FRAGMENT OF AN EMPIRE

A shot fired by a German soldier robs a Russian corporal of his memory, and for Ivan the Great War never ends. Having lost his identity he works as a farmhand, unable to comprehend that there will soon be a revolution. He finds the new forms of life confusing. A late masterpiece of silent film, evidently made under the impression of Ermler’s visit to Germany, displaying a fascination both with Expressionism and his own reality, its febrile glow. What we see, in allegorical guise, is the struggle of the revolution with itself, how the old lives on in the new and suffers, how torturous the process of social transformation is for the individual.