With all the time I have spent in darkened rooms watching the flickering images of cinema over the years, I am surprised whenever I come across a new element of movies I had never heard of before. One such example is an intriguing looking retrospective of Lithuanian cinema at the Museum of Modern Art. Another example
is on display in "The Last Bolshevik" which is a documentary about Aleksandr Medvedkin, born in 1900, who came of age during the Russian Civil War, exchanging Christianity for Communism, becoming a film director, and dying in 1989, just as the whole thing was falling apart.(Tombstones are a frequent symbol in this documentary.) Since Chris Marker is handling the festivities, you know you are not going to get the usual talking heads recap of a life and career we should know more about and that's certainly the case here, while explaining why his work is so obscure. Starting out with Medvedkin's "Happiness" made in 1934 which looks like it is worthy of wider attention, especially in one scene where the soldiers wear masks, Marker dissects propaganda in fine detail, showing how often it is different from reality but also how often it is confused with reality. Medvedkin would try to capture the reality of the countryside in his later films, but this was not the reality the Party bosses wanted seen, so they squashed his films. They did not want it to be known how badly the farm collectivization program was going, amongst other things. This just goes to prove that the audience will usually prefer a more sanitized version over the harsh light of realism.
If that is not enough to convince you to see "The Last Bolshevik," then I would also like to mention that it has the coolest intermission ever.
December 11, 2009
