Sorok serdets Review: Lev Kuleshov's weirdly intense tribute to power grids

If you are looking for a cozy movie night with popcorn, absolutely skip this one. Sorok serdets is basically a 49-minute hype video for Soviet electricity, and most people will find it incredibly boring.

But! If you love early silent cinema or want to see how the famous Lev Kuleshov handles... well, giant water turbines, it is actually pretty fascinating. ⚡

There is no plot here. Its just forty minutes of the Soviet Union trying to convince everyone that power plants are the "new hearts" of the country.

I watched this right after writing about Battleship Potemkin, and the contrast is wild. While that movie had angry sailors and baby carriages rolling down stairs, this film has... very excited engineers pointing at blueprints.

And yet, you can still feel Kuleshov's touch. The editing has this weird, aggressive rhythm where a shot of a spinning wheel cuts to a map, then to a guy looking very serious, all in about three seconds.

The Weird Magic of Soviet Industrial Hype

One scene that really stuck with me shows a giant map of Russia. Little light bulbs start popping up to show where the new power stations are going, and it honestly looks like a very primitive version of a sci-fi screen.

The movie gets almost poetic about coal and water. There is a long sequence of rushing water at a dam that goes on for so long you start to wonder if the projectionist fell asleep.

Actually, the water shots are beautiful in a strange, hypnotic way. It is just water hitting concrete, but the camera angles makes it look like some kind of alien monster waking up.

The writer, Aleksandr Andriyevsky, clearly had a massive crush on industrial machinery. Every subtitle card reads like a love letter to steam engines and copper wiring.

My favorite moment is when a worker stares at a giant dial with this look of pure, spiritual ecstasy. He looks like he is seeing the face of God, but he is actually just checking the voltage. 🔌

Is it a masterpiece? Not even close.

It is uneven, half of it feels like a high school science presentation, and the pacing is totally all over the place. But there is a charm to how completely sincere it is about something as mundane as electrical grids.

If you have 50 minutes to spare and want to see what propaganda looked like before it got super polished, give it a spin. Just do not expect any character development, because the main character is literally electricity.