Robert Altman

Films of Robert Altman:

• McCabe & Mrs. Miller - Robert Altman (1971)
• The Long Goodbye - Robert Altman (1973)
• Thieves Like Us - Robert Altman (1974)
• Nashville - Robert Altman (1975)

“Lamb to the Slaughter”, AHP, Season Three: Episode 28 - Alfred Hitchcock (1958)

“Lamb to the Slaughter” was an episode on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television anthology series (Season 3, Episode 28) that was scripted by Roald Dahl and based on his famous 1953 short story of the same name [1].  Like many of Dahl’s tales, this one is a black-comedy with a macabre twist at the end, which fits right in with the general tenor of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series.

Also in line with a general Hitchcockian theme is Dahl’s focus here on guilt.  Western culture is obsessed with guilt, inasmuch as a good part of it is derived from the Abrahamic religions, for which guilt is a major concern.  So our cultures have developed many social institutions, such as the police and judicial systems, for the assessment and identification of guilt.  Hitchcock was particularly concerned in portraying the paranoia-inducing effects associated with situations in which these mechanically-based institutional assessments of guilt go awry, and the wrong identification of guilt is made, such as in his film The Wrong Man (1956).  This is what also happens in “Lamb to the Slaughter” but in an ironic way.

This episode benefits from the presence of two veteran character actors – Barbara Bel Geddes  and Harold J. Stone.  Barbara Bel Geddes’s long career on the stage and screen often had her an portraying ordinary homespun woman, as she does here, with whom viewers can identify, and she played a similar role that year in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).  She is the main focus of this episode. Harold J. Stone, a long-time TV character actor, plays a dedicated police detective, much like the similar role he played in The Wrong Man.

The story of “Lamb to the Slaughter” comprises two parts – the crime and the police investigation..

1.  The Crime

The opening scene shows dedicated and pregnant housewife Mary Maloney (played by Barbara Bel Geddes) lovingly kissing her policeman husband Patrick when he returns home from work.  But her husband brusquely turns away and coldly announces to her that he is immediately leaving her for another woman and that he wants a divorce.  Mary is stunned by this news, and in a daze she staggers back into the kitchen to continue her housewifely duties of preparing dinner for him.  After withdrawing a large frozen leg of lamb from their freezer, she calls out to him that she won’t let him leaver her. 

“Try and stop me,” he tells her with his back turned to her while fixing a stiff drink for himself in the living room.  Still stunned, Mary comes into the living room and in an impulsive act of blind rage, hits her husband over the back of the head with the frozen leg of lamb she is  still absent-mindedly holding.  The severe blow fractures Patrick’s skull and immediately kills him.

Still in a daze, Mary walks back into the kitchen and almost mindlessly places the frozen leg of lamb into the oven and turns it on.  Then she sits down at the kitchen table and begins pondering what has just happened.   At this just point we see a change come over Mary’s face.  She shifts from being the innocent, abused housewife to being a person trying to figure out what to do with the situation she now finds herself in.  She gets up and strews rubbish and overturns furniture around Patrick’s corpse in the living room.  Then she goes out for a brief shopping visit to the local grocery store.  When she returns home, she calls the police and informs them that her husband was murdered while she was out.

2.  The Police Investigation
The police, led by Lieutenant Jack Noonan (Harold J. Stone), arrive and begin a thorough investigation of the crime scene.  The police investigators, accompanied by a doctor, are meticulous in recording all the details, as they take fingerprints everywhere and look for every last clue.  This is where the dramatic tension tightens further, as the rigorously thorough police seem to be (to the viewer’s eyes) closing in on Mary.  They quickly conclude that the appearance of a struggle prior to the murder was artificially staged and that an unsuspecting Patrick must have been murdered suddenly by an acquaintance.  But the one thing they can’t find is the murder weapon, which they are sure must have been a blunt club-like instrument.

Under all this scrutiny, Mary’s position seems increasingly shaky.  But her innocent and wounded demeanor puts her beyond the suspicions of the careful and civilized police investigators.  They inform Mary that they will be spending the entire night at her home investigating the premises in further detail in the hopes of finding that missing murder weapon. 

