Nitrate Film: The Blue Express

Engines, landscapes, peoples of a revolution: the USSR’s moving image industry of the early twentieth century was the window through which the masses surveyed their empire. Reflecting the diversity — of ethnicities and traditions, if not ideas — ‘united’ by the project of Marxist-Leninist culture, Soviet films captured an inescapably Russian flavour of internationalism.

1929’s Blue Express is an hour-long revolutionary fantasy set on a speeding train. Chinese railway stewards — members of the proletariat — in retaliation for an assault on one of their class by a soldier — their social superior — witnessed by a British diplomat seize control of the express travelling from Nanjing to Suzhou.

While the engine itself universally symbolises industry and progress, Blue Express charges it with a bizarre diplomatic mission: pulling China into the revolution. If rolling or film stock can collapse social strata, could they just as well couple nations and cultures in ideology?

The 1937 Lullaby, one of the famed filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s final films, looks inwards. This documentary catalogues customs of motherhood in the Union, portraying childrearing as a political activity. The agitprop spurs women on in the creation of the new Soviet man, simultaneously celebrating the wins of female liberation. The lullaby itself — an artefact of cultural transmission — is agitprop, with the state taking over the means of oral transmission.

The Blue Express, 1929

dir Ilya Trauberg
62′

Lullaby, 1937

dir Dziga Vertov
58′

Nitrate Film

Nitrate Film is a series of screenings selected by the film programmer Kit Ramsay, accompanied by discussions led by friends of Verdurin. The events animate live, public critique, bringing attention to filmic artefacts deserving perdurance. 

The series reconstitutes a critical audience, from camera to projector. The flammable Nitrate Film disrupts cinema’s proximity to reality that, in turns, breeds passivity in judgement. Where cinema’s rhetoric — or even propaganda — looks measured and life-size, the discussions separate them from the larger-than-life gestures of theatre.