Aerograd

Oleksandr Dovzhenko is one of the greats of Soviet revolutionary cinema who left his mark on Leyda’s generation. Leyda met him in Moscow in the summer of 1934 when Dovzhenko was preparing the shoot for an ambitious film project about the Soviet State’s advance into the wooded areas of Siberia and the fantasy of a Bolshevik metropolis on the Pacific coast. 90 years later, watching AEROGRAD generates a degree of ambivalence: the screen-filling visual compositions by Dovzhenko and cinematographer Eduard Tissé captivate on the one hand, while the narrative surrounding the partisan Gluschak is full of militaristic pathos on the other, as he cultivates the terrain in what seems like singlehanded fashion by liberating it from seditious Japanese samurais, resistant kulaks and an orthodox sect. 

Dovzhenko’s film would eventually give its name to a group of filmmakers who split off from the WFPL in 1935 and counted Leyda among their number: they initially called themselves Nykino (based on New York) before changing their name to Frontier Films in 1937, inspired by the title under which AEROGRAD was distributed in America.

The film will be shown as a 35 mm print from the Arsenal archive.