The Screengrab : sergei eisenstein

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

15. THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS (1982)

This Italian film, directed by the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, is about the people who don't fight in war but who just do their best to keep their lives from being completely overrun when it comes to town. In this case, the people are Tuscan, and it's late in the summer of 1944, with World War II winding down and the local fascists preparing to blow up anything they can before the Americans arrive. The people of the village sneak out under dead of night and prepare to hit the road, hoping to stay alive until they encounter the Yanks; the movie is presented as the memories of a woman who was six years old then, and it's infused with a playful surrealism that colors the many incidents, making them seem touched by magic. Which, at this point, is entirely appropriate for a movie where the people can't wait to embrace the invading Americans.

14. PLATOON (1986)

Drawing on memories from his own experiences in combat, Oliver Stone won Best Director and Best Picture for his grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War, where (in the words of star Charlie Sheen, back when he was a serious actor rather than a smirky sitcom star), “We did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves.” Earlier films (notably Apocalypse Now) had, of course, tackled the Southeast Asian “police action,” but the topic was generally as unpopular on the big screen as Iraq films are today. Platoon, premiering four years after the dedication of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., marked a cathartic cultural shift in America’s perception (and digestion) of the war: without Platoon’s critical and commercial success (and the flood of Vietnam movies, TV shows and video games that followed), a parody like 2008’s Tropic Thunder would have been unthinkable, not to mention sacrilegious. Yet, even though Vietnam era slang (being in “the shit”) and combat details (cigarette packs in helmet bands, etc.) are now war movie clichés, I’ll never forget seeing Platoon for the first time, when the wounds of America’s last great military misadventure were finally starting to heal, then watching shaken veterans around the theater hanging back after the lights came up, grouping together in pain and reminiscence.

13. SHAME (1968)

It’s probably no coincidence that most of Ingmar Bergman’s starkest films were made at the height of the Vietnam War, a time when the horrifying images of battle were being broadcast on television sets all over the world on a nightly basis. Bergman’s most explicit take on the horror and senselessness of war, Shame, begins in quintessential Bergman fashion, focusing on a pair of married musicians (played by Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow, of course) who have retreated from their old lives onto a remote Swedish island. Their marriage could hardly be called happy, but it’s comfortable and secure, far removed from the rest of world, including a war that’s been raging in the distance. Suddenly and without warning, the war comes to their doorstep. But despite the handful of battle sequences, Shame has nothing to do with combat, and everything to do with the poisonous effect of war on everyone it touches. Ullmann, who is concerned only with the well-being of herself and her husband, finds herself accused of treason. Their home is destroyed. Ullmann sleeps with a local bureaucrat, perhaps out of self-preservation, but perhaps for other reasons. And Von Sydow reveals himself to be either a coward or a vindictive scumbag, depending on one’s perspective. Bergman refuses to pin the story to a single war -- it’s certainly not Vietnam, in spite of when he made it. Instead, Shame is a condemnation of the very idea of war and the effect it has on humanity -- not merely the literal death and destruction, but also the psychic fallout it leaves in its wake, which can linger long after any memory of why the war was fought in the first place.

12. HENRY V (1944) & (1988)

Shakespeare's play, which came in so handy for pundits looking for a point of comparison for George W. Bush's transformation into a great war leader after 9/11, was a propaganda piece celebrating the great victory of the outnumbered English by the overburdened French at the Battle of Agincourt. But because Shakespeare knew the value of ambiguity and multiple meanings, the work is open to various interpretations and can be staged in different ways to emphasize different possible themes. Laurence Olivier had a personal triumph as both director and star with the 1944 version, which, being made during World War II, not surprisingly treated the material as the occasion for a rousing, jingoistic hard sell for patriotic warfare. Forty-five years later, Kenneth Branagh, making his movie debut as a director and also starring in the title role, had no war to promote and so saw fit to stage the work as a big, baroque spectacle with ironic attitudes towards the expressions of patriotic fervor, film noir lighting, and what Pauline Kael called a "deranged Darth Vader entrance" for himself. As it is, both movies are huge, happy wallows in showy stagecraft and the best acting the British can always offer at the snap of a finger. (Branagh's, in particular, is the kind of movie where Paul Scofield has a walk-on.)

11. BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925)

Sergei Eisenstein, master of the montage and one of the greatest pioneers of early cinema, made two classic war films, both very different from one another. His first, Battleship Potemkin, is often cited as one of the greatest movies of all time, and that’s not just hype: aside from the legendary Odessa Steps sequence, it contains some of the earliest uses of montage, and generally establishes itself as a movie using visual language light-years beyond what anyone else was doing at the time. But as a war film, it is unquestionably subversive: it was designed as a piece of pure propaganda in which the oppressed sailors of the battleship rise up in righteous anger against their cruel Czarist overlords. At no point do we have anything but sympathy for the heroic mutineers, and no less a personage than Josef Goebbels declared that anyone might become a Bolshevik after viewing the movie. Alexander Nevsky, on the other hand, is as much a celebration of patriotism and loyalty as Potemkin was of rebellion and revolution. It didn’t reach its peak of popularity until a few years after it was made, when Russia and Germany were at each other’s throats, but its ability to induce a patriotic fervor, as audiences cheered at the Russian peasant army driving out the Teutonic Knights, was unmistakable. And while it wasn’t the artistic success that Battleship Potemkin was, it did feature an unforgettable score and one scene that rivals the Odessa Steps sequence: the famous battle on the ice of Lake Peipus, which stands as one of the most thrilling battle sequences ever staged for film.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

OST: "Alexander Nevsky"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:30:00 GMT

What happened when the brilliant Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the great composer Sergei Prokofiev began working together to make a film based on the greatest triumph of the legendary warrior-saint Alexander Nevsky was more than a mere collaboration on a score by a director and a musician at the peak of their powers. It was the creation of a total work of art, an integration of the most progressive mind in cinema and one of the most forward-looking men in concert music at the time into something that was meant to be more than a whole, but an entire unified work that transcended both of the elements that made it up. And, thanks to the time and place it was made, it very nearly was never seen or heard by anyone.

When Eisenstein began work on what would be his most popular sound film, the entire Soviet Union was living in dread of an attack by Nazi Germany. They were trusted by no one, and the longstanding emnity between the two countries was such that the director left no doubt who was represented by the movie's brutal Teutonic Christian warriors, who wore modified versions of the German Army's field helments and who were led by priests bearing swastikas on their holy garments. The great Russian hero/saint Alexander Nevsky leads his savagely mistreated people in a glorious victory against the Teutonic would-be conquerers, set to a stirring, haunting, unforgettable symphonic score by Prokofiev. Unfortunately, Josef Stalin didn't trust Eisenstein any more than he trusted anyone else, and he rushed an early print into production before Prokofiev had a chance to finish it. The finished product featured not the full and rich orchestral version of the music, but a truncated cantata that, while worthwhile on its own, doesn't fully convey the glory and passion the two artists struggled to squeeze into the film.

And it didn't stop there: just prior to Alexander Nevsky's scheduled release, Russia and Germany shocked the world by signing the Von Ribbentrop Pact, which assured a peaceful alliance between the two nations. Both Hitler and Stalin knew it was a bogus treaty that wouldn't last -- Hitler used it to buy time to gain victories in Western Europe, and Stalin used it to build up his nation's military might for the attack he knew was inevitable -- but because Alexander Nevsky openly mocked the wisdom of attempting to negotiate with the evil Teutonic forces, Stalin had it suppressed, since it didn't fit the new world order. Very little good came of the ultimate betrayal of the pact by Hitler and the invasion of Russia by German forces, but it did eventually lead to the release of the now prescient-seeming Alexander Nevsky, which perfectly suited the wartime mood of Russia and served as a powerful propaganda tool in stirring the passions of the citizenry against the Nazi intruders.

