Okraina (1933) User Reviews

Okraina

[mflynn-69970 · 6/10 · 3 October 2015]

"The Outskirts (Okraina)" follows several stories as villagers in a far-distant Russian town are faced with war, a strike, a prisoner-of-war camp, and the effects and aftershocks these all bring. The town the film begins in is struggling with the shocks and effects of war, and the film follows those effects in multiple story lines. The ways that the war is used vary, from a factory strike brought on by the harshness of the times, to a young woman and her budding relationship with a German prisoner of war, to the shoe factory strike, to the soldiers at the front lines. As with many other Soviet films, there are many semi-leading and leading characters, and these film is constantly shifting between groups of characters and stories we are following. There are also tertiary characters being effected by the war as well.

The transition from the more comedic parts to the horrors of war are quick, and often very abrupt. The clumsiness of the story comes from the odd pacing, with too-long bouts of time spent in the various places where the film takes place, making it difficult to transition back to the other story lines easily. The film is clearly struggling to fit the appropriate criteria laid forth by the Soviet Union, to tell the right story with the appropriate characters and the right messages. The stories we follow are compelling in and of themselves but the choppy pacing and the lack of technical finesse detract from the overall quality of this complex, multi-layered war film.

"The greatest of Soviet directors after Eisenstein" ? - Might be

[leoperu · 8/10 · 31 December 2012]

It's difficult for me to judge Rivette's statement about Boris Barnet having been the greatest of Soviet filmmakers after Eisenstein ; I definitely prefer his works to Eisenstein's or let's say Pudovkin's.

Even in our postmodern days, Barnet's hybrid of social realism, satire, romance, genre movie, musical and slapstick may be called eccentric. Rich, dynamic mise en scene is quintessential of this masterpiece condemnation of militarism, nationalism (and capitalism). It consists of two distinct parts, the first, pre-war one mixing realism with bizarre humour, the second delivering images of war rare in their docu-like naturalism far from Eisensteinian pathos.

The transfer on Mr. Bongo's recent release seems quite good ; regrettably no extras were taken from the original Ruscico version.

/To any reader of this interested in Barnet I would like to recommend another gem by this filmmaker - funny, charming and moving "Dom na Trubnoy" ("The House on Trubnaya Street"). It was recently released in France, with Russian intertitles and French subs (the movie is a silent one)./

Mostly Confusing

[garcianyssa · 6/10 · 3 October 2015]

This was an interesting movie to watch due to the format of the film itself. Although the film summary talked about a love story between Anka and a German prisoner of war there was no mention of the rest of the cast who the story also centered on. It was less of a love story and more of a story about a small village and the people living there. Throughout the whole movie there is a struggle between the workers and the owners of the shoe factory in the town, which reflects the national struggle at the time between the tsarist regime and the Bolshevik movement.

Honestly, this movie was slightly confusing. Yes, it was very good at touching on a number of themes – how ideas can transcend national identities, workers united, and the greed of industry – but it went about it in a very confusing manner by jumping between different stories. It also seemed like the last 20 minutes of the film were rushed with the time skip and then trying to resolve the stories in a timely manner. Outskirts criticized the pre-revolutionary government with its portrayal of the shoe factory owner. The factory owner is portrayed as a greedy industrialist who only sees the war as a way to make profit and does not care for his fellow workers. However, this isn't made apparent until those last 20 minutes of the film. While the film is entertaining and contains typical party ideals it falls short in its presentation by trying to do too much at once.

Sardonic view of Russian life around WWI

[mgmax · 6 February 2004]

I first heard of Boris Barnet at the Telluride Film Festival in the mid-80s-- a rather dour intro by the historian Ian Christie was odd prepararation for two absolutely delightful silent comedies, The Girl With a Hatbox (starring Anna Sten, whom Sam Goldwyn would fail to make into the next Garbo) and The House on Trubnaya Street. Outskirts is Barnet's first sound film, and a darker work, though not as it is often described, purely a serious one.

