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loki100 -> RE: Best Documentary and/or Movie on the Eastern Front?! (3/15/2015 3:50:23 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: rrbill
@loki100: appreciate your post, but must ask
...no Western company would accept them for distribution... OR... they were never seriously offered... So, how do you know which is best interpretation of history?
I ask because believe I've seen Soviet era movies, albeit in limited setting of academic documentary films.
good question and really not sure. The mindset of the cold war and the extent that culture and art were contested (by both sides) means there may well have been reluctance by the Soviets to release a film and by major Western companies to not just buy it but also subtitle etc.
I think it went in phases, the classics of early Soviet film were widely released, but were also often either silent films or with very limited dialogue. A few Soviet bloc films on the civil war were released (either dubbed or subtitled), the Hungarian 'Red and White' and the Soviet 'The Commissar' are two that I have seen at the sort of cinemas that often feature non-English films (usually as part of a short season etc). Tarkovsky's wierd and wonderful Solaris is another that got a decent release when first made.
But I can't think of any of the classic Soviet films of the Great Patriotic War that have been released in any form. I suspect this is related to the wider blindness in the West (reflecting the Cold War) to the Soviet's own narrative of their experiences. Some of this was state mandated by the West (esp UK/USA) in that art was a tool of propaganda for both sides.
A good eg of this is Skvorecky's Tank Corps set in the Czech Republic in the late 1960s. Its in the tradition of Hasek, about a group of conscripts doing their military service and no-one reading it will come away in fear of the military commitment of the Soviet's Warsaw Pact allies. Skvorecky himself was anti-regime and fled to Canada after the Soviet invasion in 1968. The book wasn't widely released in English till the 1990s (my version is called the 'Republic of Whores'), long after a number of his novels had been translated and made widely available. There is always a danger of over-interpretation but he thought this one was supressed in the West precisely as it did not fit the required narrative of an immediate and very real Soviet threat.
But of the ones above, both They fought for their Country and the Cranes are basically well made, relatively stylised war films. But its not just films about the Great Patriotic War that are missing. None of the multitude of 'Easterns' that the Soviets made have ever had an audience. Think of the plot of the classic 'Western' but set in Central Asia with the Red Army as the Americans and Muslim 'basmachi' as the Indians. They even imported some American film stars to act in them. Dean Read was famous in the USSR for his regular role as the foreigner fighting alongside a cut off detachment of the Red Army.
Sorry long answer ..., but then I really like films and the cinema [:)]
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