Alert: Alexander Nevsky on IFC

Watching Alexander, I can't help but think how many extras took up arms and were slaughtered over the next seven years. It's chilling.

The thought also haunts me when I watch the propaganda-laced Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal. (If you haven't seen it, the Battle of Zama sequence is outstanding.)

 

This thread brought me out of my spider hole.

Same here. I've had Potemkin queued up in my TiVo Wish List for two years now, and it has never popped up.

IFC has been showing some amazing landmark foreign films recently, thanks to their Janus Film Project. I taped Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast" a few weeks ago. It reruns again at 11:15am today, followed by "Black Orpheus" and "Alexander Nevsky."

Next week, IFC is showing Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu. For those not familiar with his work, check out Anthony Lane's recent piece on him in the New Yorker.

http://www.filmforum.org/films/mizoguchi/mizoguchinyorker.html

Here's a sample quote:
There are certainly fertile comparisons to be made between Kurosawa and Mizoguchi; and yet, to those who love the latter, there is no comparison. Kurosawa seems sweaty and overwrought beside the astounding formal finesse of a movie like “Sansho the Bailiff ” (1954). I have seen “Sansho” only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal. The film itself is a tale of broken men and women, or of those bent to the breaking point by the harrying furies of society. Kurosawa may have fashioned the thrilling “Throne of Blood” from the plot of “Macbeth,” but Mizoguchi, though he adapted none of the plays, remains the more profound Shakespearean, such are the reversals and accelerations of fortune into which his characters are swept.

 

Stalin's favorite flick.

 

Finally had time to watch Nevsky. Fascinating.

It isn't as good as Ivan, and as noted, it was designed from its inception as a propoganda film, but it's a damn effective one. And as it turned out, prophetic too.

The sack and pillage of Pskov has to be up there among cinema scenes that most successfully created the deepest dread. The several-minute opening of the scene, with the ominous Prokofiev music combined with the motionless close-ups of those freaky, Nazi-evocative Teutonic Knights helmets is fantastic stuff ...



Of course, forciably converting Russian toddlers to Catholicism, then throwing them into a fire maxes out the level of madness. Disturbing.

You could see that scenes' influence on later directors, especially Kubrick, in the way it was cut -- with climactic scenes like the death of the martyr of Pskov being abruptly cut with a subtitle and a new scene, it reminded me of The Shining, where many early scenes built to a crescendo and cut away before you could ease your way out of what you just saw.

But I don't think it's propoganda because of the violence it depicts. If anything, it went light with true medieval violence, cities can and often were all but wiped out by invaders. The propoganda comes in with the leniency of Nevsky when Pskov is liberated. I'm calling bullshit that he would all of the sudden be relatively merciful to the Knights, and there's no history to back that up.

Neat film, and as I expected, an interesting piece for the historical film record. Worth checking out if you're into that kind of thing. It's like a Russified Birth Of A Nation -- and just as great and flawed (in its bent).