Russian and Soviet Films – Page 2

Masha and the Bear (Season 1, Episode 17: Recipe for Disaster): Masha and kasha aren’t a good mix

Oleg Uzhinov, “Masha and the Bear (Season 1, Episode 17: Recipe for Disaster)” (2009)

Despite its title, this charming little short turned out to be the animated children’s series’ recipe for success, its Russian-language version gaining more than 3.4 billion views on Youtube and as a result becoming the most viewed non-music video on that platform. The story is simple and straightforward but contains a little lesson about how one should accept responsibility for one’s actions and the consequences that accrue from them.

Bear is trying to teach himself how to play checkers using a guidebook but gets stuck over a game in which he plays both sides and now White is out-pointing Black by 5 to 1 literally. Bear doesn’t quite get the hang of checkers being a strictly competitive game where the object is to win, and not a game where the competition is in striving to be the best you can be and everyone gets to win. His little human charge Masha doesn’t help by stealing the black piece and trying to play hockey with it. Bear pops her outside the cottage with a real hockey puck and forces Hare, caught stealing carrots from the garden (again!), to play goalie. After a while of hitting goals, Masha and Hare demand lunch so Bear puts Masha in charge of cooking kasha (buckwheat porridge) and goes off into the woods to concentrate on his checkers game. Masha ends up raiding all the cupboards for kasha and pouring it all into the pot, mixing water and milk into it; the resulting boiling mix threatens to over-pour everywhere so she dumps as much as she can into as many pots and pans as she can, and takes them all out to the forest animals to feed them all. Even the wolves resident in the abandoned ambulance van up on the hill get overfed on kasha.

Meanwhile, Bear finally reconciles himself to the fact that Black has lost the game so he packs up and returns to the cottage just in time for the inevitable explosion …

The CGI animation emphasises bright colours and sharp lighting contrasts which give a sunny mood to the cartoon. The action is quick and zippy which allows a lot of story to be packed into a 7-minute cartoon. All the animals featured in the story are mute which make Bear’s patiently stoic and forbearing attitude and the other animals’ surprise all the more funny. The story brings out Masha’s mischievous yet lovable character as she is forced to face up to the mess she creates.

One hopes that Bear has learned not to leave Masha by herself in the kitchen again, but given that this episode has been the most popular of the entire series, perhaps the creators can’t resist having Bear forget what happened when he left Masha at home alone … maybe that’ll be another lesson to be reinforced.

The Mirror: a loose autobiographical work on memory, history, nostalgia and regret

Andrei Tarkovsky, “Zerkalo / The Mirror” (1975)

For most viewers, Tarkovsky’s “The Mirror” won’t be the easiest film to follow: the narrative follows a stream-of-consciousness structure and dives at will (and going back and forth between them) into three time periods representing its main character’s childhood, adolescence and current situation in which he, a poet, is in his 40s and dying from an unknown respiratory illness. In all of these time periods, he has unresolved issues in his relationships with both his parents (and his mother also has unresolved issues and conflicts with others), his ex-wife and his son. The ex-wife and the son have difficulties in their relationship as well, and a big part of that problem may stem from the difficulties each is having with the husband / father. Now on the verge of death, the poet (unnamed and not shown to viewers) looks back over his life and regrets the decisions he made and actions taken or not taken, and wants to make amends – but time and his failing health do not permit such atonement.

The plot relies heavily on aspects of Tarkovsky’s own life and that of his parents – as in the film, Tarkovsky’s father was a poet (and some of his poetry is quoted in the film) and his mother was a proof-reader. Scenes of the poet’s childhood take place in a beautiful bucolic countryside that could be close to Moscow – but already there are forebodings of dark events to come. A strange man claiming to be a doctor visits the poet’s mother and she seems to fall in love with him. The family barn bursts into flames and people stand by watching slack-jawed when fire destroys it – during a rain shower. Strong winds start up without any warning whatsoever, rippling over overgrown grass and knocking over tea cups and saucers on garden tables.

Scenes set during the poet’s adolescence take place during the Second World War (known as the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union and the current Russian Federation) and here the film starts to make connections between the poet’s personal life and the wider historical context in which he lives his life, and how major historical events impinge on people’s lives, taking away loved ones and thus setting off a cycle of actions by the poet and the people he associates with, the repetition of which the poet appears to recognise only when he is dying.

