Mother follows a divided family during a workers strike in the Russian Revolution of 1905. After the father is killed in a skirmish and the son is sentenced to work at a labor camp, the mother revises her ideology and helps to plan a prison escape. The film concludes with troops subduing the revolt and the death of the mother and son at the hands of the soldiers. Vsevstol Pudovkin's (1893-1957) method of montage more closely resembles Kuleshov's "brick laying" method, where the combination of cutting helps to more effectively convey or dramatize an event, in contrast to Eisenstein who advocated a montage of colliding images to generate a meaning that cannot be depicted on film. The film may be silent, but the sounds are transmitted from the image. We feel the silence drop in the bar as the father demands vodka. Mother marks a clear development in the structure and formation of the motion picture, but modern day audiences may be desensitized to the films spell. The film utilizes a cinematic language familiar to the contemporary moviegoer, but we may take the easily followed, continuous action and cutting that develops suspense for granted as we witness everyday movie vocabulary in its conception. While Pudovkin shared different theoretical views from Eisenstein, the film includes abstract sequences as well. After the death of the father, Pudovkin cuts to several images of trees blowing in the wind as a break in the action. He draws a parallel between blocks of ice plummeting down a river and the crowds of people marching, while also establishing simultaneous action for a crucial plot point near the end of the film. Mother also experiments with subjectivity, as we iris to the mother's memory of her son hiding weapons (using an x-ray vision effect to show the storage beneath the floorboards) and as we are given images of water and a child after Pavel reads the getaway plan as if to show his yearning for freedom. While the portrayal and privileging of a hero, the prison escape sequence and the climactic chase renders Mother rather Hollywood, ultimately the film is too tragic to be a Hollywood film.