The setting is the year 1914, first in a total backwater (we never know exactly where this town is, or if it's attached to something bigger, it's one town out of a thousand in Tsarist Russia) and then, as war breaks out, at the front as well. The plot is simply a series of episodes, initially comic though increasingly grim, depicting the ordinary folk. Though war is here and the great Soviet revolution is coming, the movie seems to offer little more than a sardonic Russian shrug toward such events, the people much more interested in love and clowning around. Like some other early Soviet talkies, Barnet makes a virtue of primitive Soviet sound technique by using sound expressionistically; the difference between this and a film like Pudovkin's Deserter is that Barnet often uses sound to blow a raspberry at whatever grandiose thing is supposed to be happening.

This vaguely avant-garde aspect has led a few critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum to call Outskirts an unknown masterpiece of cinema, but it's a little too rough and awkwardly put together for the name to fit comfortably. And more to the point, a Soviet masterpiece is something grand and auspicious, and this is a very different kind of film, closer in spirit to some of Godard's playful and absurdist early films, or to the casual working stiff's cynicism of 1960s Eastern European films like Menzel's Larks on a String, which mocked the pretensions and promises of Soviet society but were careful not to get too specific lest the censor's hand come crashing down. (Actually in both cases the hand came down anyway; Larks on a String was shelved for 20 years, and Barnet apparently got in trouble for Okraina, though by mid-30s Soviet standards he got off lightly and at least continued to work for another 25 years before committing suicide in the Brezhnev era.)

On the outskirts of good

[hte-trasme · 7/10 · 5 July 2014]

There are a lot of things at work in this film. They're not all necessarily working together, but they're at work. This is often a serious war film, but we still have horses talking and characters winking broadly at the camera for comic effect when need be. Under the umbrella of telling us about of small Russian town (on the "outskirts") during a vital point in history, we end up with a story about a small shoe-factory that may or may not go on strike, one about a German tenant in Russia and his landlord, one about German prisoners of war held in the town and their search for work, and one about a potential romance between one of the soldiers and the landlord's daughter -- and that's before we jump ahead to 1917 for the last twenty minutes.

Some of these subplots intertwine in interesting way, but they all cannot. It's filmed with a very striking visual style and filled with memorable images (even occasionally using a visual pun for a scene change), but it still has the early-sound characteristic of moving fairly slowly. That wouldn't be a problem due to the interesting visuals, except that it magnifies the scattered nature of the stories.

At its heart, the conflict of the landlord who is caught between affection for his tenant and nationalism turning him against Germans, and later must deal with this again when he catches his daughter with the German prisoner, is a touching one. It also allows for several conflicted and three-dimensional characters in the midst of things.

Jumping ahead to the revolution feels out of place and disjointed to this viewer, but perhaps that was mitigated at the time by the fact that for the intended audience of this film, this was a war at home that was well within living memory, and it would have been very directly relevant to them.

In all, the film is imposingly made, but doesn't come off all the way due to the fact that its matter is too scattered to make up one story, but not as broad-lens at it would have to be if it wanted completely to be "the story of a town." But it's well worth a watch, both for historical interest and for its commendable camera and direction work.

OutSkirts

[artihcus022 · 10/10 · 28 September 2008]

The remarkable qualities of this early sound film pertain to it's stunning use of sound which is inventive and innovative by any and all standards, the stunning camera movements and long takes. Just as remarkable is the storytelling which plays like a series of short stories and sketches rather than a novella or novel. Yet it doesn't break these short stories into segments or blocks or frame it unlike other attempts at multiple short narratives in a feature.

The movement between the various segments and stories is very poetic like from one Greek chorus to another. The central conceit being between the conflict between the war frontlines and the homefront of the village. The scenes of warfare shown in this film is harsh and brutal in a way that anticipates Roberto Rossellini's or Samuel Fuller's later films.

What makes it even more harsh is the sense of futility in the conflict. As the infantrymen who fight each other in the trenches have more in common than either would do with their civilian countryman, anticipating Renoir's La Grande Illusion. One breathtaking scene is when one Russian soldier saves a German from getting bombed and then tells him after their initial celebration that he'll be their prisoner now.

