He
defeated the invading Swedes, earning his honorific Nevsky, on the frozen
river Neva a few years before defeating the crusading knights on frozen
Lake Peipus. To prove that nothing is as simple as it
may appear, Alexander decided it was better to switch than fight when the
Mongols came along, and collaborated with them til the end of his days. Speaking
of collaboration, a brilliant foursome is responsible for this film…
Eisenstein as director; his partner, Sergei Prokofiev, whose score for Nevsky
is probably the best "movie music" ever composed; Edward Tisse,
Eisenstein’s long-time collaborator as cinematographer; and Nikolai
Cherkasov in the title role as Alexander. Cherkasov would later appear also
in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible films, but in those he's
an overwrought, evil oil slick. Here he is, I
think, unforgettably heroic. The film was intended to stir patriotism in the
run-up to the expected confrontation with the Nazis, but when the
Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact came along in August 1939, the film had to stay in
the cans. It was, of course, given a quick national re-release after the June
1941 invasion. I’ve seen the film countless times, having screened it
often for both Russian history and Soviet cinema classes, but my closest
encounter with an element of the genius underlying this collaborative masterwork
was being present in April 1991 for a performance of the Prokofiev cantata
conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, Prokofiev’s one-time protégé. Rostropovich’s
love for the composer was palpable as he called forth
the best the National Symphony Orchestra had in an unforgettable tribute marking
Prokofiev’s hundredth birthday, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of
the fateful Operation Barbarossa. Watch it, suspend some disbelief for this
1930s warhorse, and I genuinely believe you'll like it. Among those
who went to school on Eisenstein’s first sound film, by the way, was
Laurence Olivier, whose 1945 Henry the Fifth owes much to Nevsky.
*Andrei Rublev,
1966,
directed by
Andrei Tarkovsky. The film, based on the life of the medieval
Russian icon
painter, was only shown in Russia, in a much abridged format, in 1972;
that was three years after winning the International Critics Prize at
the Cannes
Film Festival. Soviet censors edited the film, removing up to an
hour
from the original. Reading the plot description at imdb will
certainly help you understand the movie. You can also read the notes by
Alan Kimball, University of Oregon, A Guide to Fifty Minutes Worth of
"Andrei Rublev".
CTE: Far from being a masterpiece, in my opinion, the movie can
be long, disjointed
and completely non-understandable. There are some good scenes
about
the depravities of medieval Russian life and the impact that the
Mongols (Tatars) had on the Russian people: suddenly the Mongols
appear; there is terror and destruction; and then they are gone.
You get very little
sense of the intellectual and spiritual motivations of Rublev, which is
perhaps understandable
given the lack of surviving historical sources about him. We've
got one of those
color switches (Remember the Wizard
of Oz) when the final section of the movie shifts to a color
montage of some of Rublev's surviving icons, but that gives only a hint
of what
was so powerful about his work.
*Anna Karenina,
1967, directed by
Alexander Zarkhi.
CTE: There have been numerous attempts to make a movie based on
Tolstoy's novel; most are not very successful. My suggestion is
"Read
the book." This particular film does follow the novel rather
closely, with soe nice costuming, but, of course, so much had to be
left out of the movie.
The film tends to highlight the weaknesses, immorality,
depravity, /etc. of the
characters, which fit with Societ society in the mid-1960s, but that
was not quite Tolstoy's entire intention in his novel. "Read
the book" and then maybe watch the movie.
*Ballada o
Soldate (Ballad of a
Soldier), 1960,
directed by Grigorii Chukhrai. Make sure you see the sub-titled print and not the
dubbed version.
CTE: Filmed in 1959, only 14 years after World War II had ended and in the midst
of
the Thaw, sweeping the Soviet Union, the movie is unbelievably corny in places. The
cinematography is nothing
special, black and white, but if you don't cry when Alyosha finally
reaches his mother while on leave from the front, then you have no
heart!
So, it is worth watching.
