The Battle of Russia
US, 1943
Directed by Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak
It’s kind of a false
division, but what if you were to pit entertainment against education, and have
this film represent the better part? It's no
contest, overwhelmingly. This isn’t
Hollywood rescuing and compromising dull information; it’s information rendered
with the spirit it deserves, and producing the electricity native to it. It's not often that you can say this, but blessings on the war department! They’re motivating an audience, and eventually an entire population. They’re propagandizing,
even, of course. But in this case it's progaganda in the
very best sense. Like the NFB/Stuart
Legg films that precede and then accompany these Why We Fight pieces, emotion comes always and only after a proper
and very detailed establishing of context.
Facts, two parts worth, selected and ordered and interpreted, are way
more exciting than show biz can ever be.
First because they’re so much more important than frivolous escapism. Second because they’re so much more
interesting! In the present instance our filmmakers even
dispense with Great Men, in favour of acknowledging the Soviet collective. They’d reap the whirlwind for that seeming
miscalculation, but in fact they are right, anthropologically and morally. The right thing to do is to tell their story,
not your cultural or ideological take on their story. And what a story! This feels like the Churchill museum, in
London, and as follows. After the
unspeakable hardship (not fully rendered, for modesty’s and decency’s sake) and
incalculable loss of the Leningrad siege, and in the impossible stand at
Stalingrad, this is that rare historical reduction, that rare historical
simplicity. This was the most important
thing happening in the whole world, and this was the whole world’s salvation. The result is so thrilling, and so moving.
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| Memorial |
Blockade
Compiled 2006
Directed by Sergei Loznitsa
Leningrad, from the inside. This is challengingly and beautifully
unvarnished. So much quieter than the
noble Capra film, and an amazing supplement thereto (or vice versa!). So much of the indescribable, incalculable
event isn’t here. Some of what remains
is surprisingly run-of-the-mill, or everyday.
Look at those wide streets. Look
at how powerfully wintery it is. Look at
how the feudal, the ancient operates right alongside of the modern. And of course as the siege continues things
get increasingly feudal, which is the quotidian flip side of the astonishing
idea, the only partially reflected reality of 800,000 dead.
The foley work (sound effects—this footage was originally recorded
silently) is very effective, and respectful too. It pushes us out of the realm of merely
historical stock footage into that of sparse elegy. Here is a great demonstration of how history
is an account assembled out of raw materials, and that inevitably, even
advantageously, there are many accounts of any event, no matter what the
magnitude. And with the power and weight
of even the little stuff here, you can’t but conclude that everything in the
world is finally magnitudinous. What a fortuitous
discovery, what an essential addition to the record. (Special note: water, sleds, the mass
graves—it’s not just Nazi atrocity, but the terrible necessity of disposing of
all those bodies [and what a range of transport and affect!], the fireworks,
the hanging!)
