Happiness (1935)

Original title

Счастье

Directed by

Aleksandr Ivanovich Medvedkin

Genre

comedy film, silent film

Country

Soviet Union

Runtime

1h 35m

Rating

5.8 of 10 from 31 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A poor peasant in pre-revolutionary Russia dreams of a better life. The film follows his comical attempts to escape poverty and find happiness during the era of Soviet collectivization.

satiricalslapstickwhimsicalabsurdfast-pacedplayfulexperimentalfolkloric

What happens

Happiness (Russian: Счастье, romanized: Schastye) is a 1935 silent satirical slapstick (or rather lubok) comedy set in the Russian Empire before the October Revolution and in the Soviet Union at the time of the collectivization. Medvedkin's original title was The Snatchers or The Possessors (Стяжатели). The original print featured an experimental color sequence illustrating a poor peasant's dreams of becoming a king. It was the first color production of the Mosfilm studio. According to Medvedkin, "At that time the peasant could not dream of anything multicoloured of beautiful. His dream was limited, and in that the technology helped". The sequence was discarded on account of its poor technical quality and is apparently lost. Unnoticed on its release, Happiness became well known in the 1960s among film scholars. It was especially championed by Chris Marker who included some excerpts from Happiness in his 1992 documentary The Last Bolshevik. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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