Everyone cheers when the army marches off to fight the Prussians, but when the surrender comes, the Parisian underclass rises and takes over the city, proclaiming the Commune. It is a peaceful existence, where people work for themselves, live for themselves, and are happy as instructed by the Committee. Even the shop owners and remnants of the bourgeouis -- those who have not fled to a lazy and sumptuous life in Versailles -- are left in peace, so long as they do not oppose the Commune. However, the bourgeouis French government cannot let such a paradise exist.
It's the last great triumph of pure, silent, Soviet Academician, handling all the pieces of theory brilliantly: the theory of types, in which the actors are chosen for appearance, the quick cuts, the Dutch angles, and, of course, the propaganda as co-written, co-directed and almost certainly co-edited by Grigoriy Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. The Commune was long cited as a precursor of the November Revolution, doomed to fail because the groundwork had not been laid in educating the masses; as some one said to me in an effort to be witty, "The lumpenproletariat was too lumpy." I told him he was half-right. No one lies like he lies to himself about his own motives and his heroes. And then, he tells those lies to others, believing them the truth.
This is the power of film, particularly silent film, of any immersive art which requires the audience to fall under its spell: it creates its own world through its story and images, and if you accept it, you live in that world, for at least its length. If you come out of it, and think it is great art, then you remain under its spell, and its world remains, at least in part, reality for you.
Yet art attempts to make sense of an immense world, it tries to create narratives that make sense, invents heuristics that explain what is happening. And because the universe is vast, and humanity is small, and this movie is 93 minutes in length (the version I saw; the IMDB lists its original running time as two hours), then it is false.
