Alexander Nevsky (1938)

Alexander Nevsky had terrible hair, but a nice tunic.  He lived a nine-hundred-ish years ago, and was a prince and a saint and a general all at once.  He was the Christian Mohammed, the Orthodox Jeanne d'Arc, and he kept a peace with the Mongols, that the Russians of Rus might war against the Teutons, who were all a load of jerks.

This, then, is an anti-German film made in thirties Russia.  It was intensely popular, then banned when the government realised how nice the Germans were, then unbanned and intensely popular again when the Germans became the enemies once more - all this inside three years.  It was an exciting time.

Parp!

The film is directed by Sergei Eisenstein, who made that other handsomely-edited propaganda piece 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925).  Like that film, 'Alexander Nevsky' is much easier to appreciate than to enjoy, though it surely has its merits.  One such merit is the famous musical score by Prokofiev - at least, I've often heard it's famous.  I wasn't sure I recognised it, but it had a great power to make me exclaim 'uh oh' and (more crudely) 'oh crap' at my television whenever it indicated the stirrings of impending catastrophe.  The Teutons, you see, are very horrid enemies, and whenever the film cuts to them in their vast and amazing helmets the dialogue disappears and the music takes over.  Though 'Алекса́ндр Не́вский' is a talkie, it's a silent film at heart, meaning the Catholic foe are presented for the most part as mute, unutterably malign, communicating only through helmet-size and loud instruments.

The other thing for which the movie is famed is the battle on the ice, which takes up the latter third of the duration.  It's a tremendous spectacle, and it left me thinking that Eisenstein could have made a really watchable 'Birth of a Nation' (1915).  At the time it was the greatest battle in all of cinema, and it's hard to know when it was surpassed.  The battle is immensely long, showing the overall flow of the fight, and great amounts of detail, from seething crowds to small moments of character or comedy.  It's easy to see how we got from this to The Battle of Helm's Deep, and though I'm sure Tolkein had some experience of real-life battles I wouldn't be surprised if he had seen and enjoyed this film.

Alexander Nevsky says 'Fish'.

I thought I would like Alexander more than I did.  He turned out to be rather a dull sort of fellow with little to humanise him.  He did his job, winning the war, well and functionally, and showed little reason to be posthumously canonised.  A fair résumé for a hero in the age of Stalin, but not great for a movie protagonist.

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Don't buy the DVD - the print is soft and shaky - not to an offensive degree, but it could look much better.  Get yourself the soundtrack instead, which comes with Prokofiev's music to 'Lieutenant Kijé' (1934) too.
 

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

Occasionally, recently, I've grown weary of The Penciltonian, of having to watch a pair of films a week (as enjoyable as this is) matched to the years I haven't yet covered, then write them up.  Some days I look eagerly to December, when I can count it as a complete work, and update it only when I have a great urge, or a fine and unlikely film to speak about.

Sometimes, though, I find a film like this one, 'Человек с киноаппаратом', and the project seems worthwhile.  The whole scheme, and its attached blog, started so that I could find such amazing works as this, that I might watch films I would otherwise miss entirely - and this find has excited me more than any.

Three trams.

Chairs!  Trams!  A typewriter!  A telephone!  An I-don't-know-what!  The crowds swarm, the movie theatre warms up, the band begins to play.  The film is a torrent of images, tiny clips of life, and of objects in the Russia of the late 1920s.  It's a documentary, I suppose.  A silent film with no intertitles, no story and no characters.  Factories, engineering, trams and fast trains.  Horses and parasols.  The occasional car.  We even see a birth.

I had thought silent movies had peaked a couple of years earlier with 'Metropolis' (1927), when they'd grown as big and confident as they could.  1929 is down in my mind as the year talkies became the standard, with 'Hallelujah' and 'Sunny Side Up' and the Marx Brothers - but I didn't know about this film, which does pictures without sound - and without any commentary - so well, so intimately, giving us all the scale of the city without the need for sets, and with real people passing by as themselves, not silent crowds responding melodramatically to catastrophe.