Mary tells the men, who she cordially acknowledges are all her husband’s former colleagues, that they should eat the leg of lamb which has been cooked in the oven and is now ready to eat.  It will just have to be thrown out if they don’t eat it, she tells them. The police all welcome Mary’s act of hospitality and sit down at the kitchen table to dine on the cooked lamb, while Mary sits down in the living room.  As the men happily engorge themselves on the sought-after murder weapon, Mary, in the other room, smirks quietly.

Hitchcock’s presentation of “Lamb to the Slaughter” follows the Dahl’s original story quite closely. As with many Hitchcockian tales, the objective mechanics of guilt attribution have had trouble dealing with the complexities of this world we live in. A key to the effectiveness of this episode, though, is Barbara Bel Geddes’s delicate performance.  She subtly and naturally shifts the dramatic perspective from that of an innocent victim to one of an almost scheming perpetrator. In the end, Mary shows no remorse, only cynical relief.  All along the way, the viewer shares her perspective and is likely to sympathize with her.  The degree to which the viewer fully shares and is in tune with Mary’s closing smirk, however, may well depend on the viewer’s own feelings about justice.  Where do you fall in this balance?
★★★★

Notes:

1. Roald Dahl, “Lamb to the Slaughter”, Harper’s Magazine, (September 1953).     

“The Wrong Man” - Alfred Hitchcock (1956)

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) is considered to be a minor, oddball work in the great director’s career.  It is frequently set aside from the rest of his masterful oeuvre by reviewers and critics and dismissed as an offbeat, realist docudrama uncharacteristic of the “Master’s” line of highly charged movie entertainment.  It is more like a neorealist documentary, according to some commentators [1]. 

While it is true that the film is based on real events and with the original names of the participants in those events preserved, The Wrong Man very much conforms to the general emotional and philosophical themes which have often underlain his most powerful cinematic narratives [2].  Many of his most stirring films, such as for example The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1938), Saboteur (1942), and North By Northwest (1959), feature an ordinary civilized protagonist who suddenly finds himself the mistaken target of a dark nefarious gang of antagonists.  This person faces a mysterious existential threat, and he must find out who his enemies are and how to escape them.  But in The Wrong Man the existential threat has been extended and abstracted – it here comprises the supposedly civilized and justice-oriented machinations of modern organized society, itself.  Our innocent protagonist in this film thus faces an out-of-control justice machine from which there is seemingly no escape.  (The nature of the Hitchcockian existential threat would be even further extended to that of animated Mother Nature, herself, in his subsequent horror film, The Birds (1963).)

So we have something of a paradox – a true story and a dark, existential horror film at the same time.  It was Hitchcock’s genius to have been able to combine these two contrasting narrative elements into a single film that made The Wrong Man particularly interesting. 

The true story concerns what happened to a middle-class New York family man, Christopher Emmanuel "Manny" Balestrero, who was wrongly accused of multiple armed robberies.  The case against Balestrero was based on mistaken eye-witness identifications of him by those who had earlier been held up at gunpoint.   The details of the case were reported in a Life Magazine article [3] which apparently caught the eye of Hitchcock at the time.  Hitchcock went on to make his film based on scriptwriter Maxwell Anderson’s account of those events, The True Story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, and in a personal appearance at the film’s outset Hitchcock solemnly assures his audience that “this is a true story, every word of it.”  And indeed all the facts seem to be there, as one would expect in a docudrama.  Hitchcock even used many of the original New York locations for many of the film’s exterior shots.  And yet we know that every narrative account must involve some degree of interpretation from an observer’s perspective.

And also Hitchcock’s mise-en-scene underscores a larger theme that haunts the film: guilt.  Guilt is a major element of Western consciousness, and it stems from the obsession with guilt on the part of the Abrahamic religions, which has been insightfully criticized in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche [4,5,6].  (Guilt is distinguished from the ancient Indian notion of bad karma in that guilt assumes there to be a permanent stain on and contamination of the individual(s) held to be guilty.)  In fact guilt is pervasive in modern society and manifests itself on many levels – social, institutional, and personal.  And these can be intertwined in complex ways.  In The Wrong Man there are at least five such theaters of guilt that come into play:

• Manny Balestrero.  Manny has been accused publicly of being guilty, but privately knows he is innocent.  He starts out with a naive faith that objective observation of the facts will lead to a just outcome, but his trust in the public administration of guilt is progressively shaken as he sees it fail to arrive at the right assessment. 
   
