House on the Volcano review – silent classic of Soviet Armenia glories in machine age
Machinery itself has star quality – of the most monumental and anti-heroic sort – in this fascinating 1928 silent movie from the Armenian film-maker Amo Bek-Nazaryan. It’s such a vivid, dynamic, engaged piece of work, whose energies blaze forth afresh in this restoration, having apart from anything else wonderful archival value.
Bek-Nazaryan vehemently juxtaposes the strange statuary of vast industrial architecture and the faces of the people who live and work in its shadow. The framing device is that a veteran worker in present-day Soviet Armenia is asked by his son – or someone we are led to believe is his son – to sign his application to join the Communist party. Thoughtfully, the older man tells him this is not simply a matter of bits of paper, but hard-won experience in solidarity and sacrifice; he then tells him (and us) about a workers’ action during “the reactionary years” of 1907.
In an oilfield, workers are regularly sacrificed to poor safety standards, exhausted by the long journey from their barracks. Their Armenian owner, whose thin, pinched face is seen in a stylised closeup, agrees to build housing closer to the oilfield, but this is on the site of dangerous subterranean gases (hence the title) and his frosty arrogance and cruelty is to lead to a cataclysmic horror as his employees’ housing is literally swallowed into hellish flames. For the union, the complicating factor had been that Armenian workers should not question the views of an Armenian boss: it is this kind of bourgeois nationalism that appears to be deprecated in the film.
Finally, a union worker is tricked into attacking the owner, thrown into prison and separated from his wife and child – a final twist which leads us back to the present day. One of the treats of this film is the outstanding new score from Juliet Merchant, which brings out the film’s operatic intensity, and its plaintive beauty.
• House on the Volcano is available on Klassiki.