To continue developing our recent themes of animation, automation, and accelerated production, this week we will watch Гибель сенсации. Aleksander Andrievskii's 1935 film is loosely based on Karel Capek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which played on stages all over the world in the 1920s and 30s.

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The Soviet film changes the story considerably. As the directors of an American factory attempt to speed up their assembly line to extract more profit, an enterprising inventor creates robots to relieve the exhausted workers. Management is keen to the dollar value of this new labor force, and it appears that human workers have been rendered obsolete. The result is class war – with robots...

Before the screening I will briefly continue my notes from last week on production quotas and organized competitions among the studios, who literally raced one another to meet (or beat!) their deadlines. Could the theme of this film be in dialogue with the real conditions of its production?


MezhRabPom
1935
86 minutes

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