Outskirts is known internationally as a masterpiece of early sound cinema. It takes place in a remote Russian village during World War I from 1914 to 1917. Its theme expressed through colorful and nuanced characters, is divided loyalty -family obligation vs. personal desire, nationalism vs. transcendent humanism. The story does that extraordinary thing so rare and valuable in films -it seems to tell itself without anyone pushing it. You can't be sure whether the next scene will be funny or pathetic, gentle or violent. Lebedev's History of Soviet Cinema compares Outskirts to Chekhov 'with an action of interior development as well as an outer action. In it an important role is played by everything that goes on beneath the words -the concealed and repressed emotions of its characters, the pauses and hints, the circumstances and atmosphere of events, the combination of comic and dramatic elements, all building a profound inner rhythm. (-DVD cover)



The setting is the year 1914, first in a total backwater (we never know exactly where this town is, or if it's attached to something bigger, it's one town out of a thousand in Tsarist Russia) and then, as war breaks out, at the front as well. The plot is simply a series of episodes, initially comic though increasingly grim, depicting the ordinary folk. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0024402/)



Though war is here and the great Soviet revolution is coming, the movie seems to offer little more than a sardonic Russian shrug toward such events, the people much more interested in love and clowning around. Like some other early Soviet talkies, Barnet makes a virtue of primitive Soviet sound technique by using sound expressionistically; the difference between this and a film like Pudovkin's Deserter is that Barnet often uses sound to blow a raspberry at whatever grandiose thing is supposed to be happening. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0024402/)



This vaguely avant-garde aspect has led a few critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum to call Outskirts an unknown masterpiece of cinema, but it's a little too rough and awkwardly put together for the name to fit comfortably. And more to the point, a Soviet masterpiece is something grand and auspicious, and this is a very different kind of film, closer in spirit to some of Godard's playful and absurdist early films, or to the casual working stiff's cynicism of 1960s Eastern European films like Menzel's Larks on a String, which mocked the pretensions and promises of Soviet society but were careful not to get too specific lest the censor's hand come crashing down. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0024402/)



Actually in both cases the hand came down anyway; Larks on a String was shelved for 20 years, and Barnet apparently got in trouble for Okraina, though by mid-30s Soviet standards he got off lightly and at least continued to work for another 25 years before committing suicide in the Brezhnev era. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0024402/)




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