• Rose Balestrero (Manny’s wife).   The Balestrero family are devout Roman Catholics, and Manny’s misfortunes lead Rose to assume an overwhelming sense of internal, personal guilt.  She comes to believe that she, herself, is profoundly and irredeemably guilty and hopelessly isolated in a hostile universe that is stacked against her.
   
• The Police and Legal System.   The public institutional operation of guilt determination is shown to be operated by people who are just parts of a mechanized system tasked with the determination of some hoped-for objectivity concerning who is to be labeled guilty.
   
• The Public Notion of Guilt.  We also see the attitudes of the public at large, in the roles of the eyewitnesses, who participate in the public assignment of guilt.  These are undertaken in association with various social norms that encourage the public’s aggressive assignment of guilt to observed wrongful individuals.
   
• Christian Notions of Guilt and Redemption.  Guilt is a major theme in Christianity, as it is with all the Abrahamic religions, but it is also tempered by the notion of unqualified forgiveness and salvation.  This is a subtle theme that comes more into play at the close of the film.

These theaters of guilt and their associated themes are tracked through the five acts of The Wrong Man.

1.  Before the Arrest

Manny Balestrero (played by Henry Fonda), a musical bassist in a resident band that plays dance music at the famous New York nightclub, the Stork Club, is married and a devoted father of two children and living in a modest home in Queens, NY.  His wife Rose (Vera Miles) is something of a worrier, but Manny’s faith in traditional values is the family’s mainstay.  In order to pay for Rose’s needed and expensive dental work, he decides to go to their insurance company and borrow money on Rose’s insurance account.  While visiting the insurance office, he is recognized (mistakenly, as it turns out) by some of the workers there as someone who had robbed the office a few weeks earlier.  Immediately upon Manny’s departure from the insurance office, the workers report him to the police.  Thus the film here enters the realm of the Public Notion of Guilt.

2.  Manny’s Arrest

Here we come to the machinations of the institutional guilt-determination system – the Police and Legal System.  When Manny arrives home, he is arrested on his doorstep and immediately ushered to two a liquor store and a delicatessen, whose operators identify Manny as the man who had earlier robbed them at gunpoint.  Manny obediently follows all the police’s instructions, trusting that they will soon find him to be innocent. But he is further incriminated when, asked orally to print out the original perpetrator’s money demand note, he makes the identical handwriting mistake that the original thief had made.  Then he is treated like a laboratory specimen, and he is fingerprinted, handcuffed, and jailed.  Throughout this sequence there is a disturbing atmosphere of confinement and isolation.  Manny is helplessly getting closed up by the system into a little box.

After his arraignment in court the next morning, Manny is finally released from jail on bail.

3.  Efforts to Establish Innocence
Manny now takes his own steps to try and save himself from the clutches of an errant system.  We are in Manny Balestrero’s realm.  He hires a lawyer (Anthony Quayle), who urges him to find people who can vouch for his presence with them on the days of his purported crimes a couple of months ago.  But the few people he can remember for this purpose turn out to have recently died or are unlocatable.  The  uncanny misfortune of these circumstances (the fateful disappearance of redeeming evidence) affects them both and seems to weigh so heavily on Rose, in particular, that she slides into hopelessness.

4.  Rose’s Problems

Now Manny’s world is further disintegrating as we enter Rose Balestrero’s realm.  Not only is Manny threatened by a malfunctioning public guilt-assignment system, but his own personal world is crumbling due to the onset of Rose’s mental deterioration.  She blames everything on herself, and she begins exhibiting symptoms of paranoid personality disorder, wherein further efforts in life seem futile.  Soon she has to be committed to a mental institution – another institution in connection with which Manny can do nothing and only helplessly hope that things will work out.  This is the most alarming part of Manny’s downward existential spiral and the most disturbing part of the film.

Then at Manny’s trial, his lawyer’s laborious efforts to cross-examine the incriminating eyewitnesses doesn’t fare well with the jury, and they are only saved temporarily by the happenstance of a mistrial being declared.

