Salt for Svanetia & Nail in the Boot - with live, musical accompaniment

Salt for Svanetia resides somewhere between a documentary, propaganda, drama, montage manual and Discovery Channel. The way Kalatozov’s camera works is unique: with the angles he chooses, it seems to lose the sense of gravity. Fittingly for a movie about life in the mountains, the shot geometry here leans toward the diagonal; if it makes the viewer a little dizzy, this is exactly what one feels at such a height.

Around half of Nail in the Boot‘s action takes place at a court trial, but this is anything but your typical courtroom drama. A young man has had to deliver an important message from his fellow soldiers defending their armored train against the enemy’s artillery. With his foot injured by a proverbial yet very real nail in his boot, he fails, and is charged with treason. The courtroom crowd seriously leans toward capital punishment until his last speech, in which he successfully blames them back. You will see why. This film is radical on all fronts: avant-garde experiments on steroids meet early Stalinist austerity distilled to the state of absolute ether.