There are things more important in life than ad revenue, and MosFilm can't directly get it from YouTube at the moment anyway.

RuTracker should always be one of the first options to consider, but I wouldn't be that zealous. Official subtitles might be the biggest problem, as they don't seem to have a definite source. Some are expressive (up to metrical translation of the songs) but too liberal, some were certainly made by cheapest freelancers they could find. The user has to know beforehand that better translations can sometimes be found, and that it is possible to use extensions to load subtitles from local files. Re-uploading the videos as distinct native and translated versions, and changing softsubs to hardsubs and vice versa is another problem resulting in link rot. Video itself usually seems to be fine, though one of the SD masters of “Stalker” was known for relying on digital film stabilization which resulted in artifacts on faster panning shots, but in that case it was the same on DVDs.

For comparison, LenFilm also uploaded movies to YouTube, and they had masterpieces of Alexei German in 1080p, but either recorded with botched brightness correction through some kind of screen capture software at superfast settings, or watermarked with landline phone number (in a second decade of a 21st century) of some subcontracting studio. The whole thing probably relied on some clueless intern uploading files from their office PC. However, LenFilm has been banned as vile and daaangerous “state-controlled media”, and neither German, nor popular Soviet adventure movies for kids, nor dull and boring soc-realistic factory life dramas are officially there.

Personally, I am a bit skeptical about the image of a regular multi-tasking user seeing the scene of a interrogation, a remark about the suicide of Mayakovsky, and a dinner, and getting it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFZa9CVBeJY&t=2669

Three decades of talking about multimedia, and we still don't have a convenient commentary system to hold all the explanations and notes.

Why? What's wrong with Mosfilm?

Probably cooties, according to current regime orthodoxy.

Nice

Plus if you are not in an a t m o s p h e r i c mood, you can watch Moscow - Cassiopeia (kids space film) and Kuryer (coming of age comedic drama in EOL CCCP) instead.

And then The War of the Worlds: Next Century with Iron Idem for dark comedy that's even less a fan of Soviet stuff

Kuryer was a movie that impressed me much when I saw it first, back in ~ 1988. I searched for it for 30 years and I found it on Internet a few years ago, I saw it again and I got the same hit in the head as in '88. It is not a light movie to see, a bottle of vodka aside might help if you were of that age in Eastern Europe in the 80-es.

As you're interested in identity and profiles, do you have any comments on how Ivan and Katya had (realistically or mistakenly) thought the other would have affected their own identities? (and where does Kolya see himself in 5-10 years? "most likely to become a New Russian"?)

Interesting q. It's been a while since I last saw the film.

But I saw Katya as a distant, hidden ideal for Ivan. In terms of her reflection on him being hidden from his consciousness.

She's far more idealistic in terms of silent goodness / valuing mindset. This is like the Stanislav Kurilov mindset. Calm, but knowing deeply that things like repression and conscription for short-sighted power goals are not ultimately acceptable.

Refined in character, nearly angelic, but how? And what does it mean? This is Ivan's unconscious puzzle.

To her, he seems to ground her. She understands him almost as a pet, so this perhaps explains a bit. But in this situation she can't yet express to him fully what the above implies for him. Her deeper consciousness is not available to him.

IMO this is where we got a lot of the emergent criminality in the 90s chaos (beyond what existed already), this disconnect. Those who can make values conscious but who will not force the message, formed the moralistic vitality of change. And those who will take action but who do not naturally tend to values form the vitality of force seeking direction. This contributes to broad chaos toward a structural vacuum. Something must be done in the idea space in order to propagate the values further. A very difficult problem for most of humanity at this point in time.

Just some thoughts though. Hope I understood some of what you were getting at. Please share your own thoughts if you would like.

I'm afraid I don't have the same analytic toolbox that you do, so I had no thoughts on them to this depth, thanks.

Something that did strike me is that, as a teenager on the other side of the iron curtain, I had been chasing girls at the local residential private school, who introduced me to anime — so the scene where Katya's friends are watching live-action japanese media seemed like a nice parallel (at least post-Glasnost) in our lives.

That's awesome :-) It's a wonderful film for that kind of retrospective cultural tourism.

Having these movies, and many others, on YouTube is a net positive. I already saw most of Tarkovsky's movies, but I found on Mosfilm's account on YT a few more good movies, it will be a good way to spend the nights during this summer.

I would like to have a simple way to get these movies offline without paying YT premium for 720p, so your links are welcome.