I'm a member of a film club that shows non-mainstream films, and they are having a Russian season. Last night I saw "Ukraine in Flames" by the Soviet giant Dovzhenko - he's less well known than Eisenstein but an influential film-maker. His artistic flair seems to have got him on the wrong side of Stalin so he ended up doing some "workaday" films rather than what he wanted.
Ukraine in Flames (1943) is part one of two wartime documentaries about the Russian Front in WW2 - the second is Victory in Soviet Ukraine, which I am told is not as good. IMDB link . Dovzhenko compiled it out of a large amount of USSR and captured German combat footage.
This is an interesting and graphic vision of the hellish war on the Eastern Front. It is clearly a pro-Soviet propaganda film (the person running the show said these films were partly aimed at the US to get people on their side as to the horrors being inflicted on them by the Nazis). Some of it is annoying and some of it avoids completely facts - like the large number of pro-German collaborators in the Ukraine.
It has some beautiful, lyrical sequences of peasant life on the land, and contrasts this with the horrors of war (note it is much more graphic than similar Western films and does show the way war destroys civilian lives.)
For military buffs there is a lot of interesting footage - the Soviet army and partisans are really dependent on horses and carts, in a way that CM doesn't replicate. Whole squads equipped with SMGs. The massive amount of smoke and flame issuing from devastated villages and urban areas. Uniforms and equipment of both sides (including a brief glimpse of M3 halftrack APCs in Russian service.
Note: historical inaccuracies. As I said above, it makes no mention of the collaboration and Ukrainian Nazis (e.g Bandera), rampant in Ukraine. Nor does it mention the extermination of Jews in its depiction of German atrocities - one of the audience said afterwards that the mass burial towards the end of the film was actually of Jewish citizens who were murdered.
My verdict: well worth seeing for its insight into WW2 on Eastern Front. The version I saw had quite reasonable subtitles, which made it quite clear what is going on, and makes a distinction between Russian and Ukrainian speakers.
Ukraine in Flames (1943) is part one of two wartime documentaries about the Russian Front in WW2 - the second is Victory in Soviet Ukraine, which I am told is not as good. IMDB link . Dovzhenko compiled it out of a large amount of USSR and captured German combat footage.
This is an interesting and graphic vision of the hellish war on the Eastern Front. It is clearly a pro-Soviet propaganda film (the person running the show said these films were partly aimed at the US to get people on their side as to the horrors being inflicted on them by the Nazis). Some of it is annoying and some of it avoids completely facts - like the large number of pro-German collaborators in the Ukraine.
It has some beautiful, lyrical sequences of peasant life on the land, and contrasts this with the horrors of war (note it is much more graphic than similar Western films and does show the way war destroys civilian lives.)
For military buffs there is a lot of interesting footage - the Soviet army and partisans are really dependent on horses and carts, in a way that CM doesn't replicate. Whole squads equipped with SMGs. The massive amount of smoke and flame issuing from devastated villages and urban areas. Uniforms and equipment of both sides (including a brief glimpse of M3 halftrack APCs in Russian service.
Note: historical inaccuracies. As I said above, it makes no mention of the collaboration and Ukrainian Nazis (e.g Bandera), rampant in Ukraine. Nor does it mention the extermination of Jews in its depiction of German atrocities - one of the audience said afterwards that the mass burial towards the end of the film was actually of Jewish citizens who were murdered.
My verdict: well worth seeing for its insight into WW2 on Eastern Front. The version I saw had quite reasonable subtitles, which made it quite clear what is going on, and makes a distinction between Russian and Ukrainian speakers.
