STALINGRAD
A film review by Gareth Rees
Copyright 1993 Gareth Rees
Director: Joseph Vilsmaier
Starring: Dominique Horwitz, Thomas Kretschmann, Jochen Nickel,
Sebastian Rudolph, Dana Vavrova
Script: Johannes Heide
Music: Norbert Schneider
Length: 150 mins
Release: Germany 1993
There is a documentary that gets shown from time to time on the BBC consisting of archive film footage taken by the Russians during the siege of Stalingrad. After seeing these pictures of Russian soldiers desperately defending every street, every building, every room of their town (and dying in the hundreds of thousands) no fictional account of the battle for Stalingrad can ever have the same emotional power.
However, director Joseph Vilsmaier has made a courageous attempt, courageous both because the current political climate in Germany may not be appreciative of an epic account of one of Germany's worst military defeats and because it is a difficult task to engender the audience's sympathy for soldiers fighting for the army that killed twenty million Russians.
The film focuses on Hans Witzland, an officer in the German Sixth Army newly arrived in Stalingrad. Concerned about the treatment of POWs he is branded a Russian-lover and from that point we see his disillusionment with the war grow as he sees corruption among the higher officers, worthless words from the leaders back in Germany, his men provided with medals instead of food, and the terrible carnage on both sides.
Some of the scenes are very effective--a stupidly suicidal attack on a machine-gun emplacement; soldiers hysterically attempting to get medical help for their dying comrade; soldiers in a penal battalion prodding gingerly with sticks at a snow-bound road in an attempt to find anti-personnel mines. There is a marvelously epic feel of the tragedy of the war produced by the gradual attrition of Witzland's company. He arrives in Stalingrad with four hundred men, and inexorably disease, frostbite and combat take their toll until at the end all that remain are two men holding each other as they die of cold.
But the film founders on its lack of characterisation; the characters aren't differentiated or individual enough to emerge from their uniforms and from the horror of their experiences to stand out as people and to enable the audience to empathise with them. Instead of being a harrowing and emotional experience, STALINGRAD is merely numbing.
--- Gareth Rees
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