The Last Bolshevik/Le tombeau d'Alexandre ( Chris Marker, 1993 )
The Last Bolshevik/Le Tombeau d'Alexandre is a 2 hour Chris Marker documentary that explores the life of Aleksandr Medvedkin and his movies. But not just his movies. Given that Medvedkin was born in 1900 and died in 1989, his life and more so his movies, encapsulate the falling of the Tsarist regime of Russia at the time and the rise and fall of Communism and the leaders that included Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev, Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev.
As is described in the documentary by Nikolai Izvolov during one of the segments that to write a biography of Medvedkin would be hard as there would be "a lot of blank pages." Therefore this film tries to paint a picture for the viewer of Medvedkin and his surroundings. I should say that the terms "film" and "documentary" does a disservice to this given as the film is divided into "letters." These letters are "feelings" that the director himself have kept to himself, now in the wake of his death he finds that he has all these things to say but as Medvedkin is no longer alive, all these thoughts, emotions and memories are put into a sort of cine-essay that detail the history of film, Soviet history and the personal struggles that the ordinary person had had to deal with in order to survive along with some barbed humour.
But the focus of this documentary isn't solely about Aleksandr Medvekin and his difficulties of getting his films seen and for being "a pure communist in a land of would-be communists." It also details the last hours of writer Isaak Babel and his common law wife, Antonina Pirozhkova. She appears on this film to give an extraordinary account of her time with him. Sitting in the car that the Soviet police, the NKVD, had picked them up in, sitting totally silent, knowing that their lives will never be the same as Babel is being imprisoned. As they are leaving she wonders if she would be next on the list. But the NKVD have nothing on her and she is free to live. And with that Isaac Babel gets out of the car and with that disappears into prison and with that, completely disappears from the Soviet spectrum as is the way with Joseph Stalin. Work for the state and the state will work for you. Work against Stalin and you face the consequences.
This goes with the raging paranoid times of Stalin. Trotsky was the enemy. And anyone who was not seen to be working for the state, who was seen to be "silent" was seen to be a member of Trotskyist organisation that was planning to overthrow Stalin's brutally bureaucratic regime. Babel himself confessed that his "silence" was "deliberate sabotage and a refusal to write." To Stalin, that was not enough. He had to be part of a bigger conspiracy - he had to be a Trotsky-ite. On the 27th of January 1940, Isaak Babel was shot dead while in prison. According to original Soviet papers, he died on March 17th 1941. His wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, would not know the true extent of his death many decades later.
And what ties this all together between Aleksandr Medvedkin and Isaak Babel? Other than the fact that they both were Russian, that they lived through this regime? And specifically to this film? Well, Medvedkin made a loose film adaptation from an Isaak Babel story. Which could be enough to cause trouble in Stalinist Russia.
This is a deeply personal and political film where ordinary human lives get tangled in a political regime that promised them a kind of utopia but got very ugly and twisted very quickly. Aleksandr Medvedkin's struggles in the Communist regime were almost commonplace. People put their lives on the line on a daily basis. Medvedkin is used throughout this film as a kind of gauge on the timespan of 20th Century Russia. Born into the end of Tsarist Russia and fought for and lived through Communism. His death, in 1989, comes right at the very end of Communism when Mikhail Gorbachev famously declares that "the Iron Curtain is a rusty curtain." And with that, the oppression that had been in place, is now gone. Now, these filmakers who made films that were banned in those difficult times now have their films watched by film students and might even find their audience even when, in their time, there was none. For which, there is nothing better.
As is described in the documentary by Nikolai Izvolov during one of the segments that to write a biography of Medvedkin would be hard as there would be "a lot of blank pages." Therefore this film tries to paint a picture for the viewer of Medvedkin and his surroundings. I should say that the terms "film" and "documentary" does a disservice to this given as the film is divided into "letters." These letters are "feelings" that the director himself have kept to himself, now in the wake of his death he finds that he has all these things to say but as Medvedkin is no longer alive, all these thoughts, emotions and memories are put into a sort of cine-essay that detail the history of film, Soviet history and the personal struggles that the ordinary person had had to deal with in order to survive along with some barbed humour.
But the focus of this documentary isn't solely about Aleksandr Medvekin and his difficulties of getting his films seen and for being "a pure communist in a land of would-be communists." It also details the last hours of writer Isaak Babel and his common law wife, Antonina Pirozhkova. She appears on this film to give an extraordinary account of her time with him. Sitting in the car that the Soviet police, the NKVD, had picked them up in, sitting totally silent, knowing that their lives will never be the same as Babel is being imprisoned. As they are leaving she wonders if she would be next on the list. But the NKVD have nothing on her and she is free to live. And with that Isaac Babel gets out of the car and with that disappears into prison and with that, completely disappears from the Soviet spectrum as is the way with Joseph Stalin. Work for the state and the state will work for you. Work against Stalin and you face the consequences.
This goes with the raging paranoid times of Stalin. Trotsky was the enemy. And anyone who was not seen to be working for the state, who was seen to be "silent" was seen to be a member of Trotskyist organisation that was planning to overthrow Stalin's brutally bureaucratic regime. Babel himself confessed that his "silence" was "deliberate sabotage and a refusal to write." To Stalin, that was not enough. He had to be part of a bigger conspiracy - he had to be a Trotsky-ite. On the 27th of January 1940, Isaak Babel was shot dead while in prison. According to original Soviet papers, he died on March 17th 1941. His wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, would not know the true extent of his death many decades later.
And what ties this all together between Aleksandr Medvedkin and Isaak Babel? Other than the fact that they both were Russian, that they lived through this regime? And specifically to this film? Well, Medvedkin made a loose film adaptation from an Isaak Babel story. Which could be enough to cause trouble in Stalinist Russia.
This is a deeply personal and political film where ordinary human lives get tangled in a political regime that promised them a kind of utopia but got very ugly and twisted very quickly. Aleksandr Medvedkin's struggles in the Communist regime were almost commonplace. People put their lives on the line on a daily basis. Medvedkin is used throughout this film as a kind of gauge on the timespan of 20th Century Russia. Born into the end of Tsarist Russia and fought for and lived through Communism. His death, in 1989, comes right at the very end of Communism when Mikhail Gorbachev famously declares that "the Iron Curtain is a rusty curtain." And with that, the oppression that had been in place, is now gone. Now, these filmakers who made films that were banned in those difficult times now have their films watched by film students and might even find their audience even when, in their time, there was none. For which, there is nothing better.
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