In keeping with the film’s dream-like world, the experiences of the poet’s mother and ex-wife (both roles played by the same actor, Margarita Terekhova) and their son Ignat (Ignat Daniltsev, who also played the poet as a young boy) are also very surrealistic, particularly in a scene where Ignat, left on his own at home in the apartment block, visits a neighbouring apartment and the woman there invites him in for tea, asks him to read from a book and then later disappears mysteriously, crockery and all. The rooms seem to change as well and we do not know if Ignat is back at home or still next door. Real or naturalistic scenes co-exist with scenes from the imagination; it may be that Tarkovsky is attempting to capture as much of the human experience in all its beauty, glory, pain and suffering (there is considerable historical archived film of the Spanish Civil War and the Chinese-Soviet border wars included) into a visual work that reflects back that experience.

Themes of guilt, regret, nostalgia and longing, desire, and the repetition that reinforces these emotions, along with how memory and history can cause or buttress them, are very prominent in this film. The natural world with its mystery and apparent randomness is a significant character to whom humans accommodate themselves. The poet’s mother accepts her place in the universe, having done what she could, and achieves a contentment her son has always sought.

A dense and really hard-hitting documentary in “Nationalized Finance: Russian Direct Investment Fund Focuses on Helping Country Expand and Grow”

“Nationalized Finance: Russian Direct Investment Fund Focuses on Helping Country Expand and Grow” (Vesti News, 6 August 2018)

An interesting and informative news documentary from Vesti News on Youtube has been attracting attention on how Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), invests its monies in major infrastructure projects and other projects in Russia deemed to be of national importance together with private and foreign investors. Through partnerships with large private investors and foreign government enterprises and investment funds, the RDIF selects what it considers the highest quality ventures – perhaps only a dozen or so out of thousands of such projects at any one time – and puts in money together with its partners at a ratio of 1 ruble for every 9 rubles the private or foreign investor invests. What criteria are used to determine which projects are selected for investment are not mentioned in the documentary but one yardstick is that for every ruble the RDIF invests in the project, there is a return of 3 rubles annually over the following 5 – 7 years of the project’s life.

After a brief explanation of what the RDIF does, where it invests and how it invests, including how it filters out projects deemed unsuitable for investment – unfortunately the English-language subtitles don’t do a great job of translating the Russian language narration, and miss out on two key areas of RDIF investment – the documentary dives straight into various case studies: a cancer research centre in Balashikha (Moscow oblast); Vladivostok International Airport; a co-investment with an Italian state road infrastructure investor into a road network linking Moscow with Rostov-on-Don and Krasnodar in the southern part of European Russia; a petrochemical construction site in Tobolsk; various co-investment fund platforms with Middle Eastern private and government investors; a fertiliser plant in Cherepovets; and a pharmaceutical company making insulin in Saint Petersburg. Case studies may feature attractively animated statistics that ingeniously stick themselves to the sides of buildings or onto roads; more prosaically, the narrator rattles off facts and other statistics in rapid-fire fashion and interviews various company spokespeople.

Dense on information and going bang-bang-bang with facts, the documentary needs a couple of viewings to be fully digested. It could be organised a bit better: more information about how the RFID was developed and the reasons why it came into being would have given a historical context for foreign viewers; the case studies could have been dealt with at a slower pace and in more detail; and maps showing where cities like Balashikha or projects like the M-4 “Don” highway are located would have been welcome. The case studies on the cancer centre and the Saint Petersburg pharmaceutical firm could have been grouped together. Surprisingly there were no case studies on agricultural projects (given that Russian agriculture has received an unexpected boost from US and European sanctions placed on the country in 2014 after Crimea joined the Russian Federation), especially those agricultural projects benefiting from technological innovations. The attractive female interviewer may be a distraction for some male viewers. 🙂 For the time being, this documentary is a good introduction to Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and the ways in which its monies are used.

A superficial survey of how far a society has recovered a decade after years of war and destruction in “Chechnya: Republic of Contrasts”

“Chechnya: Republic of Contrasts” (RT Channel, 2013)

Made in 2013, this RT documentary is probably due for an update but it remains an interesting introduction to the Chechen Republic under the leadership of Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov. The focus of the documentary is on how far Chechnya has recovered since the two wars in the late 1990s and early 2000s that left most parts of this region devastated and its capital Groznyj all but destroyed. Since 2007 when Kadyrov became Head of the Chechen Republic, the region has stabilised and money has poured into its cities and towns to rebuild its infrastructure and major buildings, and to stimulate the economy. At the same time, Kadyrov has built Islamic schools, introduced aspects of Islamic shari’a law and tried to rebuild traditional Chechen society so as to draw young people away from Wahhabism. The result of stability, new prosperity and instilling a particular fundamentalist interpretation of Islam is a society looking both backwards and forwards in rather awkward ways that probably say much more about Kadyrov and his government’s interpretation of Islam than about Islam itself.

