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By the Law / Po zakonu (1926) [Re-UP]

Posted By: Someonelse
Date: 25 Oct 2015 13:02:00
By the Law / Po zakonu (1926) [Re-UP]

By the Law (1926)
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL 4:3 | 01:18:29 | 4,55 Gb
Score AC3 2.0 @ 224 Kbps | Russian intertitles with English, German and French subs
Genre: Drama

Director: Lev Kuleshov
Stars: Aleksandra Khokhlova, Sergey Komarov, Vladimir Fogel

Lev Kulesov's legendary "constructivist Western" (adapted from a story by Jack London) was a highlight of the Soviet Cinema of the 1920s and one of the most popular films of its time. Upon finding gold in the Yukon a group of prospectors descend into murder. The survivors are facing an existential choice. The DVD presents a new transfer of the film and a contemporary score by Austrian composer and musician Franz Reisecker. As an extra it includes the only surviving fragment of Kulesov's Vasa znakomaja, featuring sets by avantgarde artist Aleksandr Rodcenko.

IMDB | Wikipedia


With a gripping story and effective technique that establishes a memorable atmosphere and heightens the suspense, this lesser-known Russian-made silent melodrama is well worth tracking down. The plot, which (interesting to note) comes from a Jack London story, is quite efficient in getting a world of possibilities out of a situation that involves only a handful of characters. The technique relies mostly on the kind of montage approach that some of the Soviet film-makers apparently favored, and it shows how effective that technique can be when used in the right setting.

By the Law / Po zakonu (1926) [Re-UP]

Set in a remote, frozen, and often claustrophobic location in the Yukon, the story focuses on the dilemmas faced by a husband and wife who must contend with a crazed killer even as they battle the elements. Both the practical challenges and the ethical/moral decisions they face are brought out well by the way that many short takes are pieced together in a fashion that constantly emphasizes the unstable and confused nature of the situation that the characters face. Only some occasional overacting (especially by the wife character) detracts from the effect, and it all leads up to a compelling final sequence. Overall, it's a distinctive and most interesting film that works quite well.
IMDB Reviewer
By the Law / Po zakonu (1926) [Re-UP]

Po zakonu (also know as Dura Lex) was the cheapest film produced in Russia (perhaps even still today); at the same time an absolute masterpiece, the greatness of which stems from its very minimalism. The minimum effort required for the story-development (Kulesov constantly claimed, he happened upon Jack London's story "The Unexpected" quite by chance), the minimum number of characters (just three for most of the film), a minimum of inter-titles and lines of dialogue, a minimum of locations; a clearing not far from Moscow (posing as "Alaska") and a cabin–the perfect setting for a stripped-to-basics chamber play. Even if the juggling of shot composition and length (Kules̆ov's notorious "Americanism") is not as artistically ambitious as in his previous work, it is still apparent how close-ups dominate inside, whilst outside, in the snowy landscapes and riverscapes, long shots reign, seemingly to the point of halting all movement.

By the Law / Po zakonu (1926) [Re-UP]

One can label Po zakonu as much an "irrlicht tale" in the "catacombs of exaltation" (Leo Hirsch) as a formalist action film, a Western psychodrama or an experimental study in bigotry. When it comes to taking artistic styles and genre conventions and playing around with them, Kuleov remains the master. There is as much of the silent Westerns of John Ford as there is Erich von Stroheim's Greed and Charles Chaplin's The Gold Rush in Po zakonu.

By the Law / Po zakonu (1926) [Re-UP]

Aleksandra Khokhlova, Lev Kulesov's life partner was by Po zakonu already the "postergirl" of his experimental Actor-Laboratory. The critics–especially the Germans–praised her "courage to be so repulsively ugly" and her "unrestrained will of expression". Bernard von Brentano, for instance, writes: "Khokhlova is not beautiful. One is even frightened of her upon first glance. However, one soon longs to see her again, having been deeply touched. Thus, she has triumphed over every opposition. Her face is thin and hard. But her eyes shine like her hair. If I were a director, I would travel to Moscow and book the actress Khokhlova."

By the Law / Po zakonu (1926) [Re-UP]

Kules̆ov didn't just book her, he created a monument to her with Vasa znakomaja / zurnalistka, a film which premiered in Moscow on the 25th October 1927. A monument which unfortunately today survives only as a fragment of 358 meters (its fourth reel, the original length amounted to 1800m). The female protagonist, a scatterbrained, clumsy, impudent female journalist, answers to the name of "Khokhlova". She is a modern woman, in-your-face and interesting in both the way she dresses and the way she handles the men who surround her in her everyday working life: she writes almost all of them off as wimps but the one she loves, a functionary, proves to be a conformist: disappointment ensues. For Kulesov, erasing intrigue leads to the possibility to focus attention on the details of ordinary life, to see the familiar anew. The mise-en-scène is unique, with razor-sharp contours and extreme lighting provided on the one hand by Aleksandr Rodcenko with his constructivist design of the materialistic world, and on the other hand by cameraman Konstantin Kuznecov with his "svetotvorcestvo" (light-making) already known from Po zakonu.

By the Law / Po zakonu (1926) [Re-UP]

In a year filled with Revolutionary festivities, a film about Soviet ordinary life, not tomention one so in love with objects as to border on the realms of documentary yet stillremain highly artificial, was something of a provocation. Not just for that reason did thecritics condemn Vasa znakomaja, as they had done Po zakonu before it, as "formalist",even "immoral".
Barbara Wurm, Edition Filmmuseum
By the Law / Po zakonu (1926) [Re-UP]

Special Features:
- New score by Franz Reisecker
- Vasa znakomaja 1927, 18' (fragment)

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A31E7794DD6F131D255A2EE81E38475E *Pozaknu.part1.rar
DFA30D425FCC1C7703A8E6B07DA92BCC *Pozaknu.part2.rar
86EABE026B3D4C29ADF391EE3D7CCAFD *Pozaknu.part3.rar
738E44E2A52889E8A5C9A62D1313E27F *Pozaknu.part4.rar
A31A97B091264827F44996F6AB691F0B *Pozaknu.part5.rar
333420A8321695C4006130A6C31B5AC2 *Pozaknu.part6.rar
54FC53953EE22D49835C9BC733D4CF32 *Pozaknu.part7.rar
6D255BB2BBAECA4C9AB45CE92924967B *Pozaknu.part8.rar
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