Machinery itself has star quality – of the most monumental and anti-heroic sort – in this fascinating 1928 silent movie from the Armenian film-maker Amo Bek-Nazaryan. It’s such a vivid, dynamic, engaged piece of work, whose energies blaze forth afresh in this restoration, having apart from anything else wonderful archival value.
Bek-Nazaryan vehemently juxtaposes the strange statuary of vast industrial architecture and the faces of the people who live and work in its shadow. The framing device is that a veteran worker in present-day Soviet Armenia is asked by his son – or someone we are led to believe is his son – to sign his application to join the Communist party. Thoughtfully, the older man tells him this is not simply a matter of bits of paper, but hard-won experience in solidarity and sacrifice; he then tells him (and us) about a workers’ action during “the reactionary years” of 1907.
