All Slights Deserved

Day 100, and what better way to celebrate my centenary than with some more Soviet cinema? Well, there are numerous better ways but just recently it's been a real strain to keep this thing going at all, so this will just have to do. I actually learnt of The Fall of Berlin courtesy of the use of brief extracts in another film I've viewed this year, Diary for My Children (AFED #83) and it's precisely the kind of full-blown propaganda cinema I've been keen to track down for a while. By their very nature these films tend to be forgotten when the winds of change sweep in and are sometimes lost forever, but as historical documents they're invaluable. The Fall of Berlin is an epic account of the Soviet Union's war against the Nazis; detailing in particular their invasion of the German capital at the climax of WWII. It's notorious for the romanticised depiction of Stalin (as portrayal by Mikheil Gelovani), whose wise and benevolent rule as shown here was some...

Like many people I like nothing more on a Friday night than to relax with a work of Russian Constructivist cinema. There's just something about rousing Soviet agit-prop that says "the weekend starts here". If you disagree well that's obviously because you're a bourgeois individualist, an anachronism destined to be swept away by the inexorable tide of communism. Strike was Sergei Eisenstein's feature debut, at the disarmingly young age of 26 he found himself spearheading the new Soviet film drive with what was meant to be the first of seven (some sources say eight) films intended to chronicle the path towards the proletariat dictatorship. The remainder of the series were never completed but the director demonstrated enough talent to be commissioned to produce the even more celebrated Battleship Potemkin later that year. Strike centres around an uprising of workers at an unspecified factory in Russia in 1903 (i.e. some years prior to the Revolution). The...