Fragment of an Empire

Fridrikh Ermler's last silent feature. An officer, shell-shocked in the First World War, spends a decade without his memory, not knowing who he is or where he came from. One day the sight of a woman through a train window brings it back, and he makes his way to Petersburg. But the city is now called Leningrad and the country he returns to is one he does not recognise. That is where the film's power sits: it presents the revolution not as a story of triumph but as a new order that a man waking up cannot make sense of. Ermler tells it through editing and objects, with an almost documentary attention. Fyodor Nikitin leads, in the fourth and last of his films with this director.