The documentary follows a number of individuals going about their daily work routines. A boy of primary school / junior high school age attends an Islamic school for several hours each day, learning to read and memorise the Qu’ran (in Arabic, not in his native Chechen) and, apart from some sport and general education, doing little else. A female newsreader visits the Firdaws fashion house to peruse suitable Islamic garb for her job. A taxi driver muses over how much his life has changed since the first Chechen war destroyed his apartment: he now has a new, and much better, apartment and his family makes an effort to observe what Chechen traditions and customs remain after decades of Soviet repression (which included deportation to Kazakhstan during World War II, in which many older people and children died). Young single women learn to be photographic fashion models showing off the latest Islamic fashion trends to the rest of the world.

The film’s coverage strikes this viewer as rather superficial for its length (26 minutes), not delving at all into how Kadyrov’s government has restored stability and security with the help of Moscow, and giving the impression that Russian money has been primarily responsible for Chechnya’s new wealth. Did most of that money come from Moscow’s coffers or from taxes paid by Chechen households, individuals and businesses? What industry might Chechnya have that could have produced some or most of that wealth? Are there Chechens who work in other parts of the Russian Federation who send remittances back to their families, and is their money actually propping up Chechnya’s wealth and development? What laws has Kadyrov’s government enacted that have eliminated violence and terrorism? Is Kadyrov’s interpretation of Islam and Chechen tradition accepted by most Chechens or do they think he is cherry-picking only those aspects of Islam that ensure his continued leadership of the small republic? These are questions that may well arise in viewers’ minds on watching this documentary.

Some people (including me) may well find the Islamic schools a potential long-term burden to the Chechen republic: if students at these schools learn little other than reading and memorising the Qu’ran, without understanding its deeper meaning and messages, and have no other education or skills to undertake work, they will end up on social welfare and their families or partners will have to support them. Male students in particular, ashamed that their women or families have to support them, may very well end up drifting into the kinds of Islamist extremism that Kadyrov wants to discourage. On the other hand, Kadyrov is to be commended for allowing women (including his daughters) to pursue careers, even if these are careers in women’s fashion design and modelling. There is nothing though on women training to be doctors, teachers, medical and hospital workers or sales representatives even though a strict literal interpretation of Islam and remaking Chechen society into an Islamic society would require considerable numbers of women to be educated in such vocations so that the separation of the sexes in daily life can be observed.

The documentary ends on a positive, upbeat note and I couldn’t help but feel a great opportunity to detail (even if briefly) how Chechnya functions, what industry it has and how Kadyrov’s government and leadership steer the republic, was lost.

Exposing and satirising British news media propaganda idiocy in “The Hooligans: Joining the Kremlin’s Football Army”

Pavel Serezhkin, “The Hooligans: Joining the Kremlin’s Football Army” (2018)

Here’s a very funny mockumentary that pokes fun at Western (and in particular British) news media propaganda hysteria about the Russian government supposedly preparing an army of “hooligans” to attack foreign football fans arriving in Russia to watch the 2018 FIFA World Cup tournament and follow their national teams. Australian sports fanatic Alex (Alex Apollonov), having failed at just about every sport and, influenced by BBC news reports about Russian soccer hooligan violence, racism and homophobia in Russia, and the Russian “new man”, whose role model is supposed strong-man Russian President Vladimir Putin, travels to Russia to find real Russian hooligans with whom he can bond. One fellow Alex especially wants to meet is Vasily the Killer, who apparently masterminded the riots at Marseilles during the UEFA European football championships in 2016. Accompanied by his friend and mockumentary narrator Aleksa (Aleksa Vulovic), plus a film crew, Alex flies to Russia to find his hero and the group known as the Orel Butchers, made notorious by the BBC as instigators of the violence in Marseilles.

The reality the two friends experience is nothing like what they expected: the Orel Butchers are just a bunch of football-crazy friends and Vasily the Killer turns out to be a family man with a large brood of children who was not even in Marseilles at the time the riots occurred. Denis, alleged by Western news reports to have led the Orel Butchers in the Marseille riots, is revealed as … non-existent. The Orel Butchers add that they were asked by Western news reporters to put on balaclavas “for fun”. Alex and Aleksa meet Alexei Smertin, a retired football player and the anti-discrimination / racism inspector for the 2018 World Cup, and stadium security to ask what they know of Russian hooligans and what barriers are in place against hooliganism. Stadium security turns out to be very good. In their search for the “new Russian man” at a gym, Alex and Aleksa discover that the gym owner firmly discourages violence and hooliganism. The duo attend a football game and sit among a group of raucous but well-behaved fans.