5. Salvation

During the waiting for a new trial, Manny’s devout Catholic mother urges him to pray to God not  for help, but for strength.  And then, as if by miracle, salvation does come.  The film narrative extendsd into the realm of Christian redemption and salvation.  The real robbery perpetrator is caught in the act of committing another robbery, and he subsequently confesses to having committed the crimes for which Manny was charged.  Manny is finally freed.  But contrary to the film’s closing textual statement, his wife Rose never did fully recover from her guilt-obsessed mental breakdown [7]


The whole story of Manny Balestrero’s existential crisis is colored by Hitchcock’s carefully crafted mise-en-scene.  Far from a supposedly objectivist presentation of truth with fly-on-the-wall “objective” observation, Hitchcock carefully fashioned The Wrong Man into a moody film-noir. In order to achieve these to achieve these atmospheric noirish effects. Hitchcock’s cinematographer, Robert Burks, skillfully employed high-contrast black-and-white photography and striking oblique camera angles.  And in this connection, every shot was carefully storyboarded well ahead of the actual shooting [8].  The film’s moody ambience was further enhanced by Bernard Herrmann’s quirky, low-key Latin-inspired musical score. 

Mention should also be made of the acting performances of Henry Fonda and Vera Miles.  Although Hitchcock did not customarily place much emphasis on acting theatrics, these two performances, particularly that of Vera Miles, add to the film’s flavor of mysterious impending existential annihilation.

The result for Hitchcock was a dark-toned melancholic masterpiece.   Indeed Jean-Luc Godard, in his early days as a youthful film critic for Cahiers du Cinema before  he launched his career as a feature film director that helped pioneer the French New Wave, marveled at the cinematic craftsmanship that Hitchcock displayed in The Wrong Man, and he rated the film as the second-best movie of 1957 [9].  Godard was particularly impressed with Hitchcock’s repeated couplings of similar narrative elements that connect like echoes or narrative responses throughout the film.  In this regard Godard cites a number of examples of these narrative pairings that permeate The Wrong Man [10]:

“To cite at random: the two imprisonments; the two handwriting tests at the police station; two conversations with Rose in the kitchen; the two hearings; apart from the credit sequence, the Stork Club appears twice; Manny goes twice to the clinic, twice to the lawyer, twice with policeman into shops for identification; the spy-hole duplicating the driving mirror; the insurance company is in the same building as the lawyer’s office; the two miracles happening on Fonda’s face; Bernard Herrmann’s score is based on two notes, etc.”

All in all, we can see that, despite its realist veneer, The Wrong Man has been carefully crafted to be one of Hitchcock’s most disturbing horror films, and it is a film that deserves a more prominent place among his oeuvre.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Devon Powell, “Blue-ray: Review: The Wrong Man”, Hitchcockmaster, (16 January 2016).  
2. Andy Webb, “The Wrong Man (1956)”, The Movie Scene, (n.d.).    
3. Herbert Brean, “A Case of Identity”, Life Magazine, (29 June 1953), pp. 97-107.   
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, (1886), (trans., Walter Kaufmann), Random House, Inc., (1966). 
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (1887), (trans., Walter Kaufmann), (in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo), Random House, Inc., (1966). 
6. R. Lanier Anderson, “Friedrich Nietzsche”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (17 March 2017).   
7. Lou Lumenick, “A case of mistaken identity ruined this man’s life — and inspired Hitchcock”, The New York Post, (7 February 2016).   
8. Laurent Bouzereau, Guilt Trip: Hitchcock and The Wrong Man, Blue Collar Productions, (2004).
9. Jean-Luc Godard, “The Ten Best Films of 1957", (from Cahiers du Cinema, 1957), Godard on Godard, (translation and commentary by Tom Milne), The Viking Press, (1972), p. 66. 
10. Jean-Luc Godard, “The Wrong Man”, (from Cahiers du Cinema, 1957), Godard on Godard, (translation and commentary by Tom Milne), The Viking Press, (1972), pp. 48-55.

“The New Babylon” - Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg (1929)

Grigori Kozintsev (1905-1973) and Leonid Trauberg (1902-1990) were two outstanding Soviet Russian [1] filmmakers who from early on worked together as a creative team.  Even as teenagers, they were members of the avant garde, and together they helped found the radical theater group the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS, 1921-1926), which drew inspiration from the contemporary disruptive artistic movements of Dadaism and Futurism then surging through Europe.  They soon shifted their creative energies to the dynamic Soviet Russian silent film movement pioneered at that time by Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, making a string of successful silent films, the last of which, The New Babylon (Novyy Vavilon, 1929), is the most famous [2,3,4].

