Russian & Soviet Documentary: A Historical Excursion (Part Two- Medvedkin, Yutkevich, the 1960s and Mikhail Romm)

The problem of writing a short piece on documentary is that a day later one regrets not mentioning this or that film or director. Well, in Chris Marker's extraordinary film about Alexander Medvedkin he mentions (towards the end) the discovery of a colour film made by Medvedkin in 1939. This film was made using chromide gelatine colour technology and recorded a physical culture parade on Red Square. Medvedkin had been planning a satirical film on 'the tragic fate of the Russian peasantry' but it never got made. Instead Medvedkin with the film 'Blossoming Youth' marked his permanent return to documentary.
Emma Widdis sees Medvedkin's return to documentary as essentially a tragic story given his hopes of continuing with the theme of his great masterpiece Happiness. For Widdis, Medvedkin never found the same voice again, and had to sing again 'in a different voice'. This voice was essentially a documentary voice and between 1959 &1989 he made eighteen documentary film 'essays' for the Central Studio of Documentary Film. Widdis goes on to categorize them as being essentially of a single strand in documentary

In all of them he used the same method: the re-editing of pre-existent footage from diverse sources in order to create his own montage, given structure and meaning by a voice-over, usually provided for by Medvedkin himself. His angry narrative aimed ... to leave 'no place for a second opinion' ... he brought the full weight of his substantial experience to bear.

Owing, perhaps, as much to content as to form Medvedkin's post-war films have rarely been shown and, although, the common view is that they are political pamphlets in many ways directed against 'easy targets' in the Soviet Union - the West, colonialism (or imperialism) and so on, some of these films of these films really do seem ahead of their time.  A Chronicle of Alarm, for example, denounced a new evil - that of crimes against the environment as well as animal experimentation. Ludmila Dzhulai in her book Documentary Illusion was to say about his anti-militaristic film Reason against Madness (1960) that his harsh, emotional narration plays a large role in this film of denunciation, yet cinematographic devices have an even greater effect. Medvedkin's documentary films are dismissed in most accounts as being too much in step with the Soviet ideology of the time and rarely shown, they may some day warrant a reappraisal in artistic terms. It is difficult to say from many accounts - Emma Widdis's two slight pages give a solely thematic account and even Chris Marker's sympathetic film Le Tombeau d'Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik) is a film (and a brilliant one at that) of its own time. Widdis all the same accepts that Medvedkin was utterly sincere about the documentary films he made concluding that As the world changed around him, Medvedkin held firm to his beliefs. Marker's final shot in his epistolary documentary also suggests that Medvedkin's complete reappraisal may be some time in the future.

The Day of the New World was one of the first attempts to portray the Soviet Union as an entire country on a single day. 97 cameramen worked in different parts of the country to capture a single day in the life of this country (that day being August 24th 1940). The film was headed by Roman Karmen and Mikhail Slutsky and based on a suggestion by the writer Maxim Gorky. The film had 200 separate episodes and somehow the complex editing of such a film did achieve a cogent narrative. The film form in fact would serve as an example to other similar projects such as Slutsky's A day of the war filmed in 1942 and A day of a victorious country. Other films like this would be made even in later post-war periods.

The immediate post-war years left, it seems, few documentary masterpieces. However there is one tantalising film little written about (and it seems hard to track down) edited by the great film-maker and theorist, Sergei Yutkevich named 'The Youth of Our Country' and made in 1946. A colour documentary film on a Physical Culture parade it was said to have been highly praised by Henri Matisse and would make a fascinating comparison with Medvdekin's 1939 film.

It wasn't until the 1960s that documentary film genuinely got back on its feet in the Soviet Union. yet strangely one could argue that the Thaw period feature film had become more documentary in its style (the mythical and myth-making era of Stalinism was over and there was a definite return to a more documentary-like realism in films generally). A fiercely argued over essay by Yutkevich in 1964 Thoughts on Cine-truths and on Cine-lies was to shake up the documentary world accused of inertia and, in many ways, served as a catalyst for a return to documentary in the late 1960s.

The Great Patriotic War continued to be, perhaps, the most significant theme in documentaries. One of the major films made and well-received at the time was Roman Karmen's The Great Patriotic - a large epic chronicle of the war.
Other films were made by Solvtsov on the siege of Leningrad and some would give a more personal or intimate take on the war. An artistically original film on the Battle of Stalingrad was made by the great Thaw director Grigory Chukhrai with his film Memory. He would later go on to make a documentary about the film director Mark Donskoi. The 1960s would also mark a search for new characters and a new emphasis on the human. Documentary was now seen, in many ways, as a study in the nature of humans or человековение. V.P. Lisakovich's Katiusha is said to be one of the prime examples of this new trend in documentary.