Director Dziga Vertov had no interest in fiction, and thought the cinema had far more important matters to attend to.  Spurred on by a desire for authenticity, and with (in apparent contradiction to this) a rich imagination for special effects, Vertov filmed some of everything, and together with his wife Elizaveta crafted an absurdly fast montage, a picture of three cities in what is now the Ukraine.

Vertov in a moving car, filming another

A dying man in an ambulance, a sequence of the ambulance driving right across the screen cut together with fire-engines going left - or rather each holding steady, as the emergency vans are shot from parallel vehicles.  Weeping, sorting, mending.  A shampoo and a shave, intercut with the sharpening of an axe.  Russia looks warmer than I'd imagined.  Not comfortable, but full of life.

It's the sort of film Peter Greenaway might have put together in the silent age.  Like this, his early films eschewed characters and actors on the screen, but they justified their sets of pictures with narrators telling stories tenuously connected to the real, visual story.  This film doesn't have that opportunity, so uses music, with various different scores having been attached to different releases over the years.  The version I watched uses Greenaway-collaborator Michael Nyman, probably my favourite movie composer, with his obsessive rhythms, his minimal, urgent chords, deployed excellently here to support the astounding pace of the film.  It's just the sound I like.

Fire-truck!

Suddenly in the middle of the film the flow ceases.  We're given, not a moving image, but a still shot, a single frame repeated.  We cut to a lady, Elizaveta Svilova, trimming the film-strip with scissors.  A moment later, the frames she's been looking at, frozen shots of blurred action, come to life, and what we know as only a set of frames is played for us as motion.  What an excellent education this film is, teaching us that films are films, that what we see is not just the truth, or the way things really look, or the natural way to tell the story in images, but a deliberately constructed piece of work, something that has been crafted and engineered, over which decisions have been made by cameraman and editor.  I'm extremely taken with this movie, as you may note.

This isn't anyone's story but the director's.  This is the tale of how Dziga Vertov walked around with a camera and gathered footage.  It wants us to remember that there's a camera on the set as well, and that everything is for our benefit, like in 'Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Leonard Cohen' (1965), when Cohen assures the audience that we haven't seen him acting naturally; caveat emptor.  The film sparkles with Vertov's amazing ingenuity and humour, reversing footage, bolstering a magician's act with trick photography, and giving us, through the wonder of stop-motion, a dancing lobster, a tripod that puts itself away and a camera that can take a bow.  The fun for the audience, then as now, is working out how it's been done.

What great shooting!  What great editing!  And after all these years, what great music, confirming and emphasising the excellent energy and drive of the pictures, an energy that exceeds anything else I've seen this year.  Few films have better captured and held my attention.

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Available on DVD, and also available on YouTube.  I think this is an amazing film, and would urge you to watch it.  It'll only take an hour.

Stalker (1979)

Outside the Zone, everything is sepia and slow

I'm afraid I'm inevitably going to spoil the end of 'Stalker', not that it ends with a twist.  No, it's just that the things I expected all the way through, which I rather looked forward to, never came to pass.

This is a Russian SF movie, a horror, perhaps, though nothing especially horrific occurs, set in a mysterious Zone, which few dare visit.  The Zone, we hear, must be respected.  Those who disrespect this grassy locale will find themselves caught in horrific and unpredictable traps, twisted, killed, destroyed.  At the heart of The Zone is a room where your heart's desire will be granted, but the less direct route is always safer.  So, after a (deliberately boring) first half hour ending with a journey into The Zone (on a wonderful little railway cart), our three protagonists, The Writer, the Professor and the Stalker take the most rambling and indirect path possible, rather than just walking in a straight line for about a hundred yards and either dying horrifically or ending the film early.

