The New Babylon

Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's visually ravishing account of the Paris Commune of 1871, told through the love story between a department store salesgirl and a National Guard soldier who find themselves on opposite sides of the barricades. The film is a feast of Expressionist-influenced imagery — the decadent bourgeoisie waltzing while Paris burns, the department store as a glittering temple of capitalist excess, rain-soaked streets erupting into revolution. The original score was composed by a young Dmitri Shostakovich, and its dissonant, modernist energy is inseparable from the film's impact. A breathtaking fusion of political passion and visual poetry from the directors who would later give the world the definitive film adaptations of Hamlet and King Lear.