An important example of socialist realism in Soviet cinema, Chapaev charts the ideological development and refinement of Chapaev (Boris Babochkin), a charismatic leader of a Red Army division. Under the guidance of his accompanying Party commissar, Dmitri Furmanov (Boris Blinov), the impetuous and proud Chapaev learns important lessons in the dialectic of spontaneity and consciousness. […]

The Golden Plague Forging Its Path of Annihilation! One of the few expressly science fiction films produced under German National Socialism, Gold makes a spectacle of British-German relations in the early years of the Third Reich. An “evil” British alchemist sabotages a “good” German chemist’s experimental attempt to obtain gold from base metals with the […]

Written in an era before modern distinctions among art, science, and religion existed, Leonardo da Vinci’s treatise on painting is regarded today as a canonical text in the history of western art for its scientific approach to problems of representation. New evidence suggests that prior to publication this text was appropriated in a Catholic Reformation […]