The film’s story concerns a highly significant, but now somewhat overlooked, sociopolitical event of the 19th century – the Paris Commune (1871), which is an important landmark in the history of socialism and communism and had a key influence on the thoughts of Karl Marx.  Perhaps because of last-minute censorial cuts imposed on Kozintsev and Trauberg just a few weeks before the release of The New Babylon by the socialist propaganda-minded Russian authorities, some of the details concerning the Paris Commune’s relatively brief existence (18 March 1871- 28 May 1871) are absent from the film, and it helps  to have some familiarity with this history [4,5].

The Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) had disastrous consequences for the French and led to the fall of the Second French Empire under Napoleon III and the establishment of the Third French Republic in 1870. The French were still menaced at that time by an advancing Prussian army, and Paris, which was then a hotbed of working-class activism, resisted submission to the new authorities. The Parisian working-class quarter, with the support of the sympathetic and semi-independent National Guard (distinct from the French Army), established its independence by setting up a worker-ruled authority, the Paris Commune, on 18 March 1871.  Although the Paris Commune lasted only a short time, it quickly came to be regarded as a signal historical event showing how bottom-up, cooperative worker solidarity could bring about progressive social change and release the working people from the exploitative and rent-seeking oppression of the upper-classes and the bourgeoisie. 

A key issue of debate during the Paris Commune period concerned the degree to which the Communards (the Paris Commune activists) should eschew revolutionary violence and seek cooperative solutions that would benefit all concerned [6,7].  This is an important theme of The New Babylon, too, although its prominence may have been diminished by those last-minute cuts. 

Indeed, there is some debate concerning the degree to which today’s restored 93-minute version of The New Babylon, as compared with the original two-hour “directors’ cut” version, should be considered a faithful rendition of the directors’ original intentions [8].  Trauberg apparently later expressed his approval of the released version [9].  I found running the 93-minute version at a playback speed of 0.9, which represented a running time of 103 minutes, to be the most satisfactory way of watching the film, and my review is based on that experience. 

Anyway, the film as it stands is hardly an exemplar of socialist realism.  And it is not a treatise on socialist values, either, like some Russian films of this period were.  Instead it plays like an expressionistic musical suite in eight movements, which over its course passionately dwells on its various themes.  In fact the film’s music, composed by 23-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich, is not just a mood-enhancing background – it is a fundamental driver of the work and an integral element of the cinematic composition.  I found the music to be sometimes distractingly strident, but often fascinatingly stirring when I watched the film.  Shostakovich, of course, was one of the major Russian musical composers of the 20th century, and with this film he began a lifelong collaboration with Kozintsev, which continued through to Kozintsev’s later, concluding masterpieces, Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1971).
 
The film’s eight movements have the feel of metaphorical back-and-forth polemical dialogue  between two contrasting social perspectives – the self-centered bourgeoisie (B) and the community-centered working class (W).  It is this highly dramatized and expressionistic B-W argument that constitutes the core of the film’s appeal.   Over the course of this metaphorical imagery, there are a few themes that are repeatedly put before the viewer:

• the obsessive and selfish conspicuous consumption on the part of the bourgeoisie;
• the joy that emerges from worker solidarity and community mindedness;
• the fragility of love in an oppressive and self-focussed environment;
• the importance of nonviolence in order to sustain a cooperative society for all.

The film begins during the Franco-Prussian War prior to the establishment of the Paris Commune.

1.  "Death to the Prussians!"

The first movement shows the mindless chauvinist patriotism of the nightclub-going Parisian bourgeoisie during the war.  Louise (played by Elena Kuzmina) is a working-class girl who works behind the counter at The New Babylon department store (a name, itself, suggestive of wasteful self-indulgence), where wealthy ladies shop for the latest styles.  Because she is attractive, she gets invited by her boss to a bourgeois ball coming up.

2.  Paris
At the ball there is more selfish bourgeois role-playing, and the department store manager makes a pass at Louise.  Then a progressive-minded journalist, Loutro (Sergei Gerasimov), announces to everyone that the French Army has just surrendered to the Prussians, and the ballroom suddenly empties in a panic.

