Bright Town is the least known and least typical film by Ol’ga Preobraženskaja and Ivan Pravov. Rather than having the usual melodramatic machinations, the plot is quite simple: the re-education of a country-woman, culturally backward, who has moved into the city with her activist husband. It lacks the exotic ethnographic elements found in other films by this celebrated couple that made their films so respected among foreign critics and so irritating to their Soviet counterparts. The discrete cinematography and low-key art direction compel the spectator to concentrate on the nuances of the private and daily lives of its protagonists, which constitute the heart of this film. Bright Town belongs to an important artistic current in Soviet cinema of the late 1920s: the bytovyj fil’m, films that dealt with day-to-day life. Following the epic revolutionary/historical work of Ejzenštejn and his disciples, and after the experimentation with classic genres by Kulešov and the Factory of Eccentric Actors, a number of films were made that focused on everyday life. Leaving experimentation and formalist questions behind, those directors were determined to focus on another important role of film: the study of human nature. This variant of Soviet cinema, however, was not destined to last: the venture practically died out with Tret’ja Mešcˇanskaja (Bed and Sofa) by Room and after a number of films by Ermler and Barnet. In Bright Town the masterful direction by Preobraženskaja and Pravov can be observed in the precise and measured handling of psychological details: as much in the work with the actors (Raisa Pužnaja, Emma Cesarskaja and Elena Maksimova play almost to perfection), as with the choice of shots and angles – a lean and composed style of direction, which would become the norm forty and fifty years in the future. The general public responded tepidly to the film. One of the activist-workers who was present at the public premiere was quoted as saying: “This might be the reality, but we don’t need to see how we live but how we should live”. He received a standing ovation. Now, for us, Bright Town represents a rare window into ‘how they lived’ and what the films from the Twenties were able to reveal, what Soviet cinema might have given us, but all to often didn’t manage: all this from a single reel of surviving film of extraordinary historical and artistic merit.

                                                                                                                                             Pëtr Bagrov