The General Line

The General Line (1929) is a silent Soviet film by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov you can watch online on iFILM. Released domestically as Staroye i novoye, it follows Marfa Lapkina — a peasant woman with no horse and no land — as she pushes to bring her village's poor into a milk cooperative.

Factory workers send a tractor. By the film's close, dozens of machines are plowing shared fields and Marfa is driving one of them. Eisenstein cast an actual peasant from Rostov whose name was genuinely Marfa Lapkina, not an actress, which gives the film a roughness that trained performers rarely deliver.

Made alongside October, the picture runs on the same aggressive editing rhythms. The cream-separator sequence, in particular, is cut like a storm — textbook Soviet montage, and still startling to watch. Stream The General Line (1929) on iFILM.