La nouvelle Babylone

The plot is just a vehicle for this surreal, innovative and radical film. For sure one of the best Soviet silent movies.

One war that gets very little screen time in cinema is the Paris Commune consisting of France's National Guardsmen and a few city workers who took over the capital city on the heels of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. This group quickly set up a form of government that was the first to adopt the ideas of Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, a mix of socialist and communist elements. For two months, its supporters beat back the French Army until it gave way. Between 10,000 and 15,000 of the Communards lost their lives battling the superior army, with over 43,000 taken prisoners.

Two Ukrainian filmmakers, Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg produced cinema's first movie on the movement, March 1929's "The New Babylon." The motion picture focuses on Louise (Elena Kuzmina), a saleswoman in a Paris' wholesale store called 'The New Babylon.' She gets swept up in the Commune's passions, even though her boyfriend is a soldier in the French Army and is fighting against the Commune.

What's fascinating about "The New Babylon" is the framing of Louise and her boyfriend's scenes. Using film director John Ford's technique of filling the backgrounds with activity while focused on the main characters in the foreground, Kozintsev and Trauberg aroused the viewers' attention with such framing. In addition, the pair use a variety of trick photography, special effects and double/triple exposures to emphasize the complexity of the Commune's situation.

The two filmmakers in 1922 formed the 'Factory of the Eccentric Actor' (FEKS), which concentrated on live theater before morphing into cinema. Basing both their stage plays and films on the experimental and the avant-garde variety, each film was unique in its subjects: comedy, political tracts, musicals, etc. FEKS' purpose was to take away the constraints from theater, film, circus, music and opera and use a combination of all of them to present an unusual visual experience. The pair were influenced by D. W. Griffith's stylization and Charlie Chaplin's surreality. Employing Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich to write his first musical accompaniment for cinema, the two filmmakers produced a unique viewing experience which is thankfully preserved.

As film critic Matt Bailey succinctly noted, "The film has all of the vigor and pure cinematic originality of Abel Gance's Napoleon without all the pretensions to greatness shouldered by that film."

There are some incredibly powerful visuals to be found throughout this Soviet paen to the doomed Communard uprising of 1871 in Paris. From its wildly expressionistic opening to the hardened and doomed faces right off of Soviet worker poster art it powerfully conveys its admiration for the heroic underclass while eviscerating the craven bourgeois. With a music score supplied by Shostakovich its an excellent example of the decade old Soviet Union trying to spread its influence by comrading up with the French of yesteryear.

Devine decadence rules in Paris with its attention to materialism and coarse joie de vivre. The haves are enjoying a grand time while the have nots struggle to survive. When the Prussians march on the city the uppercrusts bolt for Versailles, leaving the beleaguered city's defense to the workers to defend. With the threat dissipated the workers demand more rights, the bourgeois see it otherwise by turning the military on them. A stand-off ensues and a civil war erupts.

Babylon's revolutionary fervor was certainly right for the period with it being released a month after the Stock Market Crash in 1929. Emboldened with Eisenstein montage it shouts out its message with a ham fisted juxtaposition and simplicity that may have stirred the proles in 1917 but comes across dated here with the upper class caricatures no different than Griffith's Union troops in black face in his Civil War whitewash. Both remain triumphs of form over content (racism, totalitarianism) that should be be relegated to the dustbin of history,

The directing duo of Grigoriy Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg made their most famous silent work with this historical film, set in France during the time of the Paris Commune (spring of 1871). The film mixes together different styles of film-making from D.W. Griffith's historical romanticism to Soviet agitprop with a narrative, that blends philosophy and ideology to a classic story-line about love and war. The film tells the unlikely romance of Louise (Elena Kuzmina) and Jean (Pietr Sobolevsky), who try to find a shared happiness during a time of political turmoil and chaos. Ideology, the spirit of history you could say, is set against their happiness.

