Chasing Shadows: The Lost Film Goryachaya krov

Ghost Hunting

Is Goryachaya krov worth your time? Well, that is a bit of a trick question. Unless you have a time machine or access to a secret basement in a Moscow archive, you aren't going to see it. It belongs to that frustrating pile of lost media that makes film history feel like a half-finished puzzle.

If you are the type of person who gets obsessed with things you can't have, you'll love the mystery of it. If you actually want to sit down with a bucket of popcorn and watch a story unfold, you are going to be pretty annoyed by this entire exercise.

The premise sounds like standard 1920s Soviet fare. Demobilized soldiers trading their rifles for plows in the Far East. It sounds dusty, earnest, and probably full of people shouting about the glory of the harvest. You can almost picture the stiff, black-and-white compositions where everyone is standing at a slight angle to the camera.

Comparing it to something like The Bronc Stomper feels unfair, but I can’t help it. Both deal with the grit of settling a frontier, even if the politics are worlds apart. I wonder if the cinematography in this lost film had that same rugged, wind-swept look.

It is genuinely weird to think about the labor that went into this. Actors like Ivan Bobrov and Tatyana Barysheva spent weeks or months on set. They learned their lines. They dealt with bad lighting and temperamental cameras. Then, poof. It all just evaporated into the ether. 🎞️

Sometimes I think about the last person who actually saw a screening of this. Did they know it was the last time? Did they walk out of the theater thinking it was just okay, completely unaware they were holding the last witness to a piece of history?

It makes me appreciate What Price Hollywood? or even the smaller stuff like The Little Shoes. At least those exist. We can argue about them. We can point out the weird edits or the stiff acting. With Goryachaya krov, we are just staring at a blank space on a list.

Maybe it was a masterpiece. Maybe it was a total slog that bored the audience to tears. We will never know. It is just a title in a ledger now, a bit like a ghost haunting a library shelf. 👻

I guess there is a certain charm to the void. It lets you imagine a better movie than what was probably actually filmed. My version of this movie is probably way better than the one that failed to survive the 20th century.

Don't go looking for a trailer. You won't find one.