Inside the Zone, everything is ostensibly deadly

This circuitous route through a capricious realm of sudden death makes for an extremely tense film.  It's drawn out even longer by lengthy pauses to rest, close eyes, to think, and talk philosophy.  In general this heightens the tension, and the great length of each camera-shot leaves open the constant and growing suggestion that any moment now the Zone will do its thing, and one of the travellers will be punished with death.  It's really extremely fraught.  Until, that is, the viewer realises that the horrible deaths are never going to come.  In the original novel, 'Roadside Picnic', characters perish in the meat-grinder and in many other grizzly ways.  Not so in the movie; they speak of the murderous traps, and the chance of our characters dying very suddenly and in ways that kinda serve them right always seems terrifyingly imminent, but it just doesn't happen.  The anticipation of blood and mysterious violence makes its non-appearance tremendously disappointing.

Now, there's an exciting film that could have been made here, though a rather shallower one.  Pump up the cast of characters with some trap-fodder, cut the rambling, improvised-sounding philosophy, and have the most folly-filled adventurers explode in showers of blood once in a while and you have a crowd-pleasing thriller - a charmless work, but such films do well enough at the box-office.  Perhaps I was raised in a more bloodthirsty generation?

The Stalker's daughter regards beverage conveyances.
Stalker, here, doesn't mean seedy deviant, but hunter.

After the difficult opening half-hour, I found most of the film quite satisfying, if low on incident.  I reassured myself that it was far better that 'Na Srebrnym Globie' (1977).  Both are two-and-a-half-hour ventures into the gritty and Wintery SF of the Eastern Bloc, and both films ran into political trouble for their miserable vision of the life as grey, dirty, bleak and awful.  In this, though, I knew who all the characters were, where they were going and what might happen to them.  Had the ending not undermined all that went before, or had the body of the film have been less gruelling, I might have come out of it all more positively.  For the last half-hour I waited for the film to end, and reflected on how this Penciltonian project prompts me to watch films I wouldn't otherwise have watched, and finish them so that you, dear viewer, need not.

Opai suggests that I've failed to see the film's merits, or have written it off unduly.  Perhaps I'll revisit it some day to see what more I can find in it, but it won't be soon.

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I realised after I watched it that it's a film by Andrei Tarkovsky.  He's meant to be rather good, you know.  He did 'Solaris' (1972), didn't he?

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

This is one of three very different Russian Revolution films I'd like to cover during this 100-films experiment - and the only one in Russian.  The trio are 'Nicholas and Alexandra' (1971) which I like very much indeed, 'Doctor Zhivago' (1965) which I don't like at all, though I concede that it has great artistic merit; and this, 'Броненосец «Потёмкин»', which I admire as a piece of work, but can't claim to have a great preference on either way.  We don't watch propaganda films because they make us happy, but because they're well-wrought, interesting and historically significant.  One doesn't watch 'Triumph of the Will' (1934) through a joy at seeing Hitler's little face.  By no means!  It's a major piece of history in itself, and has brass bands and rich oratory (however objectionable) to keep the attention.

So it is with 'Battleship Potemkin'.  The propaganda films that last long enough to be counted as classics tend to be worth watching for their artistry and innovative techniques.  Most striking here are the montages, the tensest moments juxtaposing images - the mutinous sailors quailing beneath a tarpaulin, a firing squad of their fellows tensing to fire, the fire-and-brimstone priest thumping his hand with a golden cross, all cut together to produce the most emotive reaction in the spectator.  To make us angry at the unfairness, to see the suffering of fellow workers and the cruelty of oppressive officers.

It makes a compelling case.  I admire these sailors and pity the people of Odessa, gunned down by the Tsarist troopers for supporting the mutinous cause.  It's a revolution easy to support, but history has left it seeming bitter.  I don't know much about Soviet Russia, but I know I wouldn't want to live there.  The revolution, as in the microcosm of the Battleship, got rid of the most visible villains, but in the long-term life got no better.  If I didn't know this, such a film might have incited me to action.

