspices of Women and Film History International. The pianist flexes his hands while our hosts—Janes Gaines and Hilary Hallett—introduce a three-hour program composed of partially extant martial-art, espionage, and adventure films featuring gutsy female protagonists from Denmark, China, France, and the United States. I glimpse a technician near the edge of the stage helping Chonghwa Chung, lead researcher from the Korean film archive, set up for his presentation to follow the program. In the aisle behind me voices murmur in conversation, something about “queer kisses” in early cinema,... You do not currently have access to this content.

Staging the Cinematic: Puccini, Fanciulla, and Early Silent Film

Abstract Giacomo Puccini’s operas have a long history of being hailed as “cinematic.” Such descriptions began to appear during his lifetime and persisted in the years following his death, and more recent scholarship has continued to echo them. Associations between Puccini and film also extend to the cinematic screen: there are numerous filmed versions and adaptations of his operas, and his music has been featured in film soundtracks since the 1930s. Nevertheless, even though Puccini’s career roughly coincided with the first three decades of film history, surprisingly little is known about his attitude toward film or how it may have influenced his oeuvre. Taking La fanciulla del West as a case study, I investigate the complex historical relationship between early cinema, Puccini, and his operas, focusing particularly on the connections between Fanciulla and three American silent film genres that were popular in the years leading up to the opera’s premiere: early or “Eastern” Westerns, chase films, and lynching or execution films. I begin by investigating the filmic world to which Puccini and his creative team were exposed, tracing the evolution of cinema to 1910. I then turn specifically to the chase scene and attempted lynching in act 3 of Fanciulla, which I analyze in relation to the aforementioned genres, as well as to Belasco’s play The Girl of the Golden West, on which the libretto is based. Finally, I offer new perspectives on what it means—and meant—to understand Puccini’s operas as cinematic. In so doing, I demonstrate that the meaning of the adjective “cinematic” is historically contingent, not determined by immutable characteristics or qualities.

How Asta Nielsen Transformed the Screen

Freelance film curator Pamela Hutchinson interviews Scandinavian studies scholar Julie K. Allen about the life and work of silent film star Asta Nielsen, who made her debut in 1910 and was among the most acclaimed performers of her generation. Allen discusses her work on Nielsen, including the translation of the actor’s memoir into English for the first time: The Silent Muse (Rochester, NY: Camden House 2022). The conversation covers Nielsen’s most famous roles, her global reception, and her enduring importance to queer audiences.

Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’ from Lohengrin and its Use as a Wedding March

AbstractThe ‘Bridal Chorus’ of Wagner’s 1850 opera Lohengrin is one of the most recognizable pieces of music in the world. This article explores how it became so inextricably associated with wedding ceremonies – real ones, or on stage and in film. Furthered by its use at several British royal weddings the music was especially popular at wedding ceremonies in Britain and the USA. Notwithstanding that the chorus was usually performed in an instrumental arrangement, its attractiveness as wedding music was strengthened by various new English texts, its popular title of ‘Here comes the Bride’ deriving from a 1915 silent film. On a different level, this study contextualizes and evaluates the long-lasting criticism of the use of Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’ at wedding ceremonies. Proportional to the decline in its actual use, this criticism has now mostly gone; yet, the ‘Bridal Chorus’ remains as the archetypical music to represent the arrival of the bride.

Doing “Applied Film History”

Kate Saccone interviews Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, Eye Filmmuseum’s silent film curator. Rongen-Kaynakçi discusses various aspects of her career and daily work, from archival research and film restoration projects to curating film programs and working with scholars and digital research platforms. Central to this conversation is Rongen-Kaynakçi’s role within the archive in relation to feminist film history and challenging established (patriarchal) film histories.

Body, Voice and Noise: Acting for Sound Films as Debated in the Interwar Romanian Press

"Sound cinema arrived on Romanian screens in 1929 to a moderate response. Critics and artists alike pondered over their status as an altered version of silent cinema, filmed theatre or a new art form. All three alternatives were further confronted to the status of the actor, as delineated by theatre, in an attempt to clarify the uncertain future of the film actor who used both his body and voice. This paper conducts a survey of articles on these issues published by Romanian interwar newspapers. Their authors reached various conclusions, from predicting the imminent failure of sound cinema and, thus, the disappearance of the spoken film actor, temporarily subjected to enacting on celluloid a shadow of his defining stage performance, to examining solutions that conciliated spoken dialogue with the sound dimension of film. Keywords: acting, sound cinema, sound film, spoken film, silent cinema, theatre, Romanian press, interwar period. "

