Mother

Vsevolod Pudovkin's deeply moving adaptation of Maxim Gorky's novel — and the film that proved Soviet montage cinema could break your heart as easily as it could break down barriers. A working-class mother, politically unaware and desperate to protect her family, inadvertently betrays her revolutionary son to the Tsarist police. Her gradual awakening to the cause he fights for drives the film toward a stunning climax set against the spring thaw of a frozen river — Pudovkin intercutting the breaking ice with the surging crowd in one of silent cinema's most powerful metaphorical sequences. Where Eisenstein worked with masses and abstractions, Pudovkin always began with individual human faces, and the result is a political film of remarkable emotional intimacy.