Le tombeau d'Alexandre

As a genre, the documentary is closely related to the detective story. Often the documentary seeks to find a truth in modern life, to show life as it really is, to expose reality from under official appearance. Sometimes it is even more specific - why did General Motors close down in Flint, Michigan and what effects did it have on the inhabitants in ROGER AND ME; what has happened to the memory of Jews in the Europe where they were virtually wiped out in A SMALL TOWN IN POLAND.

Marker's THE LAST BOLSHEVIK is a mystery. Alexandre Medvedkin was a genius Soviet filmmaker from the 1920s, whose films were at least the equal of Eisenstein or Pudovkin. Unlike these, they combined avant-garde rigour with surrealism, folklore and humour. Although Medvedkin was a devout Communist (he had fought in the Civil War), and saw his work providing a valuable function in the new State, their very inventiveness was seen as ambiguous and possibly subversive. His films were always put on the shelf, his name wiped out of official histories, never mentioned in film schools - the few students who were lucky enough to witness his films clandestinely were shocked at and thrilled by the lack of uniformity in his work.

The mystery is, how could such a film-maker, who persisted in making difficult, awkward films, whose very sincere communism was a stumbling-block for opportunist Stalinism, whose revolutionary train-studios (where he would travel throughout Russia, film the people and process the material straight away) actually unwittingly exposed the failings of the Revolution - how did such a man survive the great Stalinist purges of the 1930s, indeed live until the grand old age of 89, especially when men like the writer Isaac Babel and the theatre director Meyerhold (whose only 'crime' was to find his artisitic methods out of tune with Stalinist decrees) were imprisoned in concentration camps and murdered?

Marker the detective interviews witnesses (Medvedkin's daugther, former colleagues, Babel's wife), analysts (the young students who so fell in love with his work they determined to resurrect it, film critics), as well as investigating the archives. His researches are surprising and depressing.

Because this is not really just a film about Medvedkin. Born in 1900, his story is used to illustrate the Russian century, the failure of Communism, the betrayal of cinema. It is also a personal quest for Marker, whose first viewing Medvedkin's HAPPINESS was life-changing, who became a friend of the director, and introduced his work to the West, whose leftist idealism in the 1960s was soon disillusioned.

The quiet catalogue of terror and murder under Stalin is repulsive, abetted by a cinema, which, though technically innovative and exciting, was founded on lies. Films tacitly or literally glorified Stalin. Eisenstein's OCTOBER, celebrating the 1917 Revolution, had to be reedited when Trotsky, so crucial in that event, became a Stalinist persona non grata. We see films with black strips indicating that someone just fallen out of favour has been wiped out. Cinema, said Lenin, would be the Bolsheviks' greatest weopon, and its systematic collusion with tyranny is heartbreaking. Gorky, who introduced cinema (invented by Frenchmen) to Russia (and therefore an inverse Marker), proclaimed it a play of shadows, and in Russia it never became more than this, became even less, despite Vertov's desire for 'cinema truth'. Tragically, Medvedkin's truth-telling was fatal - his filming of what he thought was Kulak (the peasant landowning class) indolence, led to their slaughter, by Stalin. Marker never directly accuses him of anything - this is a film about a society and an artform where truth has been rigorously wiped out; to express this, Marker must distort his own 'real' images, which have lost their value as truth - but the intimations are horrifying and shaming.

But never finger-wagging. Marker is too melancholy, too much, in spite himself, the romantic. This is a strangely beautiful film, as all Marker documentaries are, a kind of riposte to totalitarian anti-humanism, and full of wonderful, compromised Russian cinema (and lots of Marker cats too!). Framed as letters to the deceased Medvedkin, they initiate a dialogue in which no statement can be taken for granted, where plurality and contradiction is the norm, the very opposite of tyrannical art. Some people have compared this latter to Hollywood conformity - the latter is undoubtedly culturally damaging, but it's rather insulting to suggest that the generic and unimaginative kills.

Chris Marker, again with a set of images to interrogate. About a Soviet director who believed in the collective dream, about the collective dream as shaped by cinema, and the peoples who grew despondent and fearful of it (though not of cinema).

The tools of this cinematic interrogation, which is fascinating in scope and layers, are what Marker and his friends were developing in the Left Bank some forty years ago. Even as the most blatant fabrication, the filmed image carries truths for him; the terrified look of an actor playing a muzhik in a propaganda film when faced with Soviet authority. Meaning something exists embedded in the frame itself, which we cannot wrestle away by removing context.

Marker carefully plants here some of the most erudite insights into the reality of cinema. We are told for example how the starving, raggedy workers in the collective farms turn en masse to enjoy propaganda films that portray them, the very same persons, as robust, content worker bees happily singing and laughing as they work the fields. How they walk away from this spectacle satisfied to have been entertained.

Old faces are interviewed for the sake of remembrance, to commemorate the enthusiasm of the revolution when trains converted as cinemas scoured the countryside to make films for the people, and the subsequent anxiety and horror. The odd ones who survived the purges, who turned from creators of events to mere spectactors or victims of them and who are merely a generation of relics now, with a head full of memories and perhaps a good story about Vertov to tell.

This is what Godard would be trying to do in the 90's, but the essay here is more precise and cutting, less about vague soliloquy and the camera and more about the people who perhaps held it at one time. I come out of this with the urge to see not any of Medvedkin's films, but more Marker.

-edit a few years later- Having now seen one of Medvedkin's films, Schastye, I have to say it's a masterpiece and you should seek it out.

Engrossing history of the Soviet film director Medvedkin and the difficulties of Soviet cinema in the 20s through 40s. Includes clips of numerous films which have not been seen since they were made.

A version is narrated in English with subtitles for Russian and German.

The Last Bolshevik is a documentary about the Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin. French Director (and fellow traveler) Chris Marker obviously admires his subject, and he means this to be a sympathetic film. Yet, I find it difficult to share his admiration. On an artistic level, even though I have never seen a Medvedkin film, and it is impossible to judge a director's craft by the segments shown here (lasting a few minutes), I can say there is nothing in the movie that makes me suspect we are in front of a major artist. More complicated is the political aspect of his life. He was a life long unrepentant communist. The film makes much of the fact that his movies represented the soviet artistic vanguard that Stalin ended dramatically in the early 1930s. Yet, during the Stalin era, not only he was not repressed, but he was able to make Stalinist movies (Marker show some segments of these movies, too). On the whole, this is a fine movie about a man whose life I consider to have been less than exemplary

Taking his cue from a citation of George Steiner to the effect that it is not history that we remember ("was eigenlich geschehen ist"), but the images of that past time, Marker has taken liberties with the official images of the Soviet era to construct a montage that takes pot shots at the rift between the official images of the USSR and the reality. Easy enough to do, but this hardly illuminates the historical truth about the circumstances under which an attempt was made to fulfill the dreams of Bolsheviks like Medvedkin--namely to raise, in little more than a blink of the eye, the cultural and material standard of living of the degraded and oppressed peasantry and proletariat of Czarist Russia. In a sense, his homage to Medvedkin ends up demeaning the utopian spirit of the latter and reduces, perhaps unwittingly, Medvedkin's endeavors to something foolhardy and ingenuous at best.