Turin_Horse This is one of the films I most regret having set my interest on to decide to watch it. Four and a half hours of a story running through several generations of a small Siberian village, which just can't be less interesting, moving and appealing no matter the point of view you want to look at it: epic, sentimental, historical, or all at once, which seems to have been the pretension of the director, failing completely and pitifully in his vain attempt. A loose thread of familiar and personal stories intermingled with historical events which are unable during more than four painful hours to drag your attention into them just for five minutes. Not a single character is developed in a way that you can feel any emotion or at least some interest in his/her whereabouts. But there is some epic in the film: the number of senseless, histrionic scenes which make you plead "please stop this once and for all!!!". The reason why I watched this film was that other film by director Konchalovsky is actually among my all time favorites: Runaway Train. After having watched Sibiriada now I wonder if they are the same person or I mixed up names or something.

jessicacoco2005 Siberiade, is considered by many to be Konchalovsky's masterpiece. A truly epic, grandiose, and colorful film, which follows 3 generations of two rival families in the remote Siberian logging village of Elan. The Solomins are the wealthy masters of this place, while the Ustyuzhanins are the poor unappreciated workers with no future, nothing to look forward to except hard work and an early death...That is, until the Bolshevik revolution comes and alters the power structure. While the young Nikolai Ustyuzhanin looks towards the future with dreams of a socialist paradise brought about by the glorious revolution going underway, the Solomins feel their own world dying and look towards the past, trying to hold on to what they have. Oil-rich Siberia will take on a new importance for the fledgling Soviet Union. Unchecked hope and progress collides with despair and reactive conservatism. In life, what we hope for is not what we get. Life comes with compromise. Trees fall to the ground stirring sadness in the soul for the woods that will be sacrificed for progress. Bombs explode and kill people stirring despair for we know the West will not allow a workers' socialist paradise to be created, because profits are what's important in a capitalist system. Revolution, war, famine, love and romance all combine here and are interwoven like the fibers of a fine tapestry. It's a spectacular, sweeping epic film not to be missed.

chaos-rampant Konchalovsky's towering poem to Siberia doesn't steamroll ahead, though it's 4,5 hours long. It holds back for space, takes time in roundabout exploration of childhood memories in a turn-of-the-century backwoods village, yet it picks up steam doing this, builds in emotional resonance as though even the sounds and images which compose it become imbued by sheer association with their subject matter with that quality of fierce tireless quiet dignity that characterizes the Soviet working spirit. Konchalovsky celebrates Soviet collectivity but in an almost revisionist way to paeans like Soy Cuba and Invincible the mood turns somber and reflective. So eventually the Revolution, the one thought to matter. News of it reach the secluded Siberian village only through the grapevine. Worse with the fruits of its labor, these reach the village only when a world war calls for the young men to enlist.But although the scope appears huge and daunting, Konchalovksy zeroes in on the individual, the face behind the history; with care and affection to examine the bitter longing and regret of the woman who waited 6 years after the war for a fiancé who never came back, waited long enough to go out and become a barmaid in a ship with velvet couches and which she quit years later to come back to her village to care for an aging uncle who killed the fiancé's father with an axe, the irreverent folly of the fiancé who came back from the war a hero 20 years too late, came back not for the sake of the girl he left behind but to drill oil for the motherland, the despair and resignation of the middle-aged Regional Party Leader who comes back to his small Siberian village with the sole purpose of blotting it out of the map to build a power plant. The movie segues from decade to decade from the 10's to the 80's with amazing newsreel footage trailing Soviet history from the revolution to war famine and the titanic technological achievements of an empire (terrific visuals here! pure futurism of kinetic violence and skewed angles and flickering cramped shots of crowds and faces) but the actual movie focuses on the individual, on triumphs and follies small and big. By the second half a sense of bittersweet fatalism creeps in; of broken lives that never reached fulfillment choking with regret and yearning. "It can't matter", seems like the world is saying, to which Konchalovksy answers "it must matter" because the protagonists keep on trying for redemption.Yet behind this saga of 'man against landscape' something seems to hover, shadowy, almost substanceless, like the Eternal Old Man hermit who appears in every segment to guide or repudiate the protagonists, sometimes a mere spectactor, sometimes the enigmatic sage; a little behind and above all the other straightforward and logical incomprehensible ultimatums challenges and affirmations of the human characters, something invisible seems to lurk. Ghosts of the fathers appearing in sepia dreams, repeated shots of a star gleaming in the nightsky, a curious bear, indeed the Eternal Old Man himself; Konchalovksy calls for awe and reverence before a mystical land of some other order. In its treatment of a small backwoods community struggling against nature progress and time and in the ways it learns to deal with them, often funny bizarre and tragic at the same time, and in how the director never allows cynicism to override his humanism, it reminds me of Shohei Imamura's The Profound Desires of the Gods. When, in a dream scene, Alexei tears through the planks of a door on which is plastered a propaganda poster of Stalin to reach out at his (dead) father as he vanishes in the fog, the movie hints at the betrayal of the Soviet Dream, or better yet, at all the things lost in the revolution, this betrayal made more explicit in the film's fiery denouement. The amazing visuals, elegiac and somber with a raw naturalist edge, help seal the deal. By the end of it, an oil derric erupts in flames and the movie erupts in a wild explosion of pure cinema.

dbojckov9 I was young film student in 1979 when the Union of the Soviet Filmmakers came to Sofia Bulgaria and premiered Konchalovsky's "Siberiade"; Tarkosvky's "Stalker" and Danelia'a "Autumn marathon". I was stunned by the cosmopolitan dimension of the art form. Then and only then, I saw "Siberiade" 4 and 1/2 hours epic and was speechless. Way better then Bertolucci's "1900". By far!Hope Andron will somehow get to the negative and make "director's restored version full lenght " someday! On DVD of course! Also I fiercely fought in defense of this Cinema against most of my colleagues who were equating Soviet film with bad taste! Time is on my side.