Revolution

I watched Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba recently on Turner Classic Movies and I am currently reading Elizabeth Kendall's Balanchine and the Lost Muse.  What the Kalatozov and Kendall have in common is their demonstration of the hopes and disillusionment of revolution.  The Kalatozov film was made in 1964 and shows, with constant camera movement and high-contrast black-and white, what Cuba was like before the revolution.  Its four segments show desperate women becoming prostitutes, farmers losing their land to United Fruit, students supporting revolution, and peasants whose homes have been destroyed joining Castro's forces.  The film was considered by Cuba and Russia guilty of excess "formalism" and suppressed for years until its rediscovery at the Telluride Film Festival in 1993.

Elizabeth Kendall's Balanchine and the Lost Muse was reviewed intelligently
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/oct/24/unknown-young-balanchine/
by Jennifer Homans in The New York Review of Books.  What Balanchine really thought when he left Russia in 1924 we don't know, but there was still a great deal of hope that traditional ballet could accommodate Balanchine's modern approach.  I'm not one who believes that it necessarily enhances one's appreciation of an artist to know about his life but this detailed and extensively researched book about his parents and his training add another level of appreciation to one's view of Balanchine.  I have often said that Balanchine's ballets simultaneously show life in a group, in a pair and as an individual so I found it particularly interesting to read about Balanchine as a student, a married man (to Tamara Geva when he was 18) and as a child left to fend for himself as a boarding student in ballet class at the age of 9.