The impressive martial pomp and ceremony of late 19th century Imperial Russia, as imagined by modern filmmakers. (Via the Tiger on Politics.)
As Mikhalov likes to say about Barber of Siberia, in a phrase that reveals the extent to which his film about the heroic past is intended as a blueprint for the troubled present, “It is not about what was, but about what ought to be.”
— Larsen, Susan. National Identity, Cultural Authority, and the Post-Soviet Blockbuster: Nikita Mikhalov and Aleksei Balabanov. Slavic Review, Vol. 62, No. 3, (Autumn 2003), p. 493.
