THE ROAD TO THE END OF THE WORLD
A film review by Felix Kreisel
Copyright 1996 Iskra Research
Montreal 1996 The recently concluded Montreal World Film Festival is one of the better known venues of the cinema world. It attempts to promote a wide range of filmmakers from many countries by requiring as little as possible in promotion expenditures. This year the Festival organizers paid special attention to current Russian films and even gave a special prize in the category of the Russian Cinema of Today. This writer was able to view a number of the more significant films presented at the Festival. Preceding my impressions I have included the official descriptions provided by the Festival organizers.
* * * * * * * * * * The Road To The End Of The World
* * * * * * * Official information * * * * * * *
Director: Ruben Muradian. Script: Gennady Bokarev, Ruben Muradian. Photography: Boris Shapiro. Editor: Lidia Volokhova. Music: Vladimir Rubashevsky. Sound: Larisa Shutova. Cast: Zarif Bapinaiev, Barasbim Mulaiev, Natalia Fateieva, Boris Kuliev, Zarema Bechelova, Alexander Pashutin, Bagrat Khachatrian, Viktor Proskurin. Producer: Ruben Muradian, Antik-100.
The "Great Patriotic War" (World War II) was beginning to draw to a close. But Stalin's repressive government agencies were still working at full capacity and the plan for the mass deportation of the native inhabitants of the Northern Caucasus was put into effect. March 8, 1944 became a black day in the history of these people. The film tells their pathetic story.
* * * * * ) Iskra Research; by F. Kreisel * * * * *
The Second World War exposed the social, economic and national contradictions within the Soviet Union. The great conquests of the October Revolution: central planning, industrialization, cultural progress of masses of people gave the Soviet state great advantages in the military sphere by comparison with the preceding tsarist regime and assured its final victory over fascism. Yet the bureaucratic police state of Stalin undermined many of these gains and contributed to the initial victories of the Nazi invaders: the policy of forced collectivization and artificial famine of 1932 alienated the peasantry, especially in Ukraine, its economic zigzags slowed industrial development, its police repression during the Great Purges destroyed the fighting capacity of the Red Army, its eclectic blindness allowed Hitler the element of surprise.
Towards the end of the war the regime had to forestall any movement among the masses of people towards greater democracy. For the Stalinist bureaucracy, its policy of self preservation meant that the anger of the Russian people at the great unnecessary losses had to be channeled into Great Russian chauvinism, that the Soviet nationalities were to be pitted against one another and the rigid police state of 1930's reestablished. Over the next ten years we witness the harsh genocidal policies of exiling and exterminating whole nationalities, relocation of peoples, anti-cultural crusades of Zhdanov and the anti-Semitic campaign culminating with the extermination of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Doctors' Plot. In 1941 Stalin disbanded the German Autonomous Region on the Volga. In early 1944 the Stalinist regime attacked the following nationalities: the Chechen, the Ingush, the Karachay, the Balkar, the Kalmyks, the Crimean Tartars.
This movie was introduced by its director Ruben Muradian as a documentary story, telling the tragic events of March 1944 when the 40,000 members of the Balkar nation were picked up by the force of 20,000 NKVD troops and driven thousands of miles to Siberia. Muradian does succeed in explaining that Stalin's policy was completely irrational even from the point of view of nation building and state security. The NKVD collected all persons of the Balkar nationality, even the Party and Komsomol members, even the soldiers and officers of the Red Army and their families, including Stalin's own henchmen in the local hierarchy. They were all moved to the Siberian wilderness and great many of them died en route or from the privations of the initial settlement period. Unfortunately, Muradian's method of story telling turns this historic tragedy into something of a melodrama. He pads the movie with much scenic imagery (probably to save money). His use of documentary materials is primitive: his long repetitious sequences of moving locomotives and trains do not add much to our understanding of events. On the other hand, he uses actors for all the action scenes, contemporary people instead of photos of the real victims, imagined story instead of the grim tales of 1944. He shows us a dying Red Army soldier and his fiancee, and turns the crying girl's face towards the camera milking us for emotions. He shows an elderly woman dying of a heart attack as the NKVD bastard pushes her down. He shows a loyal Stalinist committing suicide, a Red Army hero chasing the trains across the country, and so on. Such things happened, to be sure, but this reviewer does not like the movie directors who use these hackneyed cliches to jerk tears out of the viewer. As interesting as the movie is the tale of its screening around the world and in Russia itself. The Russian government film agency Roskomkino normally provides the seed money, the permits for studio use and other facilities to film a movie. Muradian's movie was duly filmed, a copy sent to Roskomkino, one reel was sent to the festivals around the world and that is all. This picture was not screened in Russia at all, and the director does not know of any plans to do so. This writer suggests that this movie was produced solely as a showpiece at the festivals like the Montreal venue to provide the public opinion in the West with a proof of the liberal and democratic intentions of the current Russian regime. True, Yeltsin and his generals did bomb Chechnia into the Stone Age, kill some thirty thousand and send hundreds of thousands more to squatter camps in the neighboring regions. But, the IMF and the World Bank can assure the gullible public that some of the money they sent to Russia was spent on filming this humanitarian drama, and this proves that Yeltsin's heart is in the right place. How do you, my reader, like to be taken for a fool? -- Iskra Research -- Historical research and publication of Marxist classics in the Russian language. Address: PO Box 397142, Cambridge, MA 02139-7142; e-mail: fjk@mit.edu http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/fjk/iskra.html
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews