DVD: Revolution: New Art for a New World — ‘a worthwhile watch’

Directed by Margy Kinmonth, 2016

Foxtrot Films

If you can’t make it to the Royal Academy’s Revolution, then Margy Kinmonth’s documentary is perhaps the next best thing. It provides a condensed, though largely absorbing introduction to the fleeting period in which the Bolsheviks and avant-garde artists such as Kandinsky, Rodchenko and Malevich formed an unlikely partnership in order to realise their respective visions of modernity.

There are illuminating interviews with relatives who recount how their forebears saw the creative freedom initially afforded by the Soviets extinguished by Stalin’s regime.

Chillingly, the film reveals just how many great innovators paid for their art with their lives. Low-budget re-enactments and a risibly effete Lenin voiceover aside, this is a worthwhile watch.