Turksib

Viktor Turin's 1929 documentary follows the construction of the Turkestan-Siberia railway as a collision of desert, mountain, and Soviet industrial will. Camels and work gangs, cotton and grain, the steppe and the new steel line are cut together so that the railroad itself becomes the hero. Turksib is less a travelogue than a montage argument: nature yields, the map is rewritten, and a continent is stitched together by track.