Krylya kholopa / The Wings of a Serf (Pacific Film Archive print)

Yuri Tarich: Krylya kholopa / The Wings of a Serf (SU 1926). Poster design: Anton Mikhailovich Lavinski (1893-1968) and Elizaveta Andreyevna Lavinskaya (1901-1950). Izdatelstvo Sovkino. From Russian Wikipedia.

KRYL’IA KHOLOPA (КРЫЛЬЯ ХОЛОПА) [Le ali del servo/Wings of a Serf] (US: Czar Ivan the Terrible) (not released in Finland) (USSR 1926) dir: Yuri Tarich. scen: Yuri Tarich, Viktor Shklovsky, based on a scenario by Konstantin Shildkret. photog: Mikhail Vladimirsky. ed: Esfir Shub. des: Egor Vladimirov. asst. dir: Vladimir Korsh. cast: Leonid Leonidov (Tsar Ivan the Terrible), Ivan Klyukvin (Nikishka), Sofia Garrel (Fima), Safiyat Askarova (Tsarina Maria Temrkyukovna), Nikolai Vitovtov (Drutskoy), Nikolai Prozorovsky (Fedka Basmanov), Ivan Arkanov (Boyar-Prince Kurlyatev), V. Makarov (Lupatov), Mstislav Kotelnikov (Ivashka), Ivan Kachalov (Malyuta Skuratov), Vladimir Korsh (Tsarevich Ivan), Klavdia Chebysheva (Kurlyatev’s wife), V. Virskaya (Kurlyatev’s daughter), V. Kurganov (Vyazemsky), Ariadna Dzyubina (Hayat). prod: Goskino. rel: 16.11.1926 (Moscow), 3.1928 (Cameo, New York City). 35 mm, 2100 m, 102'10" (18 fps); titles: RUS. source: Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA.

    44th Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone: Canon Revisited

    Grand piano: Mauro Colombis.

    Viewed at Teatro Verdi with e-subtitles in English / Italian, 10 Oct 2025

Maya Garcia (GCM 2025): "An experimental amalgam of historical materialism and Gothic sensationalism, Wings of a Serf became a notable early success for Soviet film in foreign markets, even as it was criticized and re-cut back in the USSR. Filmed and released in 1926, by the time of its auspicious international run in 1928 Soviet censors were trimming its lurid edges to make a film suitable “for children’s viewing”. American and European censors also demanded significant cuts; the film we have today – reconstructed by Soviet archivists in the 1950s-60s – contains the kinds of sexuality and violence that rarely reached the screen anywhere in the 1920s."

"The tragic tale of a peasant dreamer in Ivan the Terrible’s Muscovy whose mechanical experiments were so far ahead of their time they were denounced as “satanic,” in 1928 Wings of a Serf was already being invoked by Sergei Eisenstein (who was not involved in the film, but close to several who were) as an allegory for the experimental filmmaker’s struggle for creative freedom in the face of state demands being imposed on art. Eisenstein never published the essay in which he likened himself to the film’s protagonist, but those familiar with his life can see how harrowingly accurate that comparison proved. Nikishka is tried for witchcraft by a despotic boyar-prince who recently acquired his entire village in a petty land squabble. His execution is stayed when the boyar-prince’s lands are in turn seized as part of the Tsar’s campaign for centralized autocracy. A royal whim offers Nikishka the chance to resume his experiments with state backing, but the fanatically religious Tsar reacts violently to the results of scientific progress…"

"Wings of a Serf is the creation of a dynamic, diverse early Soviet collective. Director Yuri Tarich is remembered not as a visionary auteur but as a master of orchestrating productive collaborations, including some of the first major Belarusian film productions. He invited extensive input on characterization from Leonid Leonidov, the Moscow Art Theater veteran whose stunningly naturalistic performance as Ivan the Terrible strips away centuries of romantic bombast to expose the petty human on the throne. Esfir Shub, then just beginning to make her name as a pioneer of montage storytelling, credits Tarich with fostering her artistic development by allowing her immense freedom at the editing table. The allegorical dimension of the film invoked by Eisenstein may have emerged collectively from the experiences of these artists navigating a new state system, but there is one collaborator whose personal perspective is clearly evident: Viktor Shklovsky, the prolific theorist whose intellectual signature was the oblique strategy of the “knight’s move”, was then a resident “script doctor” at Goskino, and authored the majority of existing firsthand writing on Wings of a Serf."

"In his journalistic pieces on the film, Shklovsky focused on the aesthetic-ideological struggle to create a new materialist historical film contrary to typical expectations for courtly intrigues and violent thrills. In his memoir Third Factory (Третья фабрика, 1926), he subtly reveals the film’s allegorical dimension. The “wings” of the title are only half of a symbolic system; their counterpart was added to the script by Shklovsky as a way to tether the fanciful flying contraption to a “grounded” historical device, a flax-scutching wheel, which produced the physical material of the wings, linen."

