Le tombeau d'Alexandre

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