The General Line

Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov's silent epic about rural collectivization — also known as Old and New (Staroye i novoye). Marfa Lapkina, a real peasant, plays Marfa, a poor farmer who leads her village in forming a collective and is rewarded with the arrival of a tractor, a moment Eisenstein turns into one of the most famous montage sequences in silent cinema. Made for Sovkino on the eve of Stalin's forced collectivization campaign. The film is in the public domain.