The version that was released then, of course, featured the bastardized cantata version of Sergei Prokofiev's epic score, as would all prints for over fifty years. It wasn't until 1995, decades after both the composer and Sergei Eisenstein were dead, that a remastered version of the film -- this time featuring Prokofiev's now-classic orchestral score in all its wonder -- was released, but now it can be seen, and heard, anytime exactly as its makers intended. And if you're lucky enough to see one of the occasional screenings of the film that are held with a full orchestra playing the entire score live and in time with the movie, you've had one of life's greatest and most memorable pleasures.

BEST TRACKS: The fourth movement ("Arise, Ye Russian People", is an inspiring and memorable blend of a militaristic march and a patriotic anthem consisting of elements of traditional Russian folk music, and the sixth ("The Field of the Dead") is an incredibly moving mezzo-soprano operatic solo sung by a young woman who heartbreakingly winds her way through the aftermath of the Battle of Lake Peipus, searching for the body of her lover and kissing the eyes of the dead as she does so. But it's the fifth movement ("The Battle on the Ice") that is the most memorable, the most stunning, and the most perfect in how it integrates image and sound: as Nevsky's armies engage the Teutonic knights in an unforgettable clash on a frozen lake, it shifts from a calm, almost hypnotic introduction to a nearly atonal cacaphony once the battle begins. Breathtaking, especially in the premeire recording, conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

APT PUPIL

Bryan Singer's adaptation was not the first version of this Stephen King novella. In 1987, British Director Alan Bridges had Nicol Williamson and Ricky Schroder in the leads of this story concerning a teenager discovering his elderly neighbor's Nazi past. Unfortunately, the film ran over budget and with ten days of filming left, the financing ran out and the film shut down. Accounts vary of just how much was left to shoot. Stephen King had reportedly seen a 3/4 rough cut and commented it was "really good" while the writers, Ken and Jim Wheat, reported seeing an assemblage of forty minutes' worth of footage. By the time financing was found to complete the shoot a year later, Schroder had grown too too old to continue in his role and there was no way to finish the film short of a full re-shoot. To date, the footage has never been shown to the public, though if there's ever a special edition of Bryan Singer's version, one hopes that the director would be able to snag the rights to include Alan Bridge's version as a bonus feature.

IN GOD'S HANDS

It is a tragic fact that many early feature films have been lost forever due to negligence and poor preservation. What's horrifying is to find out that even in the 21st Century, an entire feature film can be lost due to an accident, especially when its not the new Eddie Murphy comedy but it comes from someone like filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan. In God's Hands was produced by Stephen Soderbergh's Section Eight outfit and starred Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a couple who've lost their child. Unfortunately, the entire camera negative of the film was damaged, causing it to be lost. I'm still stunned that someone on the film didn't realize something was wrong after the first few days of shooting just by checking the rushes, but the damage had been done. Kerrigan, who bounced back with Keane, has expressed no interest in trying to re-shoot In God's Hands. This is one of those cases that could be used as a backhanded argument for abandoning film to shoot digital.

THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER

This British animation has the distinction of having had the longest production phase ever. Renowned animator Richard Williams started the project in 1965, animating it part time and financing the project through the odd commercial jobs and work on other films, such as Murder on the Orient Express, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and the credit sequences on some of the "Pink Panther" films. After endearing himself to the powers that be by serving as animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Williams was finally able to get financing to complete the film, but a variety of factors resulted in its being taken away from him by Mirimax and handed over to television animator Fred Calvert. Despite numerous promises from various parties to try and complete the film according to Williams's original design, this probably won't be happening anytime soon. The original workprint of the film can be found on YouTube. The "completed" bastardisation edition can be bought from your local Blockbuster Bargain bucket, hidden under a couple hundred copies of Norbit.

MY BEST FRIEND'S BIRTHDAY

Unofficially considered by those in the know as Quentin Tarentino's directorial debut, this is a far cry from Reservoir Dogs. Shot on Super 16mm over a few years, the completed 70-minute cut was lost in a fire, and so what survives is about 30-40 minutes of rough footage. Is it watchable? It has certainly has had a cult following grow around it, and despite its technical issues, it is in, IMHO, a far more enjoyable time waster than Death Proof.

