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April to October in 1917, the Revolution's anniversary is cause for feverish celebration and analytical lampoon. Imperial statuary and rushing crowds, a screen streaked by taut ropes, raised bayonets, undulating scythes. (The Tsar's monument falls but Humpty-Dumpty can be put together again, it's just a matter of reversing the film.) "The same old story, hunger and war. But..." Breadlines in Petrograd snow, a superstar's entrance for Lenin beside a vast flapping flag. Nevsky Square demonstrations in July, "days of the people's wrath": Banners upon banners, the reactionary machine-gun literally shooting frames out of the celluloid, bourgeois parasols wielded like daggers. Horse and maiden on the bridge's widening maw, the Pharaoh's impassive stone visage reappears in Hitchcock's Blackmail. The Bolshevik office in disarray, Kerensky's Provisional Government is nothing but a peacock mechanically preening. Sergei Eisenstein's follow-up to Potemkin, a reinvention of documentary and historical films, a master class in rhythmic forms, a grand political cartoon. Toy soldiers and equine asses in high places, down in the railroad drawn blades yield to dancing solidarity. "God and Country" means a riotous montage of masks for idolatry, ornamental medals and baroque Christ and smiling Buddha for the benefit of Resnais and Marker (Les Statues meurent aussi). Decisive times, cinema in the barricades. Little Bonaparte in the limo with Stars and Stripes as hood ornament, trucks and tanks are no match for the uprising's spirited cannon. "Proletarian—learn to use your rifle," an illustrated lesson. Raid on the Winter Palace like the storming of the Bastille, a blizzard of feathers from mutilated royal mattresses, the giddy boy lolling on the throne is asleep at the close. "The time for words has passed!" Stalin was not amused, but Godard certainly was. Cinematography by Eduard Tisse. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |