Fragment of an Empire

Fragment of an Empire
Directed by	Fridrikh Ermler
Written by	Fridrikh Ermler Ekaterina Vinogradskaya
Starring	Emil Gal Sergey Gerasimov
Cinematography	Gleb Bushtuyev Yevgeni Shneider
Edited by	Lev Kuleshov
Production company	Sovkino
Release date	28 October 1929 (1929-10-28)
Running time	96 minutes, 110 minutes (2018 restoration)
Country	Soviet Union
Languages	Silent Russian intertitles

Fragment of an Empire (1929) by Fridrikh Ermler

Fragment of an Empire (Russian: Обломок империи, romanized: Oblomok imperii) is a 1929 Soviet silent drama film directed by Fridrikh Ermler.

Plot

A soldier called Filimonov lost his memory due to shell shock during the Russian Civil War. In 1928 he sees a woman in a passing train, and suddenly remembers his own history. He decides to leave for his hometown, St. Petersburg, now renamed to Leningrad. He is confused by the rapid changes in modern Leningrad and gets a job at his old workplace, where he slowly realises what it means that peasants are now in charge of the factory. His co-workers find the new address of his wife and send him there. Filimonov is confronted by the fact that his wife is now married to a Soviet apparatchik who treats her badly. In the final scene, Filimonov breaks the fourth wall and declares to the audience that there is still a lot of work to be done.

Restoration

The movie was restored in 2018 by an international team of silent movie experts, including San Francisco Silent Film Festival board president Robert Byrne and Peter Bagrov, a former archivist from the Russian Gosfilmofond. The restoration was primarily based on a 35mm print from the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. A couple of missing shots and intertitles were taken from a print sourced from the Swiss Cinémathèque. Crucially, the scene where Jesus on the crucifix is shown with a gas mask was inserted again. A new soundtrack was composed for the Dutch premiere at the EYE Filmmuseum by Colin Benders, using a Eurorack modular synthesizer.

Cast

• Fyodor Nikitin as Filimonov
• Yakov Gudkin as The wounded soldier
• Lyudmila Semyonova as Filimonov's wife
• Valeri Solovtsov as Filimonov's wife's new husband
• Emil Gal as Passenger in the train
• Sergei Gerasimov
• Ursula Krug
• Varvara Myasnikova
• Vyacheslav Viskovsky as Former Employer
• Aleksandr Melnikov as Member of the Komsomol

Bibliography

• Christie, Ian & Taylor, Richard. The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939. Routledge, 2012.

External links

• Fragment of an Empire at IMDb