Description:

In 1930, the inventor Chudakov invents a time machine but experiences great difficulties from the Soviet bureaucracy. Based on the play by Mayakovsky.

A "banya" is a kind of Slavic sauna or bathhouse used for cleaning. Mayakovsky explained in an article that the bath (or banya) in the title represents the washing-away of bureaucrats. Some of his article appears as dialogue in the film, during the scene where Conquerbonce asks about the meaning of the banya.

An excellent article about the history and impact of this rather unusual film has been written by Animation Obsessive, who also had a large role in creating the new and improved English subtitles.

In the film and original play, Pont Kitsch speaks in gibberish that's somewhere between Russian and English. To create the effect, Mayakovsky constructed "English" sentences out of assorted Russian words that vaguely sound like English ones. The audience heard nonsense with a double meaning in Russian and English. It's not really possible to capture the effect in translation, so Cook-Horujy rendered Pont Kitsch's dialogue phonetically, and these subtitles do the same.

When Ivan Ivanovich says he visited the house of "Aunty Dühring" in Liverpool, it's one of the bureaucrats' many mistakes -- some of which won't be as obvious to modern viewers as they were in their original context. Ivanovich has confused Friedrich Engels with the title of an 1878 book Engels wrote, Anti-Dühring, and Manchester (where Engels once lived) with Liverpool.

In the video above, some 4:3 scenes are unfortunately stretched to widescreen.