Das Ende von St. Petersburg

Soviet film directors Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein had a somewhat friendly rivalry. The two would sit down to a cup of tea and discuss the merits of each other's works and how they incorporated montage, the main editing style for the USSR filmmakers, into their movies. The Central Committee of the Communist Party awarded these two leading Soviet directors cash to produce separate films celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Bolsheviks' takeover of the Russian government in 1917.

Pudovkin emerged first with his December 1927's "The End of St. Petersburg." The movie, concentrating on the years 1913 through 1917, solidified his reputation as the premier filmmaker in Soviet cinema. Pudovkin favored the melodramatic over the more formalistic style of his country's cinematic colleagues. His earlier 1926 "Mother" hit all the sentimental notes of a bonafide weepy despite its propagandist angle. Pudovkin continued his focus on the individual in "The End of St. Petersburg" by following a farmer's son who goes to the big city to seek employment. He gets a job at a smokey, unhealthy factory where he listens to a co-worker with Communist leanings espousing ideas to reform the government by giving the workers more rights. Our farmer boy ends up in a fistfight, is arrested and sent to the front lines of World War One.

Pudovkin cross-cuts between the battle's insanity of bloody carnage with stock brokers who see the market ascending by the government's outrageous expenditures to support the costly war. The more Czar Nicholas spends on armaments, the more those military businesses make profits. Calling his cinematic technique "parallelism," or relational montage, Pudovkin drew stark contrasts between those benefiting from the conflict and those who died gruesome deaths because of capitalistic greed. The juxtaposition between the two worlds justify the Bolsheviks' reasons to stop the war, according to "The End of St. Petersburg." The Reds stopped the carnage as well as nationalized Russia's big greedy corporations because their owners could only think of think of huge profits in the midst of unnecessary deaths.

Pudovkin's final images are of the worker's wife carrying an empty food pail that reflects the populace's dire poverty. She's seen walking through the splendor of the Tsar's Winter Palace, where untold millions of rubles were spent on such opulence in the face of starvation just outside its gates. "The End of Petersburg" projects a full-hearted endorsement of the sacrifice the overthrow of the Czar had cost in human lives. But Pudovkin gives a near guarantee in his images the revolutionary promises by the Bolshevik leaders will be kept.

"The End of St. Petersburg" was the second film in what is regarded as Pudovkin's great trilogy celebrating the 1917 revolution overthrowing the crown and pays homage to the form of government Karl Marx would have been proud. But it is the Russian's cinematic skills in editing, cinematography and narrative threads that give excitement to modern film scholars the reason to continue to study his influential techniques.

The End of St Petersburg was another landmark of Soviet realist cinema, as good as if not better than Battleship Potemkin, Strike, or Storm Over Asia. It's incredibly powerful, with many absolutely stunning montage sequences that make today's quick cut edits look like like child's play in comparison. The language of cinema was invented in Russia and Germany by artists like Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Murnau, and Lang. Anyone interested in cinema history needs to see films like this one to appreciate how weak our current crop of auteurs truly are.

I have to say that I was quite captivated by this film, and, of course, I found myself rooting for those poor Soviets. The symbol of the boiled potato which at first barely fed two people, finally being shared by the communists is quite striking. The film is visually wonderful. Both Poduvkin and Eisenstein have this thing for wonderful faces, with character and pain. Of course, everything is exaggerated. Those guys at the stock market, feasting on the spoils of the country while the proletariat slaved in the factories is brought to us with an incredible heavy-handedness. These must have been used extensively for propaganda purposes and must have had people up in arms. There are good performances and all the communist symbolism one could hope for. Unfortunately, not everything panned out quite so well a few years later, with the oppressed back under the heel of those who abuse power. See this film, however, and consider the plight of the poor of Russia, stuck under the Tsar and the fat cats.

Wow!! I wasn't expecting something like this. Quite frankly, silent Russian directors make American directors of the same era look anemic by comparison.

Nearly every shot in this film is poetry - beautifully composed, lit, not over-acted (like so many silents), simple, and brutally powerfully. The faces, the atmosphere. Vsevolod had an AMAZING eye for composition. The close-ups are gorgeous and intense and fiery and the wide shots are breathtaking in the way they emphasize man's fragile diminutive size.

Of course, this is a propaganda film, so the upper class are portrayed as fat, hysterical beast-people and the lower-class are all rough-hewn and beautiful, but WHO CARES when the movie is this good! And this is during the age of Eisenstein so the quick-cut editing comes into play during the end with the big overthrow of St. Petersburg with great edits that are nearly subliminal.

Wonderful stuff

Early on in The End of St. Petersburg, Pudovkin's reputation as a montage director is evidenced. A lake shore and rising sun is paired with a view of a windmill, linking together to form a more complete view of the morning. Montages show up later, most notably a scene in which an official stands up, the camera cuts to the chair falling and breaking, and then to an attendant's shocked face. These are instances wherein Pudovkin's linkage method is clear, as the images relate and build a fuller scene. However, there is a scene one might consider more in the vein of Eisenstein: footage of soldiers rushing out of trenches in WWI is interspersed with shots of businessmen viewed from above running up steps of buildings. They are surely different, and they juxtapose sharply. Perhaps Pudovkin aimed to show the differences of those two scenes, or maybe to show that they are similar as well. Shots of a chalkboard in between these two parallel worlds (it is unsure if it belongs in that of the businessmen, but one tends to assume it does) suggest that soldiers' deaths and workers' labor are but numbers. These scenes could come off as heavy handed, but they are nuanced and the film is an intricate piece of plot and tasteful treatment of history. The depiction of WWI doesn't hold anything back, with shots of bodies floating in trenches and men being gunned down in mass. The narrative of the villager is engrossing; it doesn't overshadow the history itself and yet the film would feel lacking without it; Ivan Chuvelev's piercing stare is taken full advantage of to provide a haunting and unsettling sensation. Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg is a cinematic epic, but not in the same vein as Battleship Potemkin; it is a lighter, more detail-oriented fare.