Equally moving is the tender love story between a Russian girl Anka and a German POW given permission to work in the village. This love story is made possible because Anka's father's friend Robert Karlovish, a German taught her enough about his country to escape the xenophobia of that community at war. Also interesting is the sense of homoeroticism, neither vulgar nor campy, among the various male characters. Early in the film when the soldiers leave for the front there is a wonderful shot of two men kissing each other on the lips which is shown casually without any sense of sensation in the presentation of this scene. Barnet in his film shows that despite the conflict, the violence, the sense of division among his characters(all acted superbly conveying a naturalism absent in many early talkies) there is always a brief glimpse of what things could be or should be.

Even if for reasons of propaganda the film ends with the parade of saviour communists, Barnet has managed to create a film that transcends that all the more by ending the film in a shot worthy of Dovzhenko(a key influence on this film) where a character after hearing the arrival of the commmunists, breathes close to death, "What a rush!" and presumably dies off-screen. The world of this film belongs to people, to human relations and not to party lines.

Fun 90 Minutes

[adriennenoracarter · 6/10 · 2 October 2015]

Outskirts is the story of one town from the outbreak of WWI and into the beginning of the revolution. It follows a few separate story lines—a few of these story lines include a father and his two soldier sons; a girl, her German POW love and her awful, anti- revolution father. This series of subplots was entertaining—it allowed for a lot of issues to be tackled: the soldiers on the front and the POWs in the town provided a look at the war and some of the issues the Russian people were faced with during WWI. While it didn't even begin to show the incredible struggles and loss, it did convey the feeling that the Russians did not want to be fighting the war. There was also the love story that did a good job of showing the common humanity between the Germans and the Russians. The series of subplots, however, were also quite confusing. None of the scenes really came full circle, and a lot of them left me with more questions than I got answers. Even in the end when the revolution was beginning to come full circle, the subplot method did more to confuse than anything. My other thoughts on this film are related to its ideological content. It doesn't seem to focus too much on ideology until the end and then it is sort of in a frantic way that tries to cram all of it into a very small period of time. This seems strange to me since it was made in 1933, the heyday of the party minded film. Despite some of the film's shortcomings—such as the confusion— it was still an enjoyable 90 minutes.

Outskirts review

[JoeytheBrit · 4/10 · 25 June 2020]

The story of the residents of a Russian village during the 1st world war. Soviet comedy is a tough watch at the best of times, and this acclaimed film from Boris Barnet is no exception. It has a few good moments, and Barnet makes some innovative use of sound (which was still new in the USSR), but it feels a little too disjointed - and comedy geared towards Russian sensibilities doesn't really work for Westerners.

Dreams

[chaos-rampant · 31 March 2012]

Introduction: Kuleshov was a genius, and most of his students are worth getting to know about.

Barnet was really the most inconspicuous of Kuleshov's cycle, always quite apart from cinematic polemics raging at the time. He looked like a big lunkhead when we first see him as a cowboy in Kuleshov's Mr. West from '24. His first stab at directing assigned by his mentor, as I read, was a long serial on Fritz Lang territory about spies and counter-spies and international intrigue, except humorous and whimsical. He made another two silent comedies, one of which I've seen, very delicate and sweet-natured class conflict, almost dainty blood.

Now this, about events leading up to the Revolution of '17 and so by nature more sombre and reflective. Eisenstein and Pudovkin had turned out rigorously-driven paeans for the 10 year anniversary, Barnet's is something else altogether.

It is comedy about neighbors and brothers who are too stubborn to embrace true feelings, searing drama in the next beat about these mutual feelings sublimated in the massive conflict of war. It bleeds and you laugh with a laughter that is sadness.

It is plain fun to watch for the duration. There is sound but nowhere near as radical use as in Dezertir from that same year. Barnet was a much more gentle soul, eventually took his own life - the story goes - because he could no longer deliver art on the level he aspired to.

It's all in the ending here, a true apotheosis of cinematic expression and one of the best moments in 30's film, truly far-reaching stuff. You have to do the work though, it's not laid out in the open, submerged further afield where censors wouldn't have the imagination to apprehend him.