BB: This was the first Soviet film I ever saw. I was an
undergraduate student taking first-semester intro course in Russian language and this
film was used as a "text" by my instructor. That is, we watched the film several
times and also used the film's audio track in language lab exercises. This
made me tire of it, and when I first taught a course in "Soviet Cinema," I omitted
Chukhrai's film. In a later version of the course, I screened Ballad of a Soldier, and
think it will always be an affecting film for traditional-age undergraduates
because Alyosha and Shura are themselves both about 20. Now that I'm
much older even than the mother character, I am still much affected by the film's pathos. It's
been called "socialist realism with a human face," and I think this is an
accurate summation.
Boris Godunov.
There are many versions available of this opera. I
watched the 1978 version of Modest Mussorgsky's opera, Boris Godunov. This is generally
considered the greatest of all Russian operas, and let me warn you that operas can be
long and slow-moving, and this is no exception. But what
makes this opera a bit unique is that the title role must be song by a bass, not a
tenor or baritone! So, the opera that I watched was filmed live at
Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre in 1978 and featured the renowned Russian bass
Evgenii Nesterenko in the title role. Ok, it is a bit long, and at places
Nesterenko seems to be lacking any real pathos, but at the very least watch the
magnificent coronation scene. There is also available a 1954 version of the
opera, also filmed at the Bolshoi, that stars Aleksandr Pirogov. Finally, there is a
1986 dramatic version based on Aleksandr Pushkin’s story. This version is directed by
Sergei Bondarchuk with Bondarchuk also playing the lead role as Godunov. The drama has
received much praise for its outstanding photography and production design. So, enjoy this
most Russian of Russian historical tales in whichever version you choose.
Brat (Brother), 1997, directed by Aleksei Balabanov. The movie deals with the seamy underside of life in St. Petersburg after the collapse of the soviet world. A brother moves to the citt to be with his brother, who is already an underworld hit man, but it is the younger brother, new to the city, who really thrives as an assasin dealing with the drugs, crime and music of the city. One is left wondering if the criminal is the victim or the hero. Pretty violent, although not near as violent as a Hollywood film would have been dealing with the same subject.
Screen shot from Battleship Potemkin
*Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin), 1925,
directed by Sergei Eisenstein. The film depicts the mutiny of
sailors aboard the Battleship Potemkin
during the 1905 Russian Revolution. The original mutiny took
place 14-25 June 1905. Sailors protested the quality of the meat
being
served them, but an official doctor
said that it was ok for human consumption. When the sailor
leading the
delegation
to the officers was killed , a mutiny ensued, and the senior officers
on the ship were killed. The ship
arrived at Odesa on the 15th hoping to arrouse the support of workers for the mutiny.
City
authorities did allow the burial of the dead sailor but would not grant
an amnesty to the mutineers. The ships guns
then briefly bombarded the city. Eventually, the sailors ended up
in
Romania where
they were given safe passage to Western Europe.
CTE: The film was originally commissioned
by the Soviet government to
commemorate the 1905 Revolution. Eisenstein then chose to focus on the
mutiny of the sailors on the Battleship Potemkin in Odesa. The
sailors had revolted because of
their absolutely horrible service conditions (including rancid meat)
and the unrest in Russian in 1905 as a result of the Russo-Japanese
war. Although the recreation of the historical details of the
incident
leaves much to be desired, the film is still an Eisenstein triumph with
his "rhythmic editing" technique and the famous Odesa Steps scene in which the Cossacks gun down rioters and innocent bystanders. The actors
in the film were
amateurs, selected by Eisenstein because of their "rightness" for the
roles. Remember this film was shot in 1925, a relatively good year for
the Bolshevik Regime, and reflects the Bolshevik view of the world at
that time.
Robert Brown, Assistant Professor of Film, Loudoun Campus: Even
though Potemkin appears to have lost
some of its luster among film critics as being one of the finest films ever
made, the film is still considered quite powerful due to the
intensity served to viewers by director Sergei Eisenstein in the scene
known as the "Odesa Steps Sequence." If D.W. Griffith,
in Birth of a Nation was able to transform
film into an art form with the "shot," then Eisenstein, in the "Odesa Step
Sequence" made the emerging art form more malleable of space and time
using the technique of montage editing. The sequence, even by
today's standards of editing, is majestic, and at
the same time, horrific, due to the mixture of images and the expansion
of time and rhythm parlayed by Eisenstein. While it seems in most
modern-day films editing is used to collapse time in order to make the
drama presented more intense (see any "Action" film of today), Eisenstein
in does the opposite. And in so doing, presents
to us what seems a kind of surreal time frame of expansion that prolongs
the drama on film and makes us not only see but feel with horrific
intensity.
