Audience Member
Chris Marker's essay films are a wonder, but I can't help but feel that I'm missing layers upon layers of insights. Undoubtedly, Marker has spent enormous amounts of time choosing images, film clips, and the very best words and phrases for the narration in order to pack his essay full of these insights (and information and jokes and opinions). So, regardless of whether you are really interested in the topic - in this case Soviet director Alexander Medvedkin - Marker's essays are a marvel that has much to offer to the engaged mind (Sans Soleil, 1983, is probably the easiest entry point to his work). Medvedkin is only the starting place for Marker, of course, and the video takes in the entire history of the Soviet Union, reflecting on the differences between actual reality and the state sponsored images and memories (Battleship Potemkin, portrayals of Stalin on film) that pervaded the culture. Sure, there are talking heads but they are largely unknown to us, offering only elliptical bits and pieces of some larger tapestry that is impossible to grasp with both hands. Marker keeps things interesting with his editing technique and by separating the film into two halves (with a cat listening to music during the intermission) and six separate letters from the narrator (presumably but not clearly Marker himself, voiced by someone else) to Medvedkin. Knowing that Marker himself was a committed leftist helps to see how deeply the end of the Soviet Union and perestroika before it had affected him - he ruminates about the ideals (that Medvedkin also honoured deeply despite having all of his films banned by the authorities) and the actualities that never matched up. However, Medvedkin never lived to see this, dying in 1989. Now someone needs to create an essay film about Marker using his own techniques - now that is one that I would really like to see (and probably would never fully comprehend).
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/04/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Marker's typical brand of snarky humour and whimsical essay-making, focused on Medvedkin and Soviet cinema in general. Very entertaining, but could be tighter, with less talking heads.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/16/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Ein wunderbarer Kinoessay von Chris. Marker über das Ende des Realkommunismus und dessen Konsequenzen für die Möglichkeiten einer Fortschreibung der kommunistischen Utopie. In sechs filmischen Briefen an seinen persönlichen Freund, den russischen Filmemacher Aleksandr Medvedkin, zeichnet Marker die Geschichte der Sowjetunion durch das 20. Jahrhundert bis zur Perestrojka nach, als Geschichte eines Traums, eines Sündenfalls, einer Korrumption und eines Scheiterns. Am Ende steht der Verlust des Utopischen und ein kleiner Hoffnungsschimmer ... Kinder lieben Dinosaurier.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
Full Review
walter m
With all the time I have spent in darkened rooms watching the flickering images of cinema over the years, I am surprised whenever I come across a new element of movies I had never heard of before. One such example is an intriguing looking retrospective of Lithuanian cinema at the Museum of Modern Art. Another example is on display in "The Last Bolshevik" which is a documentary about Aleksandr Medvedkin, born in 1900, who came of age during the Russian Civil War, exchanging Christianity for Communism, becoming a film director, and dying in 1989, just as the whole thing was falling apart.(Tombstones are a frequent symbol in this documentary.) Since Chris Marker is handling the festivities, you know you are not going to get the usual talking heads recap of a life and career we should know more about and that's certainly the case here, while explaining why his work is so obscure. Starting out with Medvedkin's "Happiness" made in 1934 which looks like it is worthy of wider attention, especially in one scene where the soldiers wear masks, Marker dissects propaganda in fine detail, showing how often it is different from reality but also how often it is confused with reality. Medvedkin would try to capture the reality of the countryside in his later films, but this was not the reality the Party bosses wanted seen, so they squashed his films. They did not want it to be known how badly the farm collectivization program was going, amongst other things. This just goes to prove that the audience will usually prefer a more sanitized version over the harsh light of realism.
If that is not enough to convince you to see "The Last Bolshevik," then I would also like to mention that it has the coolest intermission ever.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
This is a brilliant, masterful work. On the surface, it's a documentary on Soviet director, Aleksandr Medvedkin most known in the West for his film Happiness. It is far more ambitious than that though; It is a dense and dialectical essay on Soviet Communism, Stalinism, ideological commitment, and how film images conceal and reveal history. I could write pages on this and maybe I should if I ever turn my dissertation into a book. I'll just say that Chris Marker really has no peers in his ability to display his historical and political consciousness on film. No one even comes close.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/26/23
Full Review
Audience Member
A fascinating exploration of the history of the Soviet Union and early Soviet cinema through the figure of a repressed and forgotten filmmaker. Structured as a series of video letters addressed to his friend Alexander Medvedkin, a Soviet filmmaker who lived through the birth and chaos of the Soviet Union and whose films were banned before release, Marker's film traces the history of Soviet cinema through Medvedkin and his contemporaries Eisenstein, Vertov, Dovzhenko, and novelist Isaac Babelthis. I've already seen The Train Marches On, Marker's previous film on Medvedkin and his agitprop trains, and Marker incorporates some of it into this film. Continuing his obsession of the nature of images his so illustrated in Sans Soleil, Marker explores how fictional cinematic images, like that of the famous Odessa stairs sequence in Battleship Potempkin, become accepted as historical truth. Although I haven't seen any early Soviet films other than Potempkin and MWtMC, and can't tell the difference between a gulag and a kulak, I was completely captivated by Marker's insightful essay, which creates so many clever insights through his esoteric connections between fact and fiction, history and film.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/18/23
Full Review
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