The Dryden will screen Alexander Nevsky (Alexander Nevsky, Sergei M. Eisenstein and Dmitriy Vasilev, Soviet Union 1938, 108 min.) as part of the Nitrate Picture Show. The feature will be followed by the short Le Sang des Bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, Georges Franju, France 1949, 22 min.): "a haunting documentary classic that details the daily operations of Paris slaughterhouses."

"In Nevsky, the white robes of the Teuton Ritter were associated with the themes of cruelty, oppression and death, while the color of black, attached to the Russian warriors, conveyed the positive themes of heroism and patriotism. This deviation from the generally accepted image for these colors would have been less surprising to the critics and press abroad (whose objections were very interesting in themselves) if they had recalled an astonishing and powerful passage of literature which I have since found for myself—the chapter called 'the Whiteness of the Whale,' in Melville's Moby Dick." — Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 1942

[source: George Eastman Museum calendar, 2017-May-5]