BB: Eisenstein’s Potemkin (pronounced Po-tchom-kin) remains a
cinematic touchstone. It’s a staple of "ten best" movie lists, including
the one done every ten years (beginning in 1952) by Sight and Sound (the
2002 list had it at #7). Critics always acknowledge Eisenstein’s brilliant
montage editing ("Art is conflict," he wrote in Film Form, and he was always
striving for a "dialectical" clash of images.) but often find this film "unlikable" (Pauline
Kael). In the still breath-taking "Odesa Steps" sequence, there are 112 cuts flying
past in no more than about 60 seconds.
Another Screen shot from Battleship Potemkin
(a woman who has just been sabred by a cossack)
*Chapayev (Chapayev),
1934, directed by
Georgy Vasilyev and Sergei Vasilyev.
CTE: Despite the endless kudos for this film (for example,
“vivid,
multi-leveled biographical/historical drama that remains as
gut-wrenchingly powerful today as when first released,” Video
Yesteryear), it takes a lot of patience to sit through the ninety
minutes of this film. Extremely simplistic, but then again, not
sure
what more could be expected out of Russia in 1934, the early years of the Stalinist regine. There is
nothing
technically-innovative to the film or its cinematography. In the movie,
you
will see one of the hallmark features of early Russian cinema, crowds
of people running everywhere. Look, the Russian Civil War was not
this
clear-cut (good guys-bad guys); nor was it this easily won; nor was it so bloodless. The
film, based on the memoirs of commissar Dmitrii Furmanov, probably does
not do true justice to the exploits of Vasilii Chapayev, killed in
action in 1919 while commanding the Red Army's Twenty-Fifth infantry
division against the Whites. I kept thinking of the movie Burnt
by the Sun as I
watched this movie. If Chapayev had lived, he would probably have
ended up as the main character in Burnt
by the Sun. Anyway, this movie
is Soviet myth-making at its best. The movie debuted on 7
November
1934, the seventeenth anniversary of the revolution.
Charge of the Light Brigade, 1936, directed by Michael Curtiz.
CTE: This epic Hollywood film stars Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, and it
is worth watching to just see these two stars on the big screen. The movie has almost nothing in the
film about Russia, and it does not even have much in connection with the Crimean War; and
there is little historically relevant here too. Most of the film focuses on the British imperial
mission in India, and the film can be considered quite “orientalist” in character. The idea of "orientalism" roughly
means that distorted western ideas of what constituted life in the "east" are substituted
for the reality of what that life was really like. For example, the movie images of the
glamourous court life of the sultan are reflective of imagined, western
ideas of what that court life was. So, this film actually reveals quite a bit about the
mindset of the 1930s when it was made. So to sum up, there is little historical accuracy here,
a lot of elaborate sets, lot of action, great stars, and worth seeing.
Charge of the Light Brigade, 1968, directed by Tony Richardson.
CTE: This movie is one of the reasons that I do not like a lot of British
film, the slow, melodramatic pace, the stupid romances, the Victorian costuming and
speech, the posturing. The film tries to be an anti-war film (1968!) and depicts the
senseless nature of the charge of the Light Brigade at
Balaclava (25 October 1854) when six hundred British cavalrymen were
essentially lead to attack a fortified Russian position with heavy
casualties, due to the incompetence of British officers--no doubt, they truly were incompetent. The film is also intended
to be an antidote to the stirring poem of Alfred Lord Tennyson. This is an
oversimplified view of class structured British society, and
the film does not come close to capturing the brutality of the
Crimean campaign (from either Russian or the Anglo-French sides). An awful lot of men
died there in terrible conditions. There is absolutely no examination of
the Russian side in this movie. The only redeeming quality of the
film is in the truly great animation scenes.
