The eccentric revolutionaries: banned for decades in the Soviet Union, a subversive comedy finally comes to DVD.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: My Grandmother - Video Recording Review

AT SOME POINT in our lives, we've all waited in a line for so long that time seemed to stand still. In My Grandmother, a strange and wonderful silent comedy made in Soviet Georgia in i929, this happens literally: As a "notorious idler and bureaucrat" cools his heels, everything around him slows to a crawl and finally freezes altogether.

But all is not lost. From atop a mountain, a member of "the Youth Communist League, our junior cavalry" hurls an enormous pen down the slope and, miraculously, into the office, where it pierces the bureaucrat's chest, removes him from his job, and restarts the clock. For the rest of the movie, our now-unemployed protagonist will search for an older apparatchik willing to be his patron and to find him a new post. Along the way, there will be no shortage of surreal sequences, including a statue that comes to life and a cartoon that crawls out of the newspaper; there's also slapstick aplenty--the central character is modeled on the American comedian Harold Lloyd--and sets inspired by expressionist and constructivist art.

But what's especially striking is that Youth Communist cavalry. At a time when Stalin was imposing harsh new constraints on Soviet cinema, the boy's intervention was clearly parody, not propaganda. If you doubt that, consider a scene later in the movie, when our antihero, applying for another job, is unable to speak to the bureaucrat behind the desk because the latter keeps disappearing and being replaced by someone new. "Directors are changed," the narration informs us. "The job remains." The film ends with the slogan, "Death to red tape, to sloppiness, to bureaucrats!"

It's no surprise that the authorities immediately banned the film, which wasn't widely seen until the '70s and has only now been released on DVD in America. What's amazing is that it was made at all.

My Grandmother was heavily influenced by eccentrism, a Russian movement indebted to both pop culture and the avant-garde. Its most obvious precursor was Dada--the eccentrics were known to disrupt plays with whistles and rattles--and it drew on native absurdist authors as well. But its chief inspirations were American. The Eccentric Manifesto, published in 1922, includes a list of the eccentrics' "parents"; among them are jazz, boxing, "the cry of the auctioneer," "the jacket of a cheap pulp thriller," and "American song and dance routines," the latter identified as their favorite form of ballet. The eccentrics loved vaudeville...