Aerograd

Rumor floods the Taiga north of the Amur. The Soviets are about to build a new city on the Pacific, a fortress, a city of aeroplanes, a fantasy, and call it Aerograd! Remnants of the White Russian Army struggle against it; Old Believers, descendants of people who fled there more than two centuries ago, are terrified by the city, the modernism, the dancing; and samurai spies are determined to stop it, because they hate Russia, with its taiga of unlimited resources.

Aleksandr Dovzhenko's movie goes beyond propaganda, into obvious and outright partisanship with a strong whiff of paranoia. I believe, like many of his contemporaries, he had trouble with Soviet censorship, and like Dziga Vertov in THREE HEROINES (1938), made something so arrantly over the top that no one could accuse him of not being a communist supporter. There are lots of actors striking heroic poses and declaiming. There are lots of long-focus shots of forsts and the Amure, and airplanes filling the sky. It's all marvelously entertaining. It's so over-the-top that, like Vertov's work in this era, I find it hard to believe that the censors didn't know what was going on. I suspect they did, but figured the audiences wouldn't.