Chelovek s kinoapparatom (The Man with a Movie Camera), 1929, directed by Dziga Vertov
CTE: Well, this is about an hour long silent movie recently
restored with orchestral accompainment from the director's original
musical notes. It was clearly experimental at the time it was
created, establishing several possible new directions in "world"
cinema. There are basically no words or sub-titles, just the film
snips of one day in the life of a Russian city (filmed in Odesa,
Moscow and St. Petersburg). I thought, what the heck, I'll skim
through it and see what I can learn about life in the late 1920s in the
Soviet Union. I ended up watching twice and learning a lot--the
sports scenes are just incredible and much better that what Leni
Riefenstahl would do with Olympia in 1936. I was absolutely
amazed by the camera work of Mikhail Kaufman, and the editing, a kind
of hyper-quick editing, of Vertov who used all kinds of different
cinematic techniques in the film. Big thumbs up.
*Dama s sobachkoi (Lady with the Dog), 1959, directed by
Iosif Kheifits.
CTE: Well, if you want to get a glimpse of what Anton Chekhov, the Russian dramatist, is all
about without going to see one of his plays on stage or reading one of
them, then you can watch this move. I've never been a big fan of
Chekhov, the slow dialogue, slow activity, slow movements, pauses, each
line slowly delivered as if it has fallen from the sky drenched with
subliminal meaning, and so on. Some careful fast-forwarding will
get you through some of the slow moments of the film that deals with an
extra-marital relationship in turn-of-the-century Russia. The dog
is fun, anyways. Black-and-white film in 1959!
Dersu Uzala, 1975,
directed by Akira Kurosawa. Won the 1975 Academy Award for Best
Foreign Language Film.
CTE: The movie was co-scripted and directed by Kurosawa, shortly
after he had failed to kill himself in a suicide attempt, and it was based on
Vladimir Arseniev's (1872-1930) In the Jungles of Ussuri.
I was going to make some inane remarks like, "It's the Russian
Jeremiah Johnson" (or Grizzly Adams), but that would be demeaning to
this brilliant movie. The viewer gets some feel for the vastness
of Siberia and how pristine Siberia still was at the turn of the
twentieth century. Well worth watching. Many thumbs up!
Dezertir (Deserter), 1934, directed by
Vsevolod Pudovkin.
CTE: The film is loosely based on a strike by dock workers in Hamburg,
Germany and the German workers sending a team of representatives to the Soviet
Union for advice and support. You can tell that the film was made
in 1934 in regards to the propaganda for the heavy industrialization of
Russia being carried out under the first and second
five-year-plans os Talin. Kind of an interesting film. Very early, Russian sound film!
Detstvo Gorkogo (The Childhood of Maksim Gorkii, 1938, directed by
Mark Donskoi.
CTE: This was the first of director Mark Donskoi's trilogy based
on Gorkii's
three-volume memoirs, one of Russia's most important writers of the
twentieth century and a kind-of supporter of the Bolshevik
regime. Stunning cinematography along the Volga River really
captures the feel of nineteenth-century Russia. Sure some of
Gorkii's memoirs
had to be changed to fit the conditions of 1938 Stalinist
Russia--Gorkii was dead by this time--and I'm
not sure if any movie could quite capture in realistic terms the
brutality surrounding Gorkii's childhood, but this film is
definitely worth seeing to understand something of the lower classes in
Russia.
*Doctor Zhivago, 1965, directed by
David Lean. Movie won the 1965 Golden Globe for Best Picture.
CTE: This
was another of David Lean's magnificent Hollywood epic films from the
1960s loosely based on Boris Pasternak's novel, Dr. Zhivago,
which had led to
Pasternak being awarded the Noble Prize for Literature. The
publication of that novel in 1958 outside of Russia had caused real problems for
Pasternak in Russia, and he "agreed" to turn down the Nobel
Prize. This film is mostly a Hollywood love story, not
shot in Russia, not using Russian actors, maybe using some Balalaika
music for authenticity. Despite a lot of problems with the film
there are some magnificent acting performances (Rod Steiger as
Komarovsky, Tom Courtenay as
Pasha Strelnikov, Alec Guinness as Yevgraf). Then there is the
finger-snap scene as Alec Guinness
(Yevgraf) appears in Zhivago's apartment; the movie is worth
watching just
for that one scene. But read the book instead; it is much different.
Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to
Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), directed by Stanley Kubrick.
CTE: One of the greatest movies ever made and featuring an all-star cast
with Peter Sellers playing three different roles. Unbelievable
black
comedy, maybe the best film satire ever made, that pokes fun at the
seriousness of the Cold War just a few years after the tensions of the
Cuban Missile Crisis. In the film, a crazy American general
launches a
nuclear attack against the Russians to preserve our “bodily fluids";
things go downhill from there. You must see this film to get an
idea of how
ridiculous much of the Cold War's peacock strutting really was.
Dvenadtsat Stulyev (The Twelve Chairs), 1971, directed by
Leonid Gaidai.
CTE: This is based on the on the satirical Russian novel, The
Twelve Chairs, written by Ilya Ilf and Evgenii Petrov.
Supposedly the family jewels have been hidden in one of a set of
twelve chairs from a rich family before the Revolution. Now it's
1927, and one of the relatives and a con man attempt to find the money;
very funny, slapstick comedy. There is also a version by Mel
Brooks.
Fiddler on the Roof, 1971,
directed by Norman Jewison. Won the 1971 Golden Globe for Best
Picture Musical or Comedy.
CTE: Despite the great songs, the comedy, the fact that
this
was/is essentially a Broadway musical, Fiddler
on the Roof still offers
excellent insight into the complex Russian-Jewish relationship at the
turn of the twentieth century and the nature of Jewish family life in
the Russian countryside. Stereotypes aside, most Jews that lived
in the Russian Empire were poor peasants, and competition for scarce
economic resources could lead to trouble between Russian and Jews. Remember
there were a lot of Jews
living in the Western provinces of the Russian Empire before World War
I, upwards of seventy percent of the population in some areas. Russian authorities inflamed anti-semitic
sentiment among the Russian peasants to keep Russian minds off more
serious problems. It was the Russians who invented the
“pogrom,” the anti-Jewish riot. Topol, in the role of
Tevye, is brilliant.
The Fixer, 1968,
directed by John Frankenheimer.
CTE: This is a film adaptation of Bernard Malamud's novel of the
same name; the novel won a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize.
The story is largely based on the notorious anti-Semitic Beilis
case in pre-revolutionary Russia when Mendel Beilis, a Jew, was accused
of a ritual murder of a Christian boy in Kyiv. After being held
in prison under brutal conditions from 1911 to 1913, Beilis was only
finally brought to trial after enormous public pressure from around the
world was applied to the tsarist regime; Beilis was found not guilty. The film is very well done and
will quickly show you everything that was bad about life in tsarist
Russia under Nicholas II.
Груз 200 (Cargo 200), 2007, directed by Aleksei Balabanov
CTE: The film is set in Russia in late 1984, during the Russian War in Afghanistan, and the title of the film refers to the zinc coffins in which the Russia dead were sent back to Russia from Afghanistan and the listing on an airplane's manifest as "Cargo 200." The film has been relatively well-reviewd, but it is hard to make sense of it, just as I guess it was hard to make sense of what was going on in Russia at the time. Gives a very grim portrayal of life and alcoholism in the Russian provinces.
*Idi i Smotri (Come and See), 1985,
directed by Elem Klimov. The movie, which is based on real life
experiences, deals with a very young teenager who "fought" with Belarus
partisans in 1943 against the brutal German occupation. He is a witness, powerless to prevent any of the horrors from happening. If you log into Canvas and look under documents, you will see further commentary on the movie.
CTE: Since my grandparents came from a small village in
Belarus, this movie was especially difficult for me to
watch. The movie has
some very brutal scenes that are about as accurate as a movie can get
dealing with the realities of World War II in Russia and how horrible,
bitterly fought the war was. The movie has some typical Russian
weirdness about it (the strange girl, the bog
scene, the sepia-tinted flashback scene near the end of the movie), but
is definitely worth watching.
*Ivan Grozny I, Ivan Grozny II (Ivan
the Terrible pt. 1 and pt. 2), 1945, 1958 directed by Sergei Eisenstein,
music by Sergei Prokofiev. Part II was suppressed by Stalin in 1946 and
not
released until 1958 because of the allegedly negative depiction of
the oprichnina (secret police.)