Gone with the sound: critical perspectives on studying imaginability of American cinematic experience in the “sound” era, 1927-1935

This article explores the human-technology relationship during the transition from silent films to sound films in American history and analyzes how this specific technology has influenced film audiences’ experiences. The author revisits the importance of human-centered technology and uses the term “imaginability” to describe the likelihood for both spontaneous bodily responses and technologically cultivated thinking activities inspired by cinematic engagement. The article challenges the discourse of technology as progress while focusing on the audiences’ experience during their cinematic engagement. The author's hypothesis is that sound film provides a linear channel of synchronization and hence produces restrictions on the audience’s imagination by limiting their temporal and spatial sensibilities. This synchronized sound technology offers a streamlined audiovisual reality through matching sounds and images in real-time, leading to a shortened processing of images, sounds, and their interconnections. The transitions between filmmaking and cinematic presenting have also revolutionized theater design, leading to the liminality that describes the state of transitioning under this circumstance led by sound technology, which generates metrics, measuring how fast and how thoroughly technology conquers an outdated society by enforcing innovations. The article focuses on the interplay between the spectatorship that addresses the condition of viewing films and the sound consciousness led by the synchronized sound system as applied to filmmaking. The analysis of imaginability becomes measurable, descriptive, and referential. The author suggests that the preservation and scrutiny of silent films are urgent and necessary to recognize the values of silent film production and the audience’s cinematic experience during the silent film era.

It’s not funny! – On Wes Anderson’s comedy and genre hybridizations

Wes Anderson is, arguably, the greatest heir to the traditional American comic genre in its different manifestations. Starting with the profound influence of the masters of comedy of the silent era, Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin, Andersonian comedy also lines up with the works of masters of classical American Comedy such as Frank Capra, George Cuckor, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder or Preston Sturges, up to the existentialist tone of some of Woody Allen’s comedies. The present contribution analyses, from the perspective of the History of Cinema, the way in which Andersonian comedy draws on this long tradition, crystalizing in the coalescence of up to five comic subtypes: deadpan humour, slapstick, screwball comedy, verbal humour and parody. The latter is of particular significance, since it is the key to the hybridization of cinematic genres that is one of the traits of Anderson’s playful and postmodern approach as a postmodern auteur. Thus, the second part of the article will explore the genre hybridizations through which the Texan filmmaker resignifies the usual meaning of traditional genre conventions, often for the purpose of achieving a very particular comic effect.

“That’s the Difference, I Am Fully Engaged With Art”: Renée Baker on the Practice of Scoring Silent Film and the Matter of “Race Movies”

Abstract: This lengthy conversation with Renée Baker engages with her multi-modal practice as a visual artist and composer of sound scores for silent films, particularly the “race movies” Body and Soul (dir. Oscar Micheaux, 1925) , The Scar of Shame (dir. Frank Peregini, 1927), and Borderline (dir. Kenneth MacPherson, 1930). Baker contends that these films render more complex and nuanced readings of black life and community than Hollywood renderings and that they contributed to the recovery of Black history .

Passion, Visions, Trance: Using Laban Technique to Train Actors in the Performance Non-Ordinary Psychophysical States in German Expressionist Drama

