The famous, avant-garde and at the same time idealizing silent film of the Russian master director duo Grigori Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg from 1929 comes from the phase of revolutionary romanticism of the young Soviet Union. The film uses the suppression of the Paris Commune after the lost war against the German troops of 1870/71 as a backdrop for its plot. Trauberg's and Kozintsev's montage eschews a continuous narrative line in favor of associative contrasts. The pleasure-seeking bourgeoisie is juxtaposed with scenes of the hard-working people. The department store becomes the symbol of a world in which everything can be bought. The film music by Shostakovich - it is his first film composition ever - bristles with ironic-grotesque play, the combination and confrontation of old familiar forms, melodies and genre quotations such as march and waltz. Whereby the modern realization clearly sets itself apart from the cinema clichés that were already common at the time. Instead of emphasized subjective emotionality, striking mirroring and whimsical parody create a distance to what is shown. The result is a powerful music of unusual musical structure, which reflects the conflicts of the film plot in an original and unconventional way.