ARRIVE ALIVE

Jeremiah Chechik is one unlucky man. His second film was supposed to be a comedy featuring Willem Dafoe as a hotel manager who falls for Joan Cusack as one of the guests. It was co-written by National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live veteran and self-styled "dangerous comedian" Michael O'Donoghue and produced by Art Linson. Unfortunately after two weeks of shooting, Linson pulled the plug and wrote off a couple of million dollars. Why? Apparently, it was due to Dafoe's performance, an attempt to bring "edge" to a romantic-comedy leading-man part that Linson, in his book A Pound of Flesh, described as "terrifying". Chechik managed to bounce back with Benny & Joon before his career was nearly destroyed with The Avengers, one of those productions where 50% of the production ended up on the cutting room floor.

QUE VIVA MEXICO

This was to be Sergei Eisenstein's first film made outside Russia, co-produced by renowned American novelist, Upton Sinclair. Unfortunately, after cost-overruns and other problems, Eisenstein was summoned back to the Soviet Union by Stalin (who can refuse an invitation like that?) leaving behind over 200,000 feet of unedited footage. Despite promises to send the footage to the USSR for the director to edit, this never came to pass, and instead several different edited versions of the film have appeared under different titles over the years, most of them falling into obscurity. None of the versions come close to what Eisenstein may have wanted but the film is still inspiring people to take a shot at it. (This YouTube clip is a trailer to promote the latest attempt at a restoration from Lutz Becker).

--Phil Nugent; Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 1.

The Rep Report (January 11-15)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives launches a wide-ranging new retrospective, "The Medieval Remake" (January 11 - February 16), devoted to the many different flavors of medieval fantasy on film. (The series "was inspired by The Contagious Middle Ages in Post-Communist East Central Europe, an exhibition on view at the Townsend Center for the Humanities on the UC Berkeley campus through January.") We're not talking Robert Taylor and George Sanders jousting in tin costumes here; the whole program is strictly high end, with Takovsky's Andrei Rublev, Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, both Dreyer's and Bresson's takes on the story of Joan of Arc in the dock, a pair of Ingmar Bergman's flashbacks to the Dark Ages (The Seventh Seal and Virgin Spring), and Fritz Lang's two enormous, silent Nibelungen, baroque visual extravangas so large-scaled that Wagner himself might have wondered if maybe the director were laying it on a little thick. It's striking to be reminded of how many great directors of wildly varying ranges and styles have been drawn to this period and these stories, and it promises to be an amazing series. But you might want to stick Ivanhoe or Excalibur in your Netflix queue just to help you lighten up afterwards.

Hepcats, zoot suiters, and beboppers can usher in the new year at PFA with "Cool World: Jazz and the Movies" (January 12 - February 6), a series that mixes well-known films with jazzy scores and settings (such as The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra's great performance as a junkie poker dealer) and relative obscurities. Notable among the latter category are Sweet Love, Bitter, a low-budget 1967 drama that features a strong performance by the comedian-activist Dick Gregory as a character modeled on Charlie Parker, and All Night Long, a 1962, modern version of Othello set in London, that features Charles Mingus in an acting role as himself. (A clip from it appears in the documentary Mingus.)

NEW YORK: "John Ford at Fox" (January 12-February 2) spotlights the glory period that was the director's time at "the Hollywood studio closest to being Ford’s base." (It's the same body of work honored in the new DVD box set Ford at Fox.) There are films here, such as The Iron Horse, Young Mr. Lincoln, and My Darling Clementine, where the director defined the popular version of key chapters of American history; others, such as the folk comedies Steamboat 'Round the Bend and Judge Priest, which preserve the performance style of Will Rogers, now are American history. The series begins with the new documentary Becoming John Ford, featuring interviews with Ford biographer Joseph McBride and Peter Fonda.

Take Five: Revolution!

