Alone
About Alone
Yelena Kuzmina, just out of a Leningrad teachers' college, shops for furniture with her fiancé Petya and pictures a neat city class. She is posted to a village in the Altai. A faceless Nadezhda Krupskaya, seen from behind, lets her stay in the city, then a campaign against cowards sends her anyway. The local Soviet man will not help her against the Bey, who keeps the children with the sheep and sells the herd. On the way to the regional center she is thrown from a sled in a snowstorm. The village finds her, throws out the Soviet representative, and a plane is sent to take her to an operation. She says she will come back.
Cast & crew
More about Alone
Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg wrote and directed. Planned as a silent film, it was released with effects, some dialogue recorded after the shoot, and a score by Dmitri Shostakovich. Andrei Moskvin photographed it. Yelena Kuzmina plays the teacher under her own name. Pyotr Sobolevsky plays the fiancé. Sergei Gerasimov plays the local council chairman. The plot takes up education, technology, and the drive against kulaks.
Themes
Background
The story is built around three official themes of the moment: schooling, machines, and removing kulaks from the countryside.
Making
Shooting began in 1929, as the first five-year plan tightened what a film was expected to say. The teacher's name is the actress's own, and the village detail is played as ethnography.
Look
Andrei Moskvin photographed it, including the Altai village and the snowstorm.
Technique
A silent production finished as a sound film, with post-recorded speech and a full score.
Music
Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the orchestral score. Dialogue was recorded after filming and mixed with effects.
Notes
- Maria Babanova plays the chairman's wife, Yanina Zhejmo a young teacher, and Boris Chirkov a voice on the telephone.
- A dead horse on a pole stands for the village's shamanist practice.
- Their previous film, The New Babylon, had been censored in 1929.
Scenes
- Krupskaya, seen only from behind, grants the request to stay, and the campaign against cowards reverses it.
- Yelena is thrown from the sled in the snow.
- The plane flies over the dead horse on its pole.
