A simple story set in the years when country dwellers were pouring into the city, with a hint of a crime film. Sasha, a young peasant woman, arrives in town pregnant. One police officer takes her under his protection, but another denounces her as the wife of a detainee accused of having murdered the village teacher. The film’s ending is lost but easy to assume: a flashback shows that the husband is innocent and reveals the real killer. The film was made at Belgoskino, a small studio in Leningrad. “To study the militia’s character and its mechanisms”, Khokhlova spent time in a police station, observing arrest procedures, witnessing a prisoner having a seizure, from which she drew inspiration for a memorable episode with Liudmila Semionova (Chertogo koleso/The Devil’s Wheel, Tretya meshchanskaya/Bed and Sofa). It seems that the heroine comes out of her inertia in this moment of female solidarity, as she does when she befriends the police officer’s wife. In her memoirs, Khokhlova seems to be mainly concerned with her actors. She had studied with Stanislavski and his creative principles seem to oppose the expressive acting style developed by Kuleshov (decomposition and mechanisation of gestures and movements), of which she had been the most notable practitioner: “I was above all trying to make people look real, not like actors. So I was pleased when they thought that my leading actress was a cleaning lady, and they asked me why was I taking her with me, when she was an actual actress who had studied at the GTK”. On the other hand, the editing style is Kuleshov’s, and the cast combines members of the collective – Andrei Fayt, Galadzhev – and actors from different backgrounds.

Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz