Mother (Pudovkin film)
어머니 (푸돕킨 영화)
Vsevolod Pudovkin's 1926 Soviet silent film from Maxim Gorky's novel. A worker's wife betrays her son in trying to save him, awakens during the 1905 revolution and falls carrying the red flag. Paired with Battleship Potemkin as a peak of Soviet montage, it follows one person's awakening rather than the masses.
In depth
What is the story?
A Russian factory district in 1905. The drunken father Vlasov beats his wife, and their son Pavel protects her. Pavel hides his comrades' pistols under the floorboards, and his mother, Nilovna, secretly sees him. The Black Hundreds ply the father with vodka and use him as a strike-breaking thug, and he dies in the brawl. Nilovna, believing it will keep her son out of prison, reveals the hiding place.
It does no good. Pavel is arrested, and in court, under a bust of Nicholas II, bored judges give him hard labour for life. Her eyes are opened. She joins the revolutionaries planning a prison break on May Day. Pavel escapes, crosses the river by jumping across ice floes and reaches the march, and is shot dead in the moment he embraces her. She picks up the fallen flag, holds it high, and goes down under the hooves of the gendarmes' horses.
Why is it still watched?
Its contribution to Montage Theory is to build character by editing rather than by psychological acting. Pudovkin himself wrote that he tried to move the audience "not by the psychological performances of an actor, but by plastic synthesis through editing". The director Grigori Roshal said he was the first to create characters through montage, and did in cinema what Dickens did in novels.
Contemporaries set it beside Battleship Potemkin, and the contrast still holds: Eisenstein filmed the power of the masses, Pudovkin the courage and persistence of one person. Nikolai Batalov plays Pavel and Vera Baranovskaya Nilovna, and Pudovkin himself appears as a police officer. Nathan Zarkhi wrote the script. It was his first feature and the first film of a trilogy continued by The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Storm Over Asia (1928). In the 1958 Brussels poll it came eighth of twelve. It was made in 1926, but sources differ on the release: 15 March 1927 in one account, autumn 1926 in another.
How does it differ from the novel?
Pudovkin wrote in the opening title that the theme was "borrowed from Gorky", but nearly every event in the film is there in embryo in the novel. He removed the novel's long political education and narrowed the story to the change in one woman.
How far did it travel?
In 1927 a print was sent to Gorky in Sorrento. According to Anastasia Tsvetaeva's memoir, the private screening in a local cinema was attended by Fascist officials too. In Britain the film was banned in 1930 when a London group applied for permission to show it. Mosfilm restored it in 1968 with a score by Tikhon Khrennikov.