Mother

A classic of Soviet silent film tells of a mother who is radicalized after she naively betrays her revolutionary son to Czarist authorities. There are very few more poignant examples of world-historical irony in cinema than the Soviet silent film—the revolutionary hopes they expressed proved to be tragic illusions, but the works themselves remain deeply influential, and rightly so. Most American film buffs will be familiar with Eisenstein, but just as important is the work of Vsevolod Pudovkin. Arguably Pudovkin’s greatest film was made in 1926, entitled Mother. Mother takes place in 1905, when a young man, played by Nikolai…