Vulovic and Apollonov are well known for having travelled to North Korea in 2017 in search of a haircut supposedly not approved by the North Korean government (and which Vulovic got, along with a snazzy moustache). They bravely brazen their way into most situations with a mix of apprehension and awkwardness, and their deliberate misunderstanding of their hosts’ explanations is often more embarrassing than funny. In the gym scene where the two are looking for the “new Russian man”, they misinterpret and mistranslate what the gym owner is saying, and in that reveal a common disinformation method (allowing someone to rattle on in his or her own language and deliberately twisting that person’s words in the English language translation or subtitles) used by mainstream news media outlets to paint a completely different story.

Alex eventually returns to Australia much sadder (though not necessarily wiser) at not having found any Russian football hooligans in spite of what he was led to believe from following BBC news reports. Viewers hope that he will find a sport that accommodates his limited physical abilities and which is popular with Australians. At least, having visited Russia, he and Aleksa have found a country with warm welcoming and very polite people living comfortable if not lavish lifestyles, far from the old Soviet-era stereotypes that Western news media outlets still insist on applying with the aim of demonising Russia and Russian people for having a leader and a government that will not kowtow to elite American hegemony.

Loveless: a character study and thriller that criticises Russian society as stagnant, self-absorbed and materialist

Andrei Zvyagintsev, “Loveless” (2017)

As with previous films of Andrei Zvyagintsev that I’ve seen, “Loveless” is as much a criticism of modern Russian society and what it values as it is of the individuals who pursue hedonistic and materialist goals to the exclusion of all else. The film opens with a Moscow couple, Boris (Alexei Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak), in the middle of divorce proceedings trying to sell their apartment to interested buyers and ignoring their only son Alexei (Matvey Novikov) who suffers in silence at his parents’ bickering. After the potential buyers leave, wanting more time to think the potential purchase over, Boris and Zhenya get stuck into tearing strips off each other while Alexei hides and cries in distress. Over the next day or so, Boris and Zhenya ignore each other by burying themselves in work during the day – and Boris worrying that his conservative Orthodox Christian bosses will turf him out if they discover that his marriage has broken up – and partying with new lovers in the evening. Eventually the couple notice that Alexei has gone missing and call the police. The police are tied up with various other cases of missing persons and refer Boris and Zhenya to a group of volunteers who help them search for Alexei.

The characters are very one-dimensional – Zhenya is a screechy, self-absorbed harpy while Boris is passive and hardly says anything much to defend himself – and everything in the film from the cinematography and the plot to the visual narrative of various buildings (progressing from comfortable and modern to derelict and decrepit) is overloaded with symbolism and meaning, ultimately referring us to the same banal message that Zvyagintsev’s films usually broadcast: that Russia is a stagnant society given to hysteria and emotion, and Russians are a people who never learn from their mistakes. Working class people in particular come in for heavy condemnation but most significant characters in this film are obsessed with being on the make, acquiring wealth and luxury with the least amount of effort, using other people and checking social media constantly. Dysfunctional family relationships and conservative Christianity come in for heavy criticism, as though these exemplify and underline darker aspects of modern Russian culture and society.

The film’s attempt to create a parallel between Boris and Zhenya’s deteriorating relationship on the one hand and on the other hand their later relationships and even the separation of Russia and Ukraine and the resulting war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine is clumsy and contrived. Sex scenes are far too long and do not add anything significant about the characters who engage in them. While the cinematography can be good, even beautiful (as at the beginning and the end of the film), it dwells a great deal on the bleakness of Moscow winters as a metaphor for the bleakness and apparent apathy of modern Russian life.

Ultimately the film itself takes on a hermetic and self-obsessed bent as it trudges on to a devastating climax, at which (implausibly) Zhenya still rejects Boris as he tries to comfort her. The two later go their separate ways and resume their old habits – and psychological isolation – in new surrounds with new partners. At times the action and plot narrative in the film come across as unrealistic. Zvyagintsev seems intent to keep his characters as undeveloped as can be to bang home his criticism, however deserved or undeserved, of Russia.

I can see that future films of Zvyagintsev are going to be as stagnant and unchanging in the cheap pot-shots they take at ordinary people, as the society he believes Russia to be. Unfortunately those social and other structural problems of Russian society that Zvyagintsev takes to be symptomatic of the worst aspects of Vladimir Putin’s governance and the society that has developed under his leadership – the indifference of the police towards two parents who have lost a child, the alienation of individuals within families, family conflicts that pass from one generation to the next, the insidious influence of conservative religion through elites – are readily recognised by Western audiences as also typical of their societies: these problems are ones produced by capitalist societies.

