RUSSIAN WARS Movie Review

Russian Wars on Screen

The Soviet government of the 1920s controlled all aspects of Russian filmmaking. The medium that was just beginning to learn how to entertain mass audiences in Europe and America was appropriated by the Soviets to teach and indoctrinate, and so those first Soviet films are of limited appeal—mostly historic—to today's videophiles. That said, the early Russian filmmakers invented or perfected many of the basic techniques that are still in use today. The most famous example is editing. An acute shortage of film stock during the Revolution forced students at the Moscow Film School to experiment with what they had on hand. They learned how to take short pieces of film, which had nothing to do with each other when they were shot, and combine them to create a coherent narrative.

The result of the Russian work came to the attention of a worldwide audience with Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. The Odessa steps sequence is one of the most famous examples of early audience manipulation. That baby carriage is as indelible an image of the silent era as Chaplin's Little Tramp and Griffiths's Klansmen.

Eisenstein would attempt more conventional propaganda—conventional by Western standards—in Alexander Nevsky. There he translates Russian legends into a flag-waving anti-Nazi polemic that ends with another famous scene, the Teutonic Knights fighting on the frozen lake. It's a moment that demonstrates the enduring power of film. Despite some absolutely ridiculous costumes and dialogue that have gone before, the big finish is an involving, well-choreographed battle scene.

Sergei and Georgi Vasilyev are more realistic, but no less ideological, in Chapayev, the heroic tale of a peasant warrior of the revolution. The 1934 film casts White Russians as Nazi invaders.

The 1956 King Vidor War and Peace certainly owes more to Hollywood than to the Moscow Film School, and its main value now lies in an attractive, youthful cast led by Audrey Hepburn and

Henry Fonda. The same might be said of Julie Christie and Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago, but David Lean treats the Russian Revolution seriously. Despite the fact that it was made during the coldest years of the Cold War, the film is remarkably even handed.