Fragment of an Empire
At our invitation, Francesca Bozzano, the Director of Collections at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse, has curated a varied selection of short and feature films from their catalog. This program includes ten screenings ranging from silent cinema, experimental films, and animation to underground, documentary, and classic films, with several restorations done by the Cinémathèque de Toulouse or from elements preserved in their vaults.
Accompanied on the piano by Gabriel Thibaudeau
Fragment of an Empire will be preceded by the short film Terrible Vavila and Aunt Arina
One March 8th, despite their husbands' disagreement, a group of women decide to get together and talk.
After suffering amnesia during the First World War, a man regains his memory a few years later, but it's the memory from before the October Revolution, and he looks at Soviet society through the eyes of a man from the Tsarist regime... An astonishing film in the style of Soviet cinema at the very end of the 1920s, totally revolutionary before the return to a conservative aesthetic imposed by socialist realism in the 1930s. A film that is both propagandistic and critical, which combines great aesthetic refinement with a highly refined ideological complexity, as Ermler perversely invites us to take a double look at socialism.
Fridrikh Ermler
Fridrikh Ermler in a Soviet filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter. Born into a working-class family, he served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and later collaborated with the Cheka. In 1923-1924, he studied at the Cinema Academy (now the Saint Petersburg State Institute of Film and Television) but did not complete the course, instead starting work at Sevzapkino studios, which would later become Lenfilm. His first feature film, Katka's Reinette Apples, co-directed with Edouard Ioganson, was released in 1926. In 1932, with Sergei Yutkevich, he directed the first Soviet talkies, Counterplan, a propaganda film celebrating the achievements of Leningrad workers who exceeded the government's economic planning targets. In 1940, Fridrikh Ermler became the director of Lenfilm. He was awarded the Palme d’or at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival for his film The Turning Point.
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