La fine di San Pietroburgo

Soviet film directors Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein had a somewhat friendly rivalry. The two would sit down to a cup of tea and discuss the merits of each other's works and how they incorporated montage, the main editing style for the USSR filmmakers, into their movies. The Central Committee of the Communist Party awarded these two leading Soviet directors cash to produce separate films celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Bolsheviks' takeover of the Russian government in 1917.

Pudovkin emerged first with his December 1927's "The End of St. Petersburg." The movie, concentrating on the years 1913 through 1917, solidified his reputation as the premier filmmaker in Soviet cinema. Pudovkin favored the melodramatic over the more formalistic style of his country's cinematic colleagues. His earlier 1926 "Mother" hit all the sentimental notes of a bonafide weepy despite its propagandist angle. Pudovkin continued his focus on the individual in "The End of St. Petersburg" by following a farmer's son who goes to the big city to seek employment. He gets a job at a smokey, unhealthy factory where he listens to a co-worker with Communist leanings espousing ideas to reform the government by giving the workers more rights. Our farmer boy ends up in a fistfight, is arrested and sent to the front lines of World War One.

Pudovkin cross-cuts between the battle's insanity of bloody carnage with stock brokers who see the market ascending by the government's outrageous expenditures to support the costly war. The more Czar Nicholas spends on armaments, the more those military businesses make profits. Calling his cinematic technique "parallelism," or relational montage, Pudovkin drew stark contrasts between those benefiting from the conflict and those who died gruesome deaths because of capitalistic greed. The juxtaposition between the two worlds justify the Bolsheviks' reasons to stop the war, according to "The End of St. Petersburg." The Reds stopped the carnage as well as nationalized Russia's big greedy corporations because their owners could only think of think of huge profits in the midst of unnecessary deaths.

Pudovkin's final images are of the worker's wife carrying an empty food pail that reflects the populace's dire poverty. She's seen walking through the splendor of the Tsar's Winter Palace, where untold millions of rubles were spent on such opulence in the face of starvation just outside its gates. "The End of Petersburg" projects a full-hearted endorsement of the sacrifice the overthrow of the Czar had cost in human lives. But Pudovkin gives a near guarantee in his images the revolutionary promises by the Bolshevik leaders will be kept.

"The End of St. Petersburg" was the second film in what is regarded as Pudovkin's great trilogy celebrating the 1917 revolution overthrowing the crown and pays homage to the form of government Karl Marx would have been proud. But it is the Russian's cinematic skills in editing, cinematography and narrative threads that give excitement to modern film scholars the reason to continue to study his influential techniques.

Pudovkin makes use of revolutionary techniques, especially montage, as he narrates the story of the storming of the Winter Palace in Skt. Petersburg, 1917. The plot centres on two families, one rural and one urban, whose paths cross as they engage passionately in the uprising. The film is a masterpiece in silent film narration.

Early on in The End of St. Petersburg, Pudovkin's reputation as a montage director is evidenced. A lake shore and rising sun is paired with a view of a windmill, linking together to form a more complete view of the morning. Montages show up later, most notably a scene in which an official stands up, the camera cuts to the chair falling and breaking, and then to an attendant's shocked face. These are instances wherein Pudovkin's linkage method is clear, as the images relate and build a fuller scene. However, there is a scene one might consider more in the vein of Eisenstein: footage of soldiers rushing out of trenches in WWI is interspersed with shots of businessmen viewed from above running up steps of buildings. They are surely different, and they juxtapose sharply. Perhaps Pudovkin aimed to show the differences of those two scenes, or maybe to show that they are similar as well. Shots of a chalkboard in between these two parallel worlds (it is unsure if it belongs in that of the businessmen, but one tends to assume it does) suggest that soldiers' deaths and workers' labor are but numbers. These scenes could come off as heavy handed, but they are nuanced and the film is an intricate piece of plot and tasteful treatment of history. The depiction of WWI doesn't hold anything back, with shots of bodies floating in trenches and men being gunned down in mass. The narrative of the villager is engrossing; it doesn't overshadow the history itself and yet the film would feel lacking without it; Ivan Chuvelev's piercing stare is taken full advantage of to provide a haunting and unsettling sensation. Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg is a cinematic epic, but not in the same vein as Battleship Potemkin; it is a lighter, more detail-oriented fare.

This films editing style lends, which can jarringly cut between shots with little regard to space and time, itself well to scenes with lots of tension or aggression. This makes the majority of the movie very intense by using images transitions to convey emotion, but the early parts suffer for it. Noticeable emphasis is placed on the angles and content of shots to convey mood, which frequently works as an effective metaphor in the narrative. But before the story is set up, the meaning of many juxtaposed shots floats away without having another element in the story to meaningfully attach to.

I think too much time is spent early in the film on imagery the film deemed important, instead of offering context for the imagery. But after that it is quite enjoyable to watch. Montage used as metaphor relies heavily on a common ground between the language of images a film uses and the audiences understanding of them. But the impression and transition between images itself can enhance pacing and tension, and this greatly improves the movie. In particular the scenes where the younger protagonist attacks his employer is very powerful. In fact the content of the film after that point is enough to justify watching it. It takes characters to make a story enjoyable, and the film becomes aware of this and uses its editing to enhance the characters.

This silent 1927 masterpiece is truly brilliant. To me it embodies everything that cinema is meant to be; it's visual art in motion, literature with pictures, history with emotion; all those and much more. It really is at the peak of film-making.

I say that, but that is not to say it is a perfect film. Just that the intention in creating this bleak and powerful look at poverty in early 20th-century Russia is absolutely spot-on: It wants to tell a tale, create an image, and to breathe life into history. The intention is not simply to entertain like so many awful films of the past ten years, which is a good thing, since "The End of St. Petersberg" is great without actually being entertaining.

There are some very powerful scenes and some frankly unforgettable visual sequences - the scenes of the first world war for example, or the beginning of the workers' strike. Take it from me, Pudovkin's direction is absolutely masterful and I think it's sad that seemingly so few people have discovered him. But with all that said, by today's standards this doesn't quite have the staying power of Chaplin or Keaton.

It's quite wonderful to behold, but it can really only captivate the interest of people who are interested in details of history, or who know little of the events leading up to the Russian revolution. Unfortunately for me I'm neither very interested nor entirely ignorant and so while I'm very glad to have witnessed this grand-scale piece of master craftsmanship it couldn't completely peak my interest.

That's unimportant though in the great scheme of things, and I don't mean to say that I don't thoroughly recommend it to anyone who enjoys film or art. ****1/2 / *****