"In Third Factory, Shklovsky recalls the flax-processing center where he first found employment after returning to the USSR from political exile in 1923; he sees the violence that works the coarse plant into useful linen as a metaphor for the conversion of his generation of revolutionary artists into loyal employees of the new state. The prop that gives the film a formal connection to material economy proves a multi-layered symbol: the capricious wheel of fortune that raises the hero up from the dungeon to fleeting prestige as court mechanic; the inhuman machinery of  capital spattered with workers’ blood; and the state torture device on which the heretical wills of former revolutionaries are broken."

"Another element that may have originated in the efforts of the “script doctor” to add historical shading to courtly intrigues has also proven crucial to the film’s symbolic legacy. Several scenes set in the court of Ivan the Terrible showcase one of his most infamous favorites, Fedka (Fyodor) Basmanov. These were the first cinematic reference to Ivan and Fyodor’s long rumored sexual relationship, tearing the veil from that taboo with a flagrancy untempered by the intervening century. At the time of the film’s creation, homosexual relations were recently decriminalized and sexual mores were a hotly debated issue not yet suppressed by the hard conservative turn of the early 1930s. A taste of the contentious but open cultural discourse of the Soviet mid-1920s is offered by a critic in the short-lived journal Kino-Front (no.1, 1927): “In a Soviet historical picture, the important thing is class struggle, not the personality and pathology of the Tsar. In their effort to bring the epoch to life, they diligently depict Ivan the Terrible as a homosexual, even though his homosexuality bears no relation, direct or indirect, to the inventor of the prototype airplane or to the oprichnina.”"

"A more astute observer can see that there are complex relations between the Tsar’s “homosexuality”, his persecution of the blaspheming inventor of “satanic” wings, and his creation of the oprichnina (a proto police-state enforced by a cultlike praetorian guard of oprichniki). Eisenstein was such an observer. When in 1941 he was enlisted to make a new Soviet film epic about Ivan the Terrible, he began constructing an impossible sexual labyrinth, in which his own complicated “bisex” psychology would confront the two-faced monster of a state that stringently regulated sex and gender among civilians while granting sexual license to the ruling elite. Wings of a Serf was a key source of construction material for Eisenstein’s labyrinth, and remains a singular work that demands renewed consideration as both a feat of creative ingenuity and a compelling artifact of a historical moment, whose paradoxes haunt our cultural and political landscape more ominously than ever, one hundred years later." – Maya Garcia

The print 

"We are screening the 35 mm print preserved at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. The PFA acquired the print from Russia’s Gosfilmofond in the early 1970s; it is a duplicate of Gosfilmofond’s own copy, reconstructed sometime in the 1950s-60s, when the Russian titles were recreated. One other copy of the film is known, an original nitrate of a circa 1928 Dutch market cut, preserved at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam."

AA: I see Yuri Tarich's legendary film for the first time, and I guess I'm not the only one. A film all have heard about but few have seen.

First impressions: a high quality production, a lavish historical spectacle, well written, directed,  edited, designed and acted. Full of dense historical detail of manners and mores and physical circumstances of life. Made during the NEP era, Russia's equivalent to Hollywood before the Code. Taboos are casually ignored, including the homosexuality in the private life of Ivan the Terrible.

It is easy to see how this movie may have inspired Eisenstein and Tarkovsky (the balloon prologue in Andrei Rublev). 

The prison system, the torture chambers, the networks of informers and the methods of the oprichnina were familiar for Bolsheviks from their decades in the underground in the Russian Empire. Stalin was already in power when the film was made but it was still ten years to the unleashing of the Great Terror.

The year is 1568. Simultaneous events include the Spanish Inquisition and St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Shakespeare was a contemporary. In Sweden to which Finland belonged we had the Reformation, the Stockholm Bloodbath and brutal succession wars of the children of Gustav Vasa. (In the cinema the era is covered in Sir Arne's Treasure).

I reflect on this context because of the extreme cruelty on display. Such were the times, and not only in Russia. 

The film has a standpoint: it is people's history. It stands by the oppressed serfs - and women who are fair game for the abuse of the boyars. Even the czarina is not safe from the murderous rage of Ivan the Terrible. The mad czar declares also a war on science. He blinds the inventor of the flax-scutching wheel so that nobody else can build one. Nikishka, the inventor of a flying machine, is the only one who can repair the wheel, but he meets his end in Ivan's execution chamber.

Atrocities pile up so that The Wings of a Serf might almost qualify as a horror film. But it does not have horror aesthetics or poetry. Terrible forces are in motion, but there is something unresolved in the formidable dynamics of the story world.

The print is mostly excellent, doing justice to the the fine soft detail of the superb production and cinematography.