Two brothers have gone to war, the father receives news from the trenches that one has died, the young, rash one. Meanwhile a German POW has returned in his place; the same age, also a shoe-maker, a worker, and finds love in captivity the young brother was denied in an early scene on the same bench. The brother dead for a dubious cause has been surreally transmuted back home into a narrative that now turns vindictive, cruel, anxious - the German POW is summarily beaten by Russians, persecuted. Barnet's coup is that these scenes depict a Revolution under foot, a valiant cause in communist lore.

Meanwhile the older brother is still at the front fighting the war. We hardly ever see the German enemy, it's mostly exhausted soldiers futilely storming desolate no man's land. He calls off the bloodshed, single-handedly walking in the firing range and is summarily arrested by Russians as a traitor. The last news he hears is that the Winter Palace has been stormed. His response, on the threshold of consciousness: "what a rush!".

Barnet had Kuleshov's films to draw from on how to outwit the censors, but he outdoes even his mentor here in his ability to envision a multi-dimensional fabric.

Not a Film for the Millions

[kril10 · 5/10 · 3 March 2013]

Boris Barnet's 1933 film Outskirts was created during a time when the only films acceptable for public Soviet cinemas had to obey the motto: "films for the millions." If it was not simplemindedly portraying Communism, the Revolution, or the Party's role in improving Soviet life, it was not screened. Every viewer had to be able to understand their message about these themes. Although Outskirts did indeed depict Soviet class struggle, its relationship with World War I, and the Revolution, it did so in a way that very few contemporary moviegoers could fully understand. I say this because even I, a modern viewer with much more cinema-watching experience than the common Soviet citizens of the 1930s, had trouble following the film. Its many subplots were allowed to run their respective courses with little to no connection at all, and some of these subplots were not even adequately concluded. As a result, Outskirts provides little more than a series of incomplete stories with confusing messages at the end.

To get right into it, the purpose of the German tenant at the Russian hotel is unclear—other than to perhaps depict bourgeois indulgence through whimsical games of checkers, why is he even in the film? All he does is play checkers, get angry at the bourgeois Russian owner at the outset of World War I, and leave without any further explanation. Furthermore, although the role of the captured German soldier is more understandable in the film's goal in representing Communist ideology, it was not concluded clearly at all. When the Russian shoemaker protected the German soldier as being "a fellow shoemaker" against the wounded Red Army soldiers, he made a point about the fact that Proletarian struggles transcend national borders, but what happened to the German soldier afterwards? Was he a convinced Communist? Did he fight again in the war? Outskirts failed to answer any of this.

While all of this is going on, there are even more subplots—the relationship between the Russian shoemaker and his superior shoe factory owner with a large government order of boots, his two sons who fought and died in the war, an emerging love story between the Russian hotel owner's daughter and the captured German soldier, and a final sequence where the shoemaker may have murdered the hotel owner during the Revolution. There is a point where as a viewer, I have to say enough is enough. Although most of these do in fact represent Communist themes, I feel that Outskirts was a desperate attempt to compress the entire Party's ideology into one movie. In my opinion, the film's grand scope is what led to its confusing message and consequent failure.

Entertaining film

[rebe_afaro · 3 October 2015]

The first of Barnet's films to be a talkie, Outkast is a landmark for his career. The movie takes place at the brink of World War I, in the midst of a troublesome time for the pre-revolutionary nation. There are even scenes of a strike at the start of the movie that alludes to some of the class struggles that were common during that point of time. A student of Kuleshov, a famous director known for his experimentalist movement during early Russian cinema, Barnet truly follows in his mentors footsteps in more ways than one. The film follows the stories of different characters who all hold different dynamics in their relationships with each other, including two brothers in war, longtime friends who become inherent rivals and two young lovers that come from opposing sides of the war spectrum. Their stories are well developed through the use of film angles and cutting the scenes in different segments that eventually lead to a chronological order that tie the character's together. The film has heavy comedic and depressing elements that make the characters stories that much more palpable.There are even some flashbacks that are used to emphasize the emotions that the character is having, like the violent snap of the war as someone reads a letter announcing the death of a loved one. There are a couple of examples of communist ideology, such as when the shoe maker stands up for the German prisoner who is also a shoemaker. The film was able to hold my attention to the very end. It was definitely an interesting watch.