3.  Paris under siege

Now the perspective shifts to the oppressed working-class sector of Paris, and it shows their destitution.  The focus then narrows to a local dwelling, where Loutro expresses his anti-war sentiments (i.e. that war is essentially an instrument of “disaster capitalism” and only benefits wealthy investors – cf. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine [10]) to Louise and an elderly worker.  They are then joined by Jean (Pyotr Sobolevsky), a  soldier from the regular French army who sullenly comes to beg for food.  At this point the narrative slows down, and Louise and Jean exchange long, meaningful glances, which contrasts with the artificial exchanges shown in the bourgeoisie segments (which involve more visually declamatory expressions of emotive states than meaningful interactive exchanges).

4.  March 18th

Now some specifics of the establishment of the Paris Commune are covered.  And here we see the stark contrast separating the B-W sensibilities.  The National Guard largely supports the rebellious Communards, and the regular French Army retreats to its headquarters in Versailles. Louise, who has joined the Communards, asks Jean to join the rebellious National Guard, but though he responds by kissing her passionately, his knee-jerk loyalty to duty compels him to stick with the regular army.

5.  The New Paris
Here there is more B-W contrast.  In the Commune the happy workers celebrate their newly obtained autonomy, singing out,

 “We work for ourselves and not for the owners!  . . . As decided by the Commune!”

Meanwhile the patriotic bourgeoisie loyally sing “Le Marseillaise”, although Shostakovich’s participatory soundtrack mixes in elements of the French Cancan to suggest the raucous superficiality of their feelings.

6.  The 49th day of the battle  

We move to the latter stages of the Commune, when the Communards are under siege and in despair.  The workers desperately all pitch in to set up barricades to protect their sector from the advancing French Army, who want to regain national control of Paris.  The workers shout out to their foes,

“We are not French.  We are Communards!” 

In the ensuing battle, though, the Communards are overwhelmed, and the Commune falls, while the contemptuous bourgeoisie look on with satisfaction from a hillside in Versailles.

7.  "Peace and Order" is restored in Paris
The last two segments are shown in darkness and a continuous downpour.  Many Communards have been killed, and the distraught working-class people stand miserably outside the Parisian cafés, watching the bourgeoisie celebrate their defeat of the lower-class rabble and their return to control.  Amid this ruckus, Jean, who is treated as a heroic soldier, desperately searches for the whereabouts of Louise.

8.  The trial

One-by-one, the captured Communards are brought before a military marshal and summarily sentenced to death.  When Louise is brought forward, she, too is sentenced to be executed.  Jean, who happened to be helplessly watching this operation, is in a state of shock – especially when he is then explicitly ordered to start digging Louise’s grave in the downpour.  When Louise sees him, she laughs scornfully and shouts out to him,

“We will meet again, Jean!”

Much of the tone of The New Babylon is ironic and sarcastic, and it is not surprising that the Russian authorities tried to censor it.  But the mise-en-scene used to create this over-the-top expressionistic mood is fascinating.  There are many rapid-fire swish-pan montages that are employed to create a chaotic feeling of turbulence.  These are coupled with long, dramatic sequences of back-and-forth closeups that emphasize the dialogic contest between self-centered capitalism and community-oriented socialism that underlies this high-voltage tale of a cataclysmic moment of world history.  Altogether, this is a fascinating and moving experiment in cinematic expression.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Kozintsev and Trauberg were from what is now Ukraine.
2. Vincent Canby, “'NEW BABYLON,' SILENT RUSSIAN CLASSIC”, The New York Times, (3 October 1983).   
3. Stephen L. Hanson, “Novyi Vavilon - Film (Movie) Plot and Review”, Film Reference, (n.d.).    
4. Jugu Abraham, “196. Russian director-duo Grigory Kozintsev’s and Leonid Trauberg’s silent film “Novyy Vavilon” (The New Babylon) (1929) (former USSR/France), with music by Dimitri Shostakovich: One of the most laudable silent films ever made that has surfaced recently”, Movies that make you think, (19 September 2016).  
5. “Paris Commune”, Wikipedia, (29 May 2018).     
6. Ibid.
7. “Communards”, Wikipedia, (10 April 2018).   
8. Michael St Aubyn, “The New Babylon - Novyy Vavilon”, DVD Beaver, (n.d.).   
9. Ibid.
10. Naomi Klein,  The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Knopf Canada, (2007).

Leonid Trauberg

Films of Leonid Trauberg:

• The New Babylon - Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg (1929)