ARSENAL (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1929)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. This is a different list than the 100 Greatest English-Language Films one, although a few entries overlap. — Dennis

On the heels of his Zvenigora (1928) arrived one of the great films about war: Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Arsenal. It is set during the 1918 Russian Civil War, between the Reds and the Whites, communists and nationalists.
      Some of the Ukrainian artist’s images are indelible: amid combat, a soldier, eyes bulging amidst artillery fumes, his face a contorted mask; the mutineers’ derailed train, from which drops an accordian, which collapses into motionlessness; an officer mechanically performing executions in rapid succession—arm up, fire, arm down, arm up, fire, arm down. In war’s crucible, naturalism yields to expressionism. Dovzhenko convinces that his impossible vision of war suits war’s reality.
      Yet this isn’t the sum of Arsenal’s achievement, for Dovzhenko probes the politics and various casualties of war, from the competing civilian sides to the Social Democrats, to the soldiers in the field, to the starving peasants back home. (A farm horse drops to the ground in slow motion: starvation? or has it been shot, to appease human hunger?) War is shown, then, as an intricate mechanism in which everyone is impressed. There is, for instance, the agitated response of the bourgeoisie to a workers’ strike in the munitions factory; and the coming to a halt of the arsenal, besides providing a brilliant image of revolt, weighs in with the dire consequences of nonproduction for the soldiers waging war and the war effort being waged by a fractured nation. The arsenal’s stoppage would inform the heart-stopping stopping of the mill at the close of Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931), much as the collapsed accordian would reappear in René Clément’s Battle of the Rails (1945). Arsenal is an influential film, then, as well as a mind-boggling masterpiece—a part of our collective consciousness even if we have never seen it.

THE GENERAL (Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, 1926)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. This is a different list than the 100 Greatest English-Language Films one, although a few entries overlap. — Dennis

The American Civil War remains an emotional powder-keg, at least in the white South, which continues spiritually, and sometimes politically, to resist the idea of Confederate defeat. This may be why the one indisputable masterpiece about that war, Keaton and Bruckman’s The General, is a comedy.
      Buster Keaton has transformed an actual incident involving a Confederate engine driver, whose heroism helped score a victory against the Union army, into his signature theme of a boy trying hard to prove himself, in this case to the girl he loves, who rejects him as a suitor when she mistakes him for a coward. Johnnie Gray’s attempts to enlist in the army are rejected because he can better serve the cause in his job as train engineer. But doesn’t Johnnie pose a threat to the family inwardness that the girl’s father and brother hope to remove by disparaging him, to keep him from making further romantic inroads while they are away at war, and doesn’t this paranoia cast a sardonic light on the South’s regional secession motivated by their desire to retain at all costs their “way of life”?
      The girl tells Johnnie she won’t accept him into her heart again until she sees him in uniform—translation: until he is more like Father and Brother. This grotesque failure of hers to fathom the horrible nature of war spins ironically throughout the film; and when, finally, Johnnie is indeed in uniform, it is left to us to grasp Keaton’s closing irony, Johnnie’s likely fate in a war that has only just begun. It is unlikely that Johnnie will come marching home again—and if he does, he will be transformed by the experiences of killing and defeat: the loss of everything that his beloved represents.

MOTHER (Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, 1926)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. This is a different list than the 100 Greatest English-Language Films one, although a few entries overlap. — Dennis

Once a staple on lists of the ten best films, Mother is now neglected. Its centerpiece is Vera Baranovskaya’s deeply moving performance as Pelageya Vlasova.
      An exemplar of Stanislavski’s acting “method” devised for the Russian stage (where Stanislavski in fact directed her), Baranovskaya acted to the bone. Rather than playing scenes from whose sum an audience might induce her character, Baranovskaya acted fresh, holistically—out of a wholeness of characterization that she conceived and imaginatively drew into herself prior to performance. Moreover, she detailed the sort of archetypal role representation that populated the Russian stage by drawing on her own emotional history and life experience. (The misapplication of Stanislavski’s method to naturalistic roles, coached by Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg and others, helps explain its artistic shortcomings in the U.S.) Thus in Mother was Baranovskaya able to play to the full both the Mother archetype and a highly specific individual.
      Pelageya Vlasova is a tremendous instance of the Russian soul—a peasant who, trusting tsarist assurances, turns her son in for political pamphleteering but, when double-crossed by authorities by her son’s kangaroo trial and imprisonment (“Is this justice?” she asks), becomes a revolutionary herself. Somber and militant, the film is loosely taken from Maxim Gorky.
      Mother’s major motif consists of inserts showing the springtime breakup of river ice: a stunning metaphor for revolution’s liberating sunlight following a long winter of tsarist oppression and constabulary cruelty. Pudovkin, a former physics and chemistry student, acknowledged his source; but, whereas the heroine’s escape on ice floes in D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920) is just a sensational bit of plot meant to agitate and titillate, Pudovkin’s motif is expressive and poetic—the visual rendering of one of Mother’s principal themes.
      Such is the difference between art and entertainment.

