DVD of the Week: Outskirts

The Russian director Boris Barnet, who worked solely in the Soviet Union, had the misfortune of being a lyricist in a time and a place of mandatory declamation, an ironist under a regime of deadly earnestness, a discerning psychologist in a reign of subordinated individuality. His 1933 film “Outskirts” (which I discuss in this clip) appears to fit within the confines of propaganda, depicting Czarist Russia as a place of poverty, prejudice, and chaos, indicating that the workers were imbued with a revolutionary spirit that would soon burst into glorious flower, and presenting the First World War as an imperial, reactionary slaughter that distracted the international proletariat from their inherent solidarity. But a closer look reveals that Barnet brings both a sharp wit and a jolting immediacy to the action, putting degradation and repression at the forefront and offering a ludicrous contrast between official rhetoric and the actual state of things. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no English-language book on Barnet. Giuliano Vivaldi has written a useful overview of Barnet’s career at Bright Lights Film Journal. (Also, I’ve written in the magazine about Barnet’s marvellous first feature, “Miss Mend”—actually, a four-hour-plus serial, from 1926, which he co-directed with Fedor Ozep at the age of twenty-four; it’s available on DVD.)