THE LAST BOLSHEVIK
A film review by Max Hoffmann
Copyright 1993 Max Hoffmann
North American Premiere at SF Film Festival Rating: 10 (scale of 1->10) France 1993, 120 minutes. video In Russian and English with English subtitles Camera/Editor: Chris Marker Producer: Michael Kustow
IN A NUTSHELL: a highly engrossing video about the career and struggles of a cinematic Russian genius, little-known even to his own people. Hypnotic archival clips make you yearn to see the original films in their entirety. Sheds much needed light on little known aspects of life in the Soviet Union from Lenin through Stalin. Transcends the deadness of many "talking heads" interview. The memories shared are immediate and highly personal.
The film/video is structured in the form of six "letters" to the deceased Alexander Ivanovitch Medvedkin, which explore and expose his career as a driving force behind the pioneering "film trains" of the October Revolution. Medvedkin is still being rediscovered, even in the Soviet Union, because he was perennially censored by bureaucrats who couldn't understand the brilliance of his craft. Ironically, Medvedkin was a "pure" communist, who always held to the vision of Lenin. But as time went on he found himself surrounded by communists who "faked" being communists. His survival into old age (89 years) is a miracle and an inspiration for "silenced" artisitic visionaries worldwide. The survival of nine of his "never shown" films to our present day is nothing less than a miracle of Biblical proportions.
To many Americans, the details of how these Soviet financed projects were censored or shelved will seem uncomfortably "close to home" in our era of Jesse Helms, the NEA and the Christian Right's determination to cut out paper plate sized fig leaves for healthy depictions of the human form. Though the Soviets weren't driven by a frozen religious ideology, their "Stalin knows best" approach to film cutting is indistinguishable from our own Jesse Helms (currently trying to protect us from lesbians in high office). It's easy to see why some of Medvedkin's films didn't cut committee approval (like one epic where a group of comrades find themselves in Hell, after death in battle, and make themselves comfortable because it's so much better than what they've just been through in Soviet society!). Some of his humor was a bit like an early Russian Gary Larson.
Images from the archival film footage are unforgettable. Much is shown from HAPPINESS, the only Medvedkin film well known outside Russia (though made in 1934, it got its American premier at the 1972 San Francisco International Film Festival). You will see images of a peasant's house running away with legs and feet, a large hotel being removed from a futuristic Moscow on wheels, a tribunal of cows judging people. Twilight year interviews with Medvedkin himself are interwoven with fascinating insights from surviving contemporaries, (as well as promising young Russian film makers influenced by him).
Years before CNN's "see it now" coverage of the bombing of Baghdad, Medvedkin invented the concept of the "film train." It was a working film studio with processing facilities transformed from box cars! Passenger cars on the train were remodeled into the theatre. Medvedkin would travel around the country shortly after the revolution, shoot propaganda oriented films with local residents, develop/edit the film, and show it to them a few hours later! (Models of the train are available for viewing at London's Museum of the Moving Image.) Wonderful demonstrations of his innovations include the "rifle camera" he invented in WWII, so ordinary soldiers, trained in the infantry, could aim through the "cross hairs" and get dramatic front line coverage of history in the making.
Medvedkin often had to "recreate" historic battles. Ironically, for Westerners, the most universally recognized image of the storming of the Winter Palace is his highly romanticized recreation. (One contemporary relates that more extras were accidentally trampled to death during the filming than the casualties of the original event, which took place three years before!)
Your heart will ache to see some of his films in their entirety, especially one of his high camp color "musicals" made during WWII, that features giddy peasant women singing their hearts out while they shovel wheat! Images from the Silent films, (which he made into the 30s) resemble the eeriest of German cinema of the 20s, like THE GOLEM. Fascinating background detail is also revealed on the actor who frequently played Stalin's "cameos" in these films (whose image is more recognizable to the West than the dictator himself). Thoughts of Ronald Reagan give some irony to this "actor in the Kremlin."
Must viewing for any serious student of film, and high on entertainment value for anyone else. Probably destined for showing on PBS. Request it at your local, esoteric video outlet.
The original French title: Le Dernier Bolchevik, ou Le Tombeau d'Alexandre
Print from: Les Films de l'Astrophore (sorry, their address wasn't listed in the festival guide. Try Paris directory assistance.)
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