Chemi baba (1929) aka My Grandmother

This Georgian silent film, made at the tail end of the early Soviet era is a forgotten classic if ever there was such a thing. Taking place in a world of stuffy bureaucrats, My Grandmother is something like a Soviet manifesto imagined by Buster Keaton and Fritz Lang. The unique blend of slapstick, expressionism, animation, and satire anticipates the works of Monty Python and Terry Gilliam by several decades. Basically, the protagonist is a lazy bureaucrat who loses his job after being impaled with a giant fountain pen hurled at him by the Communist Youth League. Out of work, and unable to support her lavish lifestyle, his wife threatens to divorce him if he does not immediately find work. And so he begs the man who took his position to help him out. His advice? Find a grandmother and pester her for a job. By grandmother, he means one of the higher ups in the corporation. Naturally things escalate and reach an explosively absurd conclusion. My Grandmother's satirical treatment of the bureaucratic class is nothing short of acidic; the film even ends with the proclamation, "DEATH TO THE BUREAUCRATS!" But this is also one funny movie, full of bizarre visual gags, and gallows humor aplenty. Its mix of so many diverse elements is so startlingly modern that if it had been filmed with sound, it could pass as a modern film. My Grandmother is a landmark of comical cinema, and one of the last great works of the silent era.