With his nostalgia for the good old Stalinist days, the Russian president might just hop over to the Castro Theatre, when the S.F. Silent Film Festival (see item above) features a rare collection of silent films from the 1920s-1930s USSR.
The Extraordinary Aventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks is Lev Kuleshov's 1924 manic satire about American ignorance of the Soviet Union. The screening at 10 p.m. on May 31 in the Castro will be accompanied by the Matti Bye Ensemble.
In an "American-style slapstick," a goofy YMCA executive in Harold Lloyd glasses and fur coat travels to Moscow with his cowboy sidekick/bodyguard Jeddy, and falls into the clutches of a motley group of thieves posing as Bolsheviks. He is eventually rescued by real Bolsheviks and takes a sightseeing tour of Moscow (in the 1920s!). Have to see to believe.
Guenter Buchwald and Frank Bockius of the Silent Movie Music Company accompany the May 30 (10 p.m.) screening of Vasili Zhuravlyov's 1936 Cosmic Voyage, a Communist Youth League-sponsored science fiction, taking place just 10 years into the future. By then, according to the film, the Soviet space program will be going to the moon ... if only bureaucrats could be overcome.
Mikhail Tsekhanovskiy's 1929 Pochta Mail, called "a masterpiece of Soviet animation," tells the story of a letter traveling around the world. It's shown at 9 p.m. on June 1, a short before the festival-closing The Navigator.