Peter Smith — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Monday was Guy Fawkes Day. What the hell is Guy Fawkes Day, you may be asking if you are not British, or the product of an inferior educational system? The Fifth of November is what it is, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot by one Mr. Fawkes to blow up Parliament. Americans, comic book fans, and people who were hung over in their Survey of European History classes may remember it best from V for Vendetta, where the eponymous terrorist V decides Guy Fawkes Day is the perfect time to throw his own fireworks display at the Houses of Parliament, touching off a popular revolt against the tyrannical government of a future England (not entirely without similarity to modern America). Hollywood films have always had a bit of a, shall we say, delicate constitution about films that portray violent revolution, which, despite the circumstances of our own founding, seems to smack a bit of pink. Other countries haven’t been so squeamish; here’s some good films to watch when you’re ready to stick it to the Man.

BRONENOSETS POTYOMKIN [THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN] (1925)

A classic in every sense of the word, Sergei Eisenstein’s phenomenal silent movie about an uprising of sailors against the czarist regime virtually invented the modern art of montage, gave us the endlessly influential “Odessa Steps” sequence, and stood as a towering achievement of Soviet cinema, even outlasting its censors and detractors in Russia itself. But one of the most astonishing things about it is that it was made less than eight years after the Russian Revolution, arguably the most important upheaval of the 20th century. The notion that such gorgeous and powerful art could be put the service of the purest propaganda would haunt writers and critics for decades – and would be put to the test again when Leni Riefenstahl began work on her Triumph of the Will.

METROPOLIS (1927)

Science fiction, with its potential for infinite variety, would seem to be a natural for political storytelling, but much popular sci-fi is either painfully apolitical or downright reactionary. Writers such as Samuel Delany and Ursula LeGuin, who approach issues of revolution and anarchy, are still few and far between in the genre. In the 1920s, though, when Fritz Lang made his silent sci-fi masterpiece, everyone in the audience knew exactly what he was talking about. The highly charged atmosphere of Germany between the wars featured socialists, communists and nationalists constantly at each other’s throats, and Metropolis’ depiction of a mistreated underclass of despised laborers working for the enrichment of a wealth, privileged industrial elite made it quite clear where the director’s sympathy lay. Only a few years later, the Nazis would come to power, and Lang fled the country, deciding that it wasn’t his kind of revolution.

ZÉRO DE CONDUITE [ZERO FOR CONDUCT] (1933)

French boarding schools have contained an element of seediness and menace in more than one great film (see also Clouzot’s Diabolique), but nowhere do they seem as oppressive and intolerable as they do in Jean Vigo’s masterful, anarchic Zero for Conduct. Surreal, creepy, innovate, funny, touching and occasionally terrifying, the film also does more than anything before or since to convey the pure, joyous spirit of youthful rebellion that life eventually beats out of you. Less than an hour long but filled with unforgettable moments, Zero for Conduct is a masterpiece about the giddy charge of revolution.

WEEK END (1967)

It takes so little to transform that word into something threatening: simply split it, as do the French, and place a heavy emphasis on “end”, and you have the implication, carried in every frame of this astonishing film, that it’s not just the work week that’s coming to an end, but cinema and perhaps civilization itself. It’s hard to appreciate today exactly how great an impact Jean-Luc Godard’s revolutionary consciousness had on French society of its day; he wasn’t the most successful director in the country, but he was a major figure in the arts, and his stars were famous television actors with huge amounts of mainstream credibility. When his characters turned to the camera and discussed, in plain terms, the high and low of Marxist revolution, it wasn’t satire or the dabbling of a dilettante: it was someone who was dead serious, and whose final stab for some time at narrative filmmaking would eerily presage the eruption of Paris less than a year later.

IF… (1968)

Nowadays, young people know Malcolm McDowell as that kindly old man from Heroes who wants to blow up New York to prove a point about something or other. But forty years ago, between appearing as Alex in A Clockwork Orange and starring in this Lindsay Anderson classic about a rebellious youth who graduates from sassing back and carrying on with girls to turning a machinegun on the headmasters at his school, he must have seemed like the film industry’s own Antichrist. 1968 was a tumultuous year, and students in France, Italy, Japan and Germany, among other places, were only a hair away from actually lining up their teachers in front of a firing squad; the film seems a bit heavy-handed and dated these days (especially given the spectacular flameout of its director), but at the time, it was a savage and sobering piece of filmmaking.

— Leonard Pierce