Potemkin Spillage

Years ago I saw the movie Alexander Nevsky late on a Saturday night on the public TV station out of Durham, New Hampshire, it's the only time I saw the movie.  I wonder if somewhere small public stations still show classic movies on free broadcast, I don't think they do around here much. 

I knew Prokofiev's music for the movie before that and and found it compelling.  So I was predisposed to think well of the movie.  What I saw was an interesting looking, awful to watch piece of Stalinist propaganda, stifling tableaux with dialogue and an action cartoon battle scene, the famous "battle on the ice".  Perhaps my reaction had something to do with knowing a lot about Stalin's genocides and his pact with Hitler which, of course, collapsed as Hitler did what he'd been saying he was going to do since the early 1920s, pushing on past the line carving up Poland and invading Mother Russia, itself.  Prokofiev's music holds up a lot better than the movie he wrote it for.

I don't read much in the way of movie criticism so I didn't know till looking around last night that my evaluation of Alexander Nevsky is shared by some other people who get paid to scribble about movies.   Reading that I decided to post this piece.

For a film purist, it isn`t easy to see the score stripped out of a movie and, in effect, placed in front of it, thus destroying the delicate relationship established between sound and image by the director.

And when the director is Sergei Eisenstein, one of the medium`s most self-conscious, analytical creators, the damage will be particularly extensive. Not one image or edit-or, to judge from Eisenstein`s published accounts of his collaboration with Prokofiev, not one note of music-ever entered one of his films without complete and voluminous theoretical justification.

And yet, it must be admitted that ``Alexander Nevsky`` is probably more important to the history of 20th Century music than it is to the art of film. Current scholarly opinion dismisses ``Nevsky`` the film almost completely.

``I would have preferred to pass over it in silence as one of the most profoundly retrograde films ever made by a filmmaker of stature,`` writes Noel Burch, probably Eisenstein`s most sympathetic contemporary critic. For Dominique Fernandez, Eisenstein`s most recent biographer, the film is

``puerile . . . the daydream of a boy scout.``

There were, however, compelling reasons for that puerility. ``Alexander Nevsky`` marked Eisenstein`s return to filmmaking after six years, during which the official aesthetic of the Soviet Union changed from the open experimentalism pioneered by Eisenstein and his colleagues in the 1920s to the dull and repressive ``socialist realism`` that was enforced under Stalin.

Most interesting to me was the position of the movie in its time and how Stalin's on again off again alliance with Hitler and so much else impinged on the movie.

For Eisenstein, who had been forced to abandon one project (``Bezhin Meadow``) by the state film agency and had been denounced as a  reactionary "formalist`` by his colleagues at a famous film union conference, the assignment to film ``Nevsky`` was clearly his last chance.

To ensure the ideological correctness of Eisenstein`s work, he was given a co-writer (Piotr Pavlenko), a co-director (Dmitiri Vassiliev) and a special assistant for the direction of actors (Elena Telecheva). Cast as Nevsky was Nikolai Cherkasov, a blandly handsome leading man who also happened to be a member of the Supreme Soviet.

The selection of the subject was clearly motivated by Stalin`s propaganda needs of the moment. Nevsky was a 13th Century prince who led forces drawn from the Russian peasantry to an unexpected victory over invading Teutonic knights, a story with an obvious parallel to the Nazi threat then mounting in the autumn of 1937.

In an article on ``Nevsky`` in the Soviet propaganda review International Literature, Eisenstein wrote, ``I do not believe that any period in history witnessed such an orgy of violence to all human ideals as has resulted in recent years from the growing insolence of fascist aggression. . . . It is hard to believe your eyes when you read of the unbridled ferocity of the Jewish pogroms in Germany, where before the eyes of the world hundreds of thousands of downtrodden people, shorn of human aid, are being wiped from the face of the earth. Opposed to his bloody nightmare as champions of humanity and culture, as an active force rallying the energy of the best men, are first of all the Communists.``

I'll break in here to note one of the most bizarre things I've ever read was that sometime in the 1930s, Goebbels gave a list of movies he thought Nazi film makers should emulate, one of them was Eisenstein's Potemkin.  As I recall another was a movie by Fritz Lang, his recounting of the crap mythology that was the basis of Wagner's Ring.  I'll look that up later to see if I'm remembering it correctly.  Not that I think any of this is really important.

The Hitler-Stalin pact was signed in August 1939 and ``Nevsky`` was quickly pulled. Eisenstein was put in charge of a program of ``cultural reconciliation`` between the Germans and the Soviets, and soon was staging Wagner`s ``Die Walkure`` for the Bolshoi.

Nevertheless, ``Nevsky`` played long enough to become Eisenstein`s greatest domestic success and won for its maker the Order of Lenin, thus assuring him a slight measure of security in his final years. He died in 1948, two thirds of the way through his trilogy on Ivan the Terrible, which also used a score by Prokofiev.

Seen today, ``Nevsky`` plays like a systematic repudiation of Eisenstein`s most important ideas. Instead of the notion of the ``masses`` as a collective protagonist, there is a thoroughly conventional, solitary hero figure-a ``great leader`` who must have reminded Stalin of himself while flirting with the fascism the film was meant to denounce.

I know the idiot who provoked yesterday's go-round doesn't know what any of that means.  While I doubt it will lead me to go look for the movie so I can see it again it was interesting to see how much of my audience-member reaction to the movie is shared by what are arguably members of the idiot's profession.

I have a mild curiosity about where the claim that Jack Kirby copied the helmet from what Simps called "a Nazi" in Alexander Nevsky for "Magneto" comes from.  It has a pop-culture pretending to be high-art common-received bull-shit aroma to it.  I saw the "proof" frame from the comic that Simps posted and I don't think it's apparent that's where the idea came from.  If the . . . um .  . . "artist" ever said that was his inspiration, that's the only way to know if it was.  I don't really care about that, even less than I care about the movie.   What is kind of interesting is to see the damage that Stalinism did to the work of what could be considered a major artist, under the man who murdered so many artists even as Stalinists in the United States, especially those who would go on to become official celluloid heroes, like members of the Hollywood 10, praised him while being totally free of his crushing domination.  Makes you wonder what Eisenstein would have said if he were free to say what he really thought of him. 

I think the movies as high-art are more an aspirational thing than a reality, I think the really big ones have too many hands in them for that.  It's worse than opera on that count.