OCTOBER (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1927)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. This is a different list than the 100 Greatest English-Language Films one, although a few entries overlap. — Dennis

Commemorating the 1917 revolution, Oktyabr’ is a “people’s film.” For the famous passage depicting the storming of Tsar Nikolai’s Winter Palace, Eisenstein employed veterans of the actual event and borrowed details from the pantomimes of the seige that were annually staged by the people of Leningrad. These and other factors tend to collapse the difference between on-the-spot documentary and reenactment. The result is akin to faux-documentary.
      Eisenstein pushed cinema beyond linear narrative, creating trains of images that figure forth ideas rather than “tell a story.” One example: the officially ordered raising of the bridges, which unloads upon the water below—to which are added, for drowning, copies of the revolutionary newspaper Pravda (“Truth”)—a horse’s heft and a girl’s fresh, still sensuous corpse. In cinematic language, here is the tsarist establishment’s attempt to break the spine of human ties to life, beauty, Nature and truth—truth, the passage implies, that is undrownable, so wedded to it are the hearts of the masses. The outrage that the tsarist act inspired, the passage suggests, called forth revolution.
      When viewing it, one must constantly interpret October; it doesn’t encourage, much less exploit, viewer passivity. Eisenstein had tremendous faith in the power of images—and in Soviet communism as liberator of the human spirit. But just his being Jewish drew Stalin’s suspiciousness, and October became the first of his films to provoke official disfavor for its formalist tendencies—translation: too great an interest in art as something other than a tool of the state. Thereafter, Eisenstein’s projects were monitored daily to hold these “tendencies” in check. At the last moment, moreover, October had to be hastily re-edited to delete from its cast of characters Leon Trotsky and others who openly opposed Stalin as betrayer of the Revolution.

BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (Walther Ruttmann, 1927)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. This is a different list than the 100 Greatest English-Language Films one, although a few entries overlap. — Dennis

Inspired by Mikhail Kaufman’s Moscow (1926) and other Soviet documentaries by Dziga Vertov, as well as abstract German experimental films, Berlin, Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt is a rhythmic documentary. The idea for Walther Ruttmann’s film came from Carl Mayer, who had scripted F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924). Shots were selected and edited to compose a day in the life of Berlin, from dawn to deep in the night.
      The sweeping opening movement is the camera’s approach to Berlin: over rolling water, across train tracks, including over a bridge. A montage of overhead shots portrays a dense metropolis; commercial advertisements on the sides of buildings perhaps introduce a disquieting note. Sewer; tall buildings. A solitary cat walks the street. A few people become visible, then more and more as the workday begins, with men in suits off to one kind of job, and laborers off to factories. Commuters enter Berlin (trains again); children are off to school. Here is a city that works.
      Only, marching soldiers remind one of Great War defeat and Germany’s subsequent economic hardship. Are there other clues of stress? Magnets for a crowd, two “respectable” men push one another on a street corner. On another corner, a rabble-rouser of some political stripe attracts his own crowd. In a blatantly staged sequence, a woman commits suicide from a bridge. Before she takes the plunge, we see her eyes bulging in horror and madness—the film’s one closeup. A patron’s-eye view of a roller coaster ride insinuates more stress, as does the quickened pace of the film’s editing.
      Most viewers, though, see Ruttmann’s film as harmonious. My reading of Berlin’s discontent may be wrong. It must be wrong.
      Right?