Le début d'un siècle inconnu

1967 was the 50th birthday of the October revolution. Celebrations like this call for cinema to properly honor a country's history, to refresh the national memory about the days gone by, in an uplifting manner. This film doesn't do it. It is a episodic work by three young directors: Genrikh Gabay, Larisa Shepitko and Andrey Smirnov. All three had some experience by now, all having directed at least one film. This collaborative effort does not actually take place during the revolution, but in the aftermath of it. It takes place in 1920, and shows how people living in the outskirts of Russia received the arrival of a new, unknown age.

The full film has been lost to history. The film views people in naturalistic and pessimistic manner, a style that Larisa Shepitko would develop further in her later films. Because of the nastiness of the picture, Soviet censorship did not embrace it warmly. Out of the three episodes, only Gabai's was deemed clean enough to be shown to public, with Shepitko's and Smirnov's work being put on a shelf. However, something happened later, and Gabai's episode was lost, so amusingly what's left for future generations is a cut, that includes the two forbidden episodes, but not the one that the Soviets preferred.

It's an interesting story, and an interesting subject. But one can hardly view this as a classic of Soviet cinema. The subject has been scrutinized in various better films, and the structure that gives 30 minutes per episode really inhibits their chances to become deep enough, or to include enough reasons and consequences for the actions depicted. Smirnov's episode is about soldiers on a train track and the brutal faith of people with a differing ideology. Shepitko's is about life's harshness in the poor countryside. In both, the cinematography is great, but as narratives they lack a proper bite.