Archangel

1990

Comedy / Drama / Romance / War

3
IMDb Rating 6.3/10 10 1765 1.8K

Plot summary

At the height of the October Revolution during the 1919 allied intervention in Arkhangelsk, the exploits of one-legged Canadian soldier Lt. John Boles are told, after he is taken in from the cold by a dysfunctional Russian family and mistakes a local woman for his presumed dead lover.

Director

Top cast

Ari Cohen as Philbin
Brent Neale as Lustful Youth / Allied Soldier
Bif Naked as Russian Soldier
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
713.26 MB
960*720
English 2.0
NR
us  
24 fps
1 hr 17 min
Seeds 2
1.29 GB
1440*1080
English 2.0
NR
us  
24 fps
1 hr 17 min
Seeds 4

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by tedg

Eisenstein's Smooth Stones of Forgetfulness

I only know a few of Maddin's projects. This seems to be the earliest available.I'm really beginning a deep appreciation of this man's visual soul. While this project didn't change my life, it demonstrated the power to do so, like a strutting policeman among weak minds.What I like about his mind is how he seats the thing first in the soul, then in the cinematic vocabulary instead of the usual path which values character, motivations, narrative clarity. What he's done here is revisit Eisenstein. I don't suppose many filmgoers have much truck for a Russian silent filmmaker who was primarily occupied in Soviet propaganda. He developed some important ideas about how a scene (never a movie — only a scene) can be constructed from visual fragments — what it means to "see."His particular solutions aren't popular today, and the whole idea of slicing the eye has been appropriated to the service of now-conventional values of storytelling and the cult of celebrity — some few jokes and even fewer emotions destinations.Eisenstein's idea is based on the notion of readable cells of retinal comprehension, more or less of the same size which when combined give an impression. The more discrete the components in presentation the more comprehensible the assembly, what he called the collage.What Maddin does here is make a metaEisenstein. The story is set in Russia and populated by international warriors, all of whom have only a groggy notion of why they are there. Our hero, like Maddin, is Canadian. It is essentially a silent movie. There is a parallel movie that is a talkie, into which this silent, main piece is embedded.Within the silent movie is a sort of "movie within," exactly as abstract from the silent portion as the silent portion is to the talkie portion and thence not to our world (as is the usual case with folding) but to the world of normal movies.That "movie within" is the "illumination" a set of stage tableaux depicting famous battles. If you experience nothing but these — or rather if you skate over all the surrounding context and focus only on these — you will be rewarded. There's so much reference there.The overall theme of the thing is the hard boundary of memory, where the continuity of knowing begins and ends. In the story, this exhibits as amnesia plus a sort of quantum identity shifts — of women, who else? That's good, its valuable. But the interesting thing is how this is seated in the collage itself. Eisenstein's idea is that each cell, each image, of the collage needs to have some reference to the others. The art is in the nature of that reference. Maddin makes that reference sit on the cells. In his case they are not bubbles in transparent foam that light can shine through. Instead they are stones, smooth stones with hard impenetrable skins that only know themselves and keep forgetting those they are nestled against. So they forget who they are.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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Reviewed by jboothmillard 4 / 10

Archangel

I found this film in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I was confused when I saw the images of it, I was fine with it being a black-and-white film, but I wondered if the year information was correct, it was only when I read about I realised what was going on. Basically it is modelled on the style of a part-talkie early cinematic film, in other words, it is made in a way that makes it looks like something from the early 20th century, hence my confusion. The story is set in 1919, during the Bolshevik revolution, it is about one-legged amnesiac Canadian soldier, Lieutenant John Boles (Kyle McCulloch), who was assisting the White Russians in the Russian Arctic during the First World War. He finds himself in Archangel, a crystalline city of spires and domes, inhabited by some very confused people. He lodges with a local family consisting of brave son Geza (David Falkenburg), cowardly father Jannings (Michael Gottli), and mother Danchuk (Sarah Neville), the grandmother called Baba (Margaret Anne MacLeod) and an unnamed baby. Veronkha (Kathy Marykuca) enters and Boles faints, he is affected by her resemblance to his long-lost love Iris, forgetting that she has died. Coincidentally, Veronkha's husband Philbin (Ari Cohen) is also suffering amnesia and has forgotten everything after his wedding day. A Doctor (Michael O'Sullivan) explains that Philbin will relive his wedding day over and over without remembering what came after. There is much that goes on, including travelling across a field of corpses to place a grave marker, Boles confusing the unnamed baby for his own with Iris, a dreamlike trek and treasure hunt ending in failure, and a flood of rabbits running about. Veronkha decides to renew her marriage to Philbin after annulling her first marriage, and they travel to the Murmansk Hotel to repeat their honeymoon. Veronkha mistakes Boles for Philbin, and somehow develops amnesia herself, he takes the opportunity try to convince Veronkha that she is Iris, but she runs away. They reunite, but then Veronkha sees Philbin and remembers who she is, then rejects Boles and threatens to kill him, Boles is dismayed and heads back to the war. Geza is killed in battle and reunites with the ghost of his father, while Boles is injured by a grenade in a final assault, staggering through the same treasure map route that previously took him to Veronkha. In the end, Boles is emotionally destroyed and leaves Archangel to return home to Canada. Also starring Victor Cowie as Sea Captain, Robert Lougheed as Kaiser Wilhelm II and Stephen Snyder as Stage Kaiser Wilhelm II. It is a clever idea, to make a film look and feel old-fashioned, it succeeds with this concept, hence why it is considered a "must see" I suppose, but I will be honest, it was difficult to follow what was going on all the time, with little dialogue and not a lot of action, it was a reasonable stylised drama. Okay!

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