Links

New Babylon is the last great Soviet avant-garde film of the 1920s. The last masterpiece of Leonid Trauberg, Grigorii Kozintsev and their Factory of the Eccentric Actor film collective. It’s subject matter is a fast cut, head over heels, eccentric take on the revolutionary tragedy of the Paris Commune of 1871, the 150th anniversary of which falls in 2021.

Dimitri Shostakovich, aged 23 and already a rising star in the Russian music world was enlisted to write the score. Recently, a discovery was made of his lost original piano score for the film. Marek Pytel knew Leonid Trauberg personally, His restoration has involved highly specialist and academic work over many years, with access to materials of great rarity. Sasha Grynyuk’s dramatic performance of Shostakovich's score for New Babylon is a restoration of piano accompaniment to silent cinema with one of the earliest and certainly best scores for film ever composed.