Fragment of an Empire

BLU-RAY / DVD DUAL-FORMAT EDITION “If influence is the criterion for determining the significance of a film director,” writes Russian film scholar Denise J. Youngblood, “then Fridrikh Ermler is perhaps the most important director in Soviet film history.” Why he does not join the ranks of Eisenstein, Kuleshov, and Vertov as one of the great masters of Soviet filmmaking is unknown. Yet his legacy as an intricate craftsman of deceptively simple stories layered with psychological depth and technical proficiency lives on in his work. Fragment of an Empire was Ermler’s last silent feature and last of four productively contentious collaborations with the method actor Fiodor Nikitin. To prepare for his part as Filimonov—a soldier suffering from total amnesia due to shell shock from the Great War—Nikitin apparently disguised himself as a doctor’s assistant in the Forel Psychiatric Clinic, where he studied actual amnesia patients. Ermler, meanwhile, may have drawn upon his own first-hand knowle