Passion, Visions, Trance:Using Laban Technique to Train Actors in the Performance Non-Ordinary Psychophysical States in German Expressionist Drama Gerald Large (bio) In Washington State, where I teach acting at the community college level, high school juniors and seniors can take community college classes for credit (a program called Running Start). Thus, my acting classes are populated mostly by sixteen- to twenty-year-olds. Occasionally a returning veteran will give the class a try, as do students of a certain age. Rarely do I have a theatre major. This demographic is liberating in that I needn't worry about training hopeful professional actors. I can explore a broad palette of training methodologies. I can play. But "play" in the context of an acting class must be meaningful for the students. Play needs to touch them deeply. Surprisingly, I found that a movement from a century ago and a continent away provides a promising playground for my students: German Expressionism. The explosive, transcendent, and socially forward-looking plays by August Stramm, Georg Kaiser, Oskar Kokoschka, and many others give us characters who frequently move from a quotidian existence to non-ordinary states of mind. Characters in these plays don't just have objectives of a mundane nature. They are absolutely manic in their passionate desire to transform both self and society. They have visions. They sit in trancestates as if suspended in time. When I casually asked my students if they'd be interested in exploring the performance of non-ordinary states of mind—specifically, heightened passion, the act of having a vision, and trance states—the response was a resounding "Yes!" This was followed by the obvious question: "How do we do that?" How indeed? I've never taught "expressionist" acting, and my experience with the plays of this movement are not as a director but as an enthusiastic reader who takes copious notes. Digging around in the back of my filing cabinet, I found a file labeled "GE." There I find pages of notes of Stramm's Sancta Susanna (1911), Ernst Toller's Transfiguration (1919), and other plays of the genre. Then I found what I was hoping I'd kept: notes on the dancers, choreographers, and the schools of dance of the German Expressionist movement, including Mary Wigman, Rudolf Bode, Dorothee Günther, the Bauhaus experiments, Rudolf Laban…. This is when I have my "aha!" moment. I'm neither a dancer nor choreographer, but my lifelong interest in both modernism and modern dance has put me in touch with Laban many times. Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) was both a prolific choreographer and dance theorist, whose writings include a seemingly inexhaustible supply of dance categories, theories, and instructions. I knew Laban technique had what I needed to help student-actors explore the performance of non-ordinary states of mind. In this essay, I relate the lessons I found useful in teaching an introductory acting class on the performance of non-ordinary states of mind as found in German Expressionist plays. Specific techniques I explore are Flow, Effort Elements, Motion Factors, and the Passion, Vision, and Spell/Trance [End Page 29] Drives. Additionally, I use scenes from Reinhard Sorge's The Beggar (1912) as the touchstone from which to explore the performance of heightened passion, experiencing a vision, and the trance state. _______ After two weeks of introductory theatre games and improvisations, I sit with the class and introduce them to German Expressionism. I briefly talk through several plays, screen short clips from silent Expressionist films, and show them paintings from the movement. Then we dive deep into Sorge's play The Beggar (which students have previously read).1 Textual analysis is completed by students divided into small groups. They work through several basic questions on character relationships, then they list scenes where they think characters are in a high state of passion, experiencing a vision or hallucinations, or are in a trance. When the groups have completed their task, we reassemble and go through each question. In general, students are perplexed by many of the play's disconnected scenes, by the sudden appearance of angels, and by the abrupt shifts from prose to verse. I welcome the confusion...

Воображаемая столица и реальная провинция в комедии Л. Гайдая «Инкогнито из Петербурга»

The article analyzes the film by Leonid Gaidai Incognito from St. Petersburg (1977) based on the N.V. Gogol’s play The Government Inspector. The author draws attention to the preservation of theatrical aesthetics, which is revealed in the spatial accents and the interaction of the characters. The comedic core of the play, the misunderstanding, is enhanced by the eccentric accents characteristic of the aesthetics of silent cinema. The key dramatic structure of the film is the various types of urban spaces — an imaginary idea of capital city and a real provincial town, as well as the dialogue of their artistic incarnations in the film. The activation of comedy effects takes place at the intersection of extremely serious elements and their childishly naive interpretation and implementation, decoration and attempts to imitate the surrounding space with “adult” (capital) images. The “unofficial” side of the artistic world is exposed by its permanent presence on the periphery of the frame and the stubborn, but not articulated desire to return to familiar forms. The film traces the idea that regardless of the hierarchical way of life, the form of statehood, the existence of a Russian person remains unshakable, only external attributes change in accordance with ideological dominants, but at a fundamental level, the established way of life does not undergo significant changes. Incognito from St. Petersburg can be described as the intellectual apogee of the interaction of various aesthetics and comedic dominants. Masterfully alternating escalation and aggravation with containment and smoothing Gaidai keeps tension and dynamic of the dramaturgy. Eccentric elements, subtly woven into the artistic fabric, allowed the director to inscribe and remove Gogol’s motifs in the prism of his own era and its problems.

Embodying Relationality and Enacting Resistance: Celluloid Mobilities in the Silent Film The Daughter Of Dawn

Abstract: “Embodying Relationality and Enacting Resistance: Celluloid Mobilities in the Silent Film The Daughter Of Dawn ” discusses how Kiowa and Comanche actors embedded their respective material cultures in the 1920 silent film The Daughter of Dawn . Filmed in the Wichita Wildlife Refuge and featuring an all-Indigenous cast, this film is a unique entry in the canon of silent Westerns produced in Oklahoma during its nascent statehood. The author illustrates how the Kiowa and Comanche cast enacted what Michelle Raheja calls “visual sovereignty,” engaging in traditional cultural practices, both on and off camera, which were under attack by settler institutions. The performance and recording of these dynamic instances of buffalo culture, traditional dance, and Plains Indian Sign Language, which the author collectively refers to as “celluloid mobilities,” constituted an embodied refusal of settler-colonial interference in Indigenous cultural continuance.

Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno‐Romantic Cinema By KatharinaLoew, Amsterdam University Press. 2021. 320pp. $144.00 (hardcover)

The German QuarterlyEarly View BOOK REVIEW Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema By Katharina Loew, Amsterdam University Press. 2021. 320pp. $144.00 (hardcover) Joel Westerdale, Corresponding Author Joel Westerdale jpwester@smith.edu German and Italian, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, USA Email: jpwester@smith.eduSearch for more papers by this author Joel Westerdale, Corresponding Author Joel Westerdale jpwester@smith.edu German and Italian, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, USA Email: jpwester@smith.eduSearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 February 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12331Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Breaching the frame: Psychoanalysis and sunset boulevard

AbstractSunset Boulevard is a film that breaches the frames that cinema has conventionally used. It playfully satirises Hollywood with its silent era, its glossy nostalgia, its mystique that conceals its brittle cynicism. Norma Desmond is satirised but she is also the means by which Hollywood stands exposed. In many ways, the audience like Joe Gillis thinks they are in on the joke, till it turns against them. This paper argues that we can read this as a cautionary tale for psychoanalysts as we enter into an analysis of the patient, only to discover that we have been recruited into a world that never was in our control.

Rethinking Inside and Outside: The Door in Ernst Lubitsch'sWhen I Was Deadand Charlie Chaplin'sThe Adventurer

The article investigates the function and signification of doors in two silent films, Ernst Lubitsch's 1916 When I Was Dead and Charlie Chaplin's 1917 The Adventurer. Taking a theoretical perspective provided by the field of intellectual inquiry known as cultural techniques ( Kulturtechniken), the door in these films is studied with respect to its procedural and functional operations. Specifically, the article focuses on the ways in which the employment of doors in each of the films relates to these films' configurations of inside and outside as conceptual realms. The analysis presented shows that Lubitsch and Chaplin engage doors in uniquely different ways. It further reveals that, while the operation of the door in When I Was Dead reinforces an exclusive binary of inside and outside, which itself can be traced back to the film's concern with sexual difference, the operation of the door in The Adventurer essentially deconstructs the inside/outside binary, an act that can be linked to a critique of contemporary notions of industrial management and the treatment of humans as machines.

Machine learning and deep learning systems for automated measurement of "advanced" theory of mind: Reliability and validity in children and adolescents.

Understanding individual differences in theory of mind (ToM; the ability to attribute mental states to others) in middle childhood and adolescence hinges on the availability of robust and scalable measures. Open-ended response tasks yield valid indicators of ToM but are labor intensive and difficult to compare across studies. We examined the reliability and validity of new machine learning and deep learning neural network automated scoring systems for measuring ToM in children and adolescents. Two large samples of British children and adolescents aged between 7 and 13 years (Sample 1: N = 1,135, Mage = 10.22 years, SD = 1.45; Sample 2: N = 1,020, Mage = 10.36 years, SD = 1.27) completed the silent film and strange stories tasks. Teachers rated Sample 2 children's social competence with peers. A single latent-factor explained variation in performance on both the silent film and strange stories task (in Sample 1 and 2) and test performance was sensitive to age-related differences and individual differences within each age-group. A deep learning neural network automated scoring system trained on Sample 1 exhibited interrater reliability and measurement invariance with manual ratings in Sample 2. Validity of ratings from the automated scoring system was supported by unique positive associations between ToM and teacher-rated social competence. The results demonstrate that reliable and valid measures of ToM can be obtained using the new freely available deep learning neural network automated scoring system to rate open-ended text responses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, by Jonathan Freedman

