The Dark Night

Eisenstein shot 50 hours of footage on location in Mexico in 1931 and 32 for what would have become ¡Que viva México!, but was not able to finish the film. Following two wildly different reconstruction attempts in 1939 (Marie Seton's 'Time in the Sun') and 1979 (Grigori Alexandrov's '¡Que viva México!') Kovalov has here compiled another hypothetical version of what Eisenstein's film might have been.

The rat lives in a cage that stands in the room of a large communal apartment in which the poet lives. The apartment is in the house; House - in the yard-well; The courtyard is in the city; And in the courtyard - 1939 ...In the film there are many newsreel frames of those times, the sound series contains both popular and propagandist songs, both Soviet and German. The plot is divided into many unrelated episodes, which are colorized in different colors. The author claims that everything shown should be understood outside of symbolism: everything in the film means only itself.

A mixture of shots form a Soviet propaganda film and a documentary about the clinic for incurable alcoholics.

Film by Oleg Kovalov

The Island of the Dead is a film about the demise of the Russian Epocha Modern. The symbol of this culture was the legendary Russian film star Vera Kholodnaya, who evoked a poetic image of the young urban woman on the silver screen. Her death in 1919, shrouded in tragedy and mystery, put a symbolic end to the pre-Revolutionary period. The Island of the Dead is composed of fragments from numerous films from this period, juxtaposed with other contemporary artistic expressions such as music and painting. Kovalov shows convincingly how the fragile beauty of the Russian Epocha Modern had to make way for the pressure of Futurism, Constructivism and other 'progressive trends', and how these '-isms' were then also relegated to the melting pot to be remoulded by totalitarian norms.