It's constructed with an amazing clarity of vision based on political conviction.  Such fervour in the hands of an artist can produce incredible works, and the whole thing is about as striking and sure of itself as one could hope for in a ninety-year-old movie.

One of the delights of silent films is the choice of musical scores that tend to accrue.  I've watched several recently which gave me a selection of different musical styles to choose from, and director Sergei Eisenstein was well aware that this was how the future would be.  He said that 'Battleship Potemkin' would always be relevant so long as a new soundtrack was created for it every 20 years.  On this occasion, I watched it with the 2004 score by the Pet Shop Boys - a combination currently available only on Youtube, though film and music are both purchasable separately.  The new(ish) soundtrack is something one could dance to, or at least gyrate rhythmically to, and certainly gives the film a boost and an immediacy, but has the effect of making the flickering pictures seem ancient, as well as timeless.  Perhaps Youtube's diabolical picture quality played a part here - I know twenties films are capable of scrubbing up rather better than this, and I'm sure the film is available in a more beautiful state on shiny disc.  So yes, as I like the Pet Shop Boys' style, so I shall watch out for any future release marrying this soundtrack to a cleaned up print on blu-ray.  It's got to happen eventually.

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Why not watch a far better quality copy than I did? Or listen to the music - it's quite something.

Lieutenant Kijé (1934)

This Russian comedy, 'Поручик Киже', has been largely forgotten (except, perhaps, in Russia, where I presently have no data-gatherers), and seems to be wholly unavailable on VHS or DVD.  I had thought it might have lapsed into the public domain and been exploited by some cheap DVD producer on the basis of its famous soundtrack - but since this has not happened I can only guess the Prokofiev estate is blocking it, since the music he wrote for it, while rightly famed (you almost certainly know the Troika) is crudely performed and recorded, and often accompanied here by bawdy lyrics.

The whole film can be found on Youtube, however, where I would suggest you might give it your attention.  'This is the story of a spelling mistake,' as we read at the film's beginning.  I'll give you a brief idea of the premise.  It's 1800, and the Tsar of Russia is asleep.  The palace guards, up until then marching with the help of early split-screen effects, stop where the are, mid-step, toes in the air.  Everybody stops because the Tsar is asleep.

Some guy, elsewhere in the palace - if the film names any of its characters, bar Kijé, I have remained oblivious - is being seduced by a woman pretending to be a cat.  She pinches his bottom, and he cries aloud, in surprise rather than pain.  According to the English subtitles, he shouts 'Ga-oo-ah-oo-ah-r-r-r-...!!', which is loud enough to wake the sleeping Tsar, and apparently sounds enough like the Russian word for 'guard' that the awoken tyrant demands to know who has called for a guard - and begins planning punishments for them.

This picture describes the film better than my words could.

The guards' daily orders are being transcribed onto fresh paper by a clerk who manages, though a no-doubt rib-tickling Russian pun, to make a duplication of syllables into the name 'Kijé'.  One of those things that doesn't quite work in English, but never mind.  Before the mistake can be corrected the nonexistent Kijé gets the blame for shouting, and is promptly banished to Siberia - with, as they say, hilarious consequences.  The rest of the film sees him recalled and married off to the jocular lady pictured above, who relishes the prospect of being married to (by that point) a general, even one who doesn't exist.

Perhaps appropriately, the film's comedy loses something in translation from screen to the page (though I know this blog is also on a screen), but the whole film is enjoyably silly, well put-together, and especially worth watching if you already have some familiarity with Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé suite.  It has a Christmassy flavour - perhaps down to the sleigh-bells, the Siberian snow, the booziness and the folk-tale quality.  There's something of pantomime to it, and it fills eighty minutes comfortably enough.  I can't offer the film high praise, but I've watched it twice and both times found it engaging and amusing - and both times forgotten almost every detail within a few days.