Reviewed by: The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity by Jonathan Freedman Beth Newman (bio) The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, by Jonathan Freedman; pp. ix + 297. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2021, $95.00, $30.00 paper, $29.99 ebook. What do Jewishness and late-nineteenth-century decadence have to do with one another? Depending on one’s conceptions of “Jews” and of “decadence,” the answer could seem to be not much—or quite a lot, none of it good. Influential late-nineteenth-century anti-Semites used the word decadent and its cousin “degenerate” as slurs with which to vilify Jewish people and foment hatred of Jews, a theme taken up as policy during the years of Nazi ascendancy. In The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, Jonathan Freedman folds this fact into his rich, complex celebration of the decadent movement and its long afterlife, and the Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals who participated in both. [End Page 698] A prolific scholar of English and American literature, Jewish studies, and modernism, Freedman shows that Jewish people both adopted decadent themes and topoi to establish themselves as fully modern participants in the culture of major Western societies, and adapted them to specifically Jewish interests and preoccupations. He demonstrates compellingly that in doing so, they contributed to the shaping of an emergent modernism. Freedman makes this argument in seven chapters that are by turns erudite, gossipy, nuanced, funny, and moving. He stretches his canvas across the half-century or so that he calls the long fin de siècle from 1870 to 1920, extending it geographically from urban America to European centers of culture. Victorianists will be immediately interested in his first three chapters, which in different ways focus on the fin de siècle they know, surveyed from an unfamiliar angle of vision. The first chapter argues that the history of Jewish persecution, together with the Torah’s narratives of catastrophe and decline from Eden forward, created a receptive audience for decadent themes. Here, Freedman also constructs a network of Jewish critics, patrons, art historians, dealers, gallery owners, editors, and other taste-makers who provided a crucial infrastructure for the production and circulation of fin-de-siècle decadence. A chapter titled “Oscar Wilde among the Jews” explores the work of Jewish writers and artists whom Wilde championed as well as of those who championed him. These include Amy Levy, Ada Leverson, Julia Frankau, Marc-André Raffalovich, William Rothenstein, and Jacob Epstein, the designer of Wilde’s gravesite monument. Perhaps even more interesting is what Freedman discovers about Wilde’s popularity among Yiddish-speaking immigrants in London and New York who flocked to performances of his plays in the Yiddish theater, and purchased translations of his works in Hebrew and Yiddish. He shows that Yiddish-speaking revolutionaries treated “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891) as required reading at a time when Wilde was scorned by the mainstream reading public and press. A chapter uncovering the phenomenon of “Jewish Salomania” traces the enthusiastic adoption of Salomé by Jewish artists, dancers, and film actors (including Alla Nazimova of Charles Bryant’s 1923 silent film), embraced by them even before Wilde’s play added to the title character’s appeal. This chapter is lavishly illustrated, and Freedman pauses to provide compelling, often brilliant readings of the images, including of the 1897 Alphonse Mucha poster of Sarah Bernhardt that graces the book’s cover. In these chapters, as in the conclusion, Freedman serves as collector culling materials from a wide array of sources, arranging them into an often dizzying but unfailingly interesting and almost always entirely persuasive account that supports his thesis, each time from a different direction. Gender and sexuality, recurrent themes throughout, are central to one of the two chapters that crown the book: bravura readings of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40). Freedman observes that although Proust identified as Catholic, his mother was Jewish, making him Jewish in the eyes of rabbinic law. Even readers unfamiliar with Proust or the body of commentary on his vexed relationship to Jewishness...

The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike

The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike

Review: Chinatown Film Culture: The Appearance of Cinema in San Francisco’s Chinese Neighborhood, by Kim K. Fahlstedt

Review: <i>Chinatown Film Culture: The Appearance of Cinema in San Francisco’s Chinese Neighborhood</i>, by Kim K. Fahlstedt

The Russian Movie T-34: a duel between soldiers and their tanks.

The aim of this essay is to exploratory analyze the Russian film Russian War T. 34, by Alexey Sidorov, as a symbolic duel between two individuals, a Nazi German and the other one Soviet, employing their tanks, their backgrounds, their industrial cultures, and ideologies. The Dominant Explain Comes from the Curzio Malaparte reports that, at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa of 1941, advocated Nazi defeat. We use the works of Steve Zaloga to analyze the use of tanks as a combat machines. John Erickson, Brandon Schechter's reading, explains the victory of the Red Army and the USSR, mobilizing industrial, human, and cultural means employing, according to Lewin, the memory of the Russian victory over Napoleon in 1812. Our Findings indicate that the consolidation of an accelerated industrial mindset produced a new ethics where Tank Crews were soldiers and mechanically inspired and, like an elite, along with industrial technique, employed tricks as a tactic weapon, according to Michel de Certeau. Narrating the dynamic plastic of the battle between tanks, Sidorov's film holds the viewer's attention by employing the narrative aesthetics of silent cinema and visualizing his scenes dispensing with the reading of Russian subtitles. The film puts the tank, the top product of the 1930s and 40s celebrated industrial development, as a complex war tool whose employment requires exceptional individuals endowed with cunning and technique of fighting, simultaneously soldiers and mechanical.