The General Line

Eisenstein's most troubled production — begun in 1926, shelved, reworked, and finally released in 1929 as The Old and the New — is also his most personal and, in its best passages, his most visually extraordinary. The film follows Marfa, a peasant woman, as she struggles to organize a collective farm and drag her village from medieval poverty into the modern age. The centerpiece is a justly famous sequence in which a cream separator is tested for the first time: Eisenstein edits the mundane event into a crescendo of almost erotic ecstasy, milk spurting in ecstatic slow motion, faces contorted in rapture. The political content is nakedly propagandistic, but Eisenstein's formal invention is so dazzling — and his love for the Russian landscape so palpable — that the film transcends its ideological mission.