Mother (Vsevolod Pudovkin, USSR, 1926)

During the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, a panel of international film experts voted in a poll to determine the 12 best films of all time. Since then, the existence of such polls and lists is ubiquitous and practiced by many institutions; but the original Belgian list still remains an important reference point. On behalf of Garage, Nikolay Izvolov will present all 12 films that were chosen in the 1958 poll, and discuss the reasons why these movies were included in that prestigious list.

The eighth film of the series is Mother by director Vsevolod Pudovkin (USSR, 1926), a pioneer of cinematographic montage and one of the first film theorists. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Maxim Gorky, which depicts one woman’s struggle against Tsarist rule during the Russian Revolution of 1905. The film was widely compared with films by D. W. Griffith for its pioneering use of montage and close-ups, rarely seen before in silent films.

In 1978, leading cinema experts ranked this film as third out of the 100 best films of all times.

Nikolay Izvolov is a film expert and head of the department of the History of Russian Cinema at the Moscow Cinema Art Institute.