The setting itself is a fresh and interesting one, for once an ideological Soviet film is not set during 1917. However, since the depicted time period is that of international mayhem and confusion, the viewer who sits in cold, without first reading a little background, may have trouble understanding the context. Also the first half of this film, which is quasi-episodic in nature, is difficult to follow because of the artistic choices implemented by Kozintsev and Trauberg. The same problem can be found in their earlier adaptation of Gogol's "The Overcoat" called "Shinel" (1926), which also had trouble concentrating on the essential.

However the viewer would be wise to stick with the film, as the second half clarifies much, and as a narrative is much more interesting. Even the editing and cinematography improve during the most distressing sequences. The political message becomes clearer to read, to a point where the film-makers literally spell it out for you. The imagery is very vivid and thought-provoking, and the film that started out as a curiosity with a period setting ends up touching upon several ageless themes and questions.

I caught this one before it expired on "the silent stream" section of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto website, where they temporarily revive past screenings from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Mark it down as one of the classics of Soviet montage and the late silent era. This version, by the way, is the 92-minutes restoration with the original score; reportedly, there's a longer cut that was discovered in Germany in the 1980s, but which co-director Leonid Trauberg disavowed as extra footage that they'd intentionally discarded and not censored material. Regardless, as it is, "The New Babylon" is a spectacular synthesis of Impressionistic images, rapid and rhythmic editing and a score by renowned composer Dmitri Shostakovich, his first for a film, to match the operetta within the film and the operatic presentation of the Paris Commune.

The opening sequence in itself is masterful. With the aid of special portrait lenses, the focus of images is extremely narrow--mostly, only a character in the foreground per shot is seen clearly--while the background is blurred as if each frame were an Impressionist painting--none of which remain on the screen for long. Counts of the film's average shot length (ASL) range from five seconds, according to Barry Salt, to as quick as 3.7 seconds, as claimed by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. Seeing several shots pass by in a fraction of a second at its fastest pace, I wasn't about to bring out my own clicker. Suffice to say that the shot succession here is closer to that of a modern action flick than to the contemporary early talkies in Hollywood, which seem to be guaranteed an ASL of more than 10 seconds and upwards of more than 20 seconds. Eventually, the camera will sometimes spin as if in a drunken stupor until hardly anything can be made out. Other imagery, such as when the rich attack the poor in the street, is also obfuscated visually and by quick cutting. Also undercutting what one might otherwise consider an appreciation of French Impressionist paintings is that the footage is of bourgeois debauchery, a grotesque depiction of the sort of leisurely activities one might find in a Manet, Monet, Renoir, or Surat.

Nor is the entirety of the picture photographed in quite the same way; indeed, there are a few striking deep-focus compositions. One features the French flag in the foreground, as a soldier on horseback occupies the distant horizon. The montage, too, slows down at least long enough to establish a relationship between a woman who joins the Commune and a French soldier who winds up being involved in its demise, including sometimes their relatively-long forlorn looks, the plot of which does rather well to ground the grander narrative and hold the spectator's attention with the traditional, character-based identification that's more important to other movies, but rather at odds with this film's socialist and non-individualistic politics. Set during the Franco-Prussian War, the Prussian soldiers, too, only occupy silhouettes in the background of the frame; the center of this picture is occupied by France's own class conflict. It should also be noted that the lighting, including some chiaroscuro effects throughout, is finely done.

While later we see those of the middle or upper classes lounging outside, watching the Commune being defeated by the soldiers as if it were street theatre, in the opening sequence it's an apparent operetta being performed on stage while they eat and drink and generally revel, or, for the more sober, conduct business. If these arts and entertainments are defined as bourgeois, then one might very well wonder what is supposed to be made of film, such as this one. That's where the guns that the proletariat fight for come in. Cinema as mechanical, rapid-fire, revolutionary polemic for mass production and mass appeal. The crosscutting between a new operetta being practiced and the working-class women feeding the soldiers before a struggle over weaponry ensues is an especially stark contrast. Furthermore, there's the piano player on the Commune's side of the barricade and, perhaps anachronistically, "La Marseillaise" being sung as the workers' battle cry, to go along with the rest of Shostakovich's score that's always fighting in unison with the class struggle of the imagery. Sure, it's Soviet propaganda, but it's also great art.