World War II to Russian filmmakers is what martial arts and crime are to Hong Kong’s: a dependable source of content. The difference is Russia’s war films are rarely intended simply as escapist crowd pleasers.
It’s entirely appropriate then that on the 70th anniversary of Russia’s vanquishing of the Nazis, this year’s Russian Resurrection Film Festival (RRFF) should focus heavily on war films, especially (although not exclusively) films set during WW2.
At least 20 million Russians are believed to have died between Germany’s surprise invasion in 1941 (the two countries had signed a co-operation treaty) and Hitler’s 1945 defeat. The war was especially brutal for Russians due to Hitler’s contempt for what he regarded as the inferior ‘Slavic races’ and his policy of total warfare on the Russian front in which civilians were not to be spared.
As a consequence Russian war films are usually tough and serious, but also often poetic, haunting and pensive. They also have a long history if you think back to Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 classic Alexander Nevsky, which charted the Russian battle to repel foreign invaders in the 13th century.
‘Russian war films are usually tough and serious, but also often poetic, haunting and pensive.’
One of the key aspects of Russia’s war films that makes them frequently compelling is that in most cases they are not directly concerned with charting battles. They tend to forsake the machismo and thrills often found in Hollywood war stories, even the supposedly anti-war movies, for philosophical and poetic explorations of the human condition and the price of war.
While there are some lighter films also on the RRFF program, including four comedies, more than a quarter of the 24 new and retrospective features are war movies. Six of these are set during WWII, and the historical role of women in armed conflicts also comes in for close attention in the two opening night features.
Kicking off proceedings in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth is Dimitri Meskhiev’s recent Battalion, which tells the saga of the 1st Russian Women’s Battalion. The unit formed in 1917 near the end of WWI, after the overthrow of the Tsar but before the Bolsheviks’ successful power grab. The idea behind the battalion was that the sight of women in the trenches would inspire Russia’s disillusioned and exhausted male soldiers.
Watch the trailer for Battalion:
Meanwhile the gala opening film in Brisbane and Canberra is Sergei Mokritsky’s Battle for Sevastopol (2015), based on the true story of an expert female sniper in WW2 who was sent to the US to persuade Roosevelt to open a second front.
The festival’s co-directors, Greg Dolgopolov and Nick Maksymow, say the struggle against the Nazi invasion for Russians is like what Gallipoli is to Australians. It was a nationally unifying event of enormous national significance whose ramifications are still felt today. It has become “sacred material”.
“What that tends to mean in cinema is that it’s a never-ending source for explorations in humanism,” says Dolgopolov. “Russian war films tend to eschew action – blood and guts and the horrors of war – and are about the relationships between people, whether they’re behind the lines, novice soldiers or women and children.’’
Watch the trailer for Battle for Sevastopol:
Two great examples of the latter are Andrei Tarkovsky’s magisterially haunting debut feature Ivan’s Childhood, and Elem Klimov’s ferocious Come and See (1985). (The former is not on the program because it has previously screened in the festival, but it remains an important touchstone.)
Klimov’s film is not only one of the greatest war movies ever made but one of the most devastating pieces of cinema in word cinema of any genre. It features little in the way of actual combat, though it memorably does feature mass killing. No-one who has seen the film could forget the extended final act in which the SS burns a village’s inhabitants alive. At the same time it is reflective of the Russian approach to war stories that the protagonist, a young boy who joins the Russian partisans in Belarus, carries around a rifle for the entire film that he never fires until the end – and even then not at a human being.
Elsewhere the selectors have picked titles that, while hardly obscure, are less well-known than Klimov’s film, including Grigorii Chukrai’s lyrical 1959 feature Ballad of a Soldier which garnered an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay and depicts armed combat only in the opening 10 minutes. After disabling two enemy tanks, a young Russian infantryman is given several days leave to visit his mother in her village, and with enormous feeling and delicacy the film charts his journey and the people he encounters, including the young women he falls for.
Other retrospective titles screening are Nikolai Lebedev’s The Star (a 2002 remake of a 1949 classic which challenges accepted Soviet myths about the war), and Sergei Bondarchuk’s (War and Peace) 1975 tale They Fought for Their Motherland, about Russian soldiers desperately defending their turf.
Shanna Prokhorenko and Vladimir Ivashov in 'Ballad of a Soldier' (1959). Source: AAP
Alexei German’s 1976 title, 20 Days Without War, is another story about a soldier on leave, this time against the backdrop of the infamously desperate Siege of Stalingrad. Again, say the curators (who tend to finish each other’s sentences), it’s a war film “with hardly any war in it because it’s about a soldier who returns from the front. It looks at his relationship with his family and with his peers, which he believes has changed as a result both of his experiences and their perception of what’s going on.”
Rounding out the retro selection is the most recent title, Dmitry Meskhiev’s powerfully intimate Our Own, a 2004 feature about three escaped Russian prisoners hiding out from the Nazis in a small village. Again, while there is combat in the film’s opening sequence, most of it occurs while they’re hiding out and explores more philosophical human issues such as the nature of identity, i.e. who do we define as “us”?
Meskhiev’s other film on the program, Battalion, adds further evidence that he’s “a great observer of human relations, in particular in their delicacy, and he works really well with actors,” the curators say.
Maksymow says Battalion’s female lead, played by Mariya Bochkareva, was a great example of women in Russia at that time. “She was very hard, very tough - a force of nature. That reflects the fact that Russian women have tended to play a much bigger war than just sewing uniforms, and maybe that’s part of the trauma of Soviet society - women becoming masculinised, which radically changed the social fabric.”
Maksymow recalls visiting St Petersburg a few years ago in winter, and in minus 30-degree cold, seeing a battalion of soldiers laboriously cleaning the ice from the gutters on a building. Getting closer he saw a battalion of about 20 women, “all really jolly, working this ice with heavy pick axes. It was heavy and dangerous work, but no complaints, just getting on with it.”
The Russian Resurrection Film Festival opens in Sydney on October 23, before heading to other capital cities around the country.
