One should not, however, think of Barnet’s engagement as purely formal. His last silent film, The Ice Breaks, portrays an intensely political period. Deeply impressed by The Earth, he committed himself to a strange reworking of Dovzhenko’s film, based on the same situation of a village terrorised by kulaks, in which each frame, action, and cut is carefully thought out to express fully the tension of class conflict. The Ice Breaks is indeed the only one of his films in which form assumes an autonomy to the extent of becoming a discourse in its own right. In short, a truly Formalist film, which might seem quite natural for Barnet, but in fact was alien to him.

Bernard Eisenschitz, “A Fickle Man, or Portrait of Boris Barnet as a Soviet Director,” in Richard Taylor, Ian Christie, eds., Inside the Film Factory. New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (Routledge, 1991)