A significant political interview of amazing revelations in “Secret World of the US Election: Julian Assange Talks to John Pilger”

John Pilger, “Secret World of the US Election: Julian Assange Talks to John Pilger” (RT.com, October 2016)

One famous Australian journalist talking to another famous Australian journalist should be a major media event covered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation or the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) but unsurprisingly neither of these networks was interested in promoting, let alone broadcasting, excerpts of John Pilger’s astonishing interview of Assange in which nearly every reply Assange gives to Pilger is a jaw-dropping revelation of the depths of the corruption of one of the two major candidates in the 2016 US Presidential elections – I’m referring of course to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party candidate – as revealed in Wikileaks’ releases of emails hacked from the Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s email server and leaked to Assange’s organisation. The really amazing thing about this interview is that both Assange and Pilger manage to keep their nerve talking about Clinton’s connections to Saudi Arabia and Qatar among others through her and her husband Bill’s humanitarian charity Clinton Foundation and those nations’ funding of ISIS; her obsessive pursuit of regime change in Libya that resulted in Muammar Ghaddafi’s death and mutilation; and the US political establishment’s attempts to derail the other US Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign, among other matters discussed.

Those who can’t or won’t bring themselves to believe that Hillary Clinton is steeped in corruption and has broken numerous US laws, from laws on government record-keeping to laws on the conduct of private charities, the law on perjury and laws regarding conflicts of interest during her time as US Secretary of State (2009 – 2013), are advised to refer to various blogs and websites (not all of which are politically partisan) detailing her many blunders and crimes: 21st Century Wire is one good website as are also Club Orlov and Off-Guardian.org among others.

The excerpts from Pilger and Assange’s conversation are gathered up into two main subject groups: the Podesta emails detailing the scope of Hillary Clinton’s numerous conflicts of interest, and Assange’s own predicament, holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, awaiting possible extradition by the UK to Sweden on trumped-up charges of rape.

Without a doubt, this interview must be one of the most significant political interviews of 2016 and it is a great pity and tragedy that it isn’t more widely known and broadcast in Australia at least, if not in the United States. The interview and its transcript can be viewed at this link.

Channel 24 (Russia) Interview with First Lady of Syria Asma al Assad: a riveting conversation with a classy lady

Channel 24 (Russia) Interview with First Lady of Syria Asma al Assad (18 October 2016)

In contrast to so many female politicians and spouses of world leaders, the wife of Syrian President Bashar al Assad comes across as a natural and genuine person, well-spoken, intelligent and perceptive, in her first interview with a foreign interviewer in 8 years. Asma al Assad talks about her experiences in carrying out charitable works and projects of social and economic advancement in Syria, and in holding the country together under continuous assault from jihadi groups and those Western and Middle Eastern countries that finance and supply them with arms, advice and new fighters. As of the time of interview, her projects to improve Syrian people’s lives, particularly the lives of young people, are still ongoing though her focus is now on helping the families of soldiers and others who have died or are injured as a result of war. Asma al Assad speaks warmly of her husband, describing him as calm, approachable and easy to talk to, and explains why so far she has refused all offers (all non-Syrian) of sanctuary for herself and her children away from Syria. She expresses confidence in the country’s future and ability to rebuild its society and infrastructure.

Mrs Assad is a thoughtful interviewee, very articulate, and highly critical of Western duplicity and hypocrisy in portraying the situation in Syria to the public outside Syria. Having worked as an analyst in a major investment bank in the UK (where she was born and attended school and university) and in Europe, Mrs Assad was well prepared for the role of First Lady, tackling social problems in Syrian society, and easily sees through the apparent generosity of those Western countries that offered her asylum and financial security during the current war. She presents a very calm demeanour and her voice tends to be rather monotone. A contemporary young Western audience might find Mrs Assad rather boring to watch and listen to, and not at all glamorous or dramatic. Yet whatever glamour she emanates – and she does look like someone of class – comes from her inner being. The result is an interview that, while it does not touch on anything different from the narrative of war, suffering, Western hypocrisy and having to battle propaganda that we have come to expect, is nevertheless riveting.

Battleship Potemkin: a classic of drama, passion and the power of people to overturn injustice and oppression

Sergei Eisenstein, “Battleship Potemkin” (1925)

Although this film was made over 90 years ago and is a silent black-and-white work, it still stands up well against current films thanks to its crisp action and a plot that will still resonate with many people, especially those living in countries experiencing political repression in their daily lives. The film’s emphasis on the people as the grassroots foundation for political and social movements that can overthrow governments and implement new and better ways of living is a refreshing contrast and rebuttal to Hollywood stereotypes about the power of individuals to drive and achieve change.

The action