Established one year before United Artists was incorporated on the opposite side of the globe, and before the other Hollywood studios coalesced into the top-down factories they'd remain until the 1960s, the Leningrad filmworks Lenfilm has weathered more upheaval than some nations. Too huge and powerful to get lost in history, this Soviet production house—northern compatriot to Mosfilm—shape-shifted with the times, starting out in the full roar of Stalinist agitprop, churning out mass entertainment in the war and post-war years, blossoming in the 1950s-1960s Khrushchev thaw, withstanding the official tumult of perestroika and the empire's eventual collapse, and enduring today as subdivided companies. Most of Lenfilm's product has gone unseen by us—West-beloved upstarts like Dovzhenko, Kalatozov, Paradjanov, and Tarkovsky either stuck to Moscow or worked in the ethnic outlands—but any cross section of its legacy, like the Walter Reade series beginning this Friday, reveals a torrent of iconoclasm and rebellious style. Nothing, not even fascistic force, could keep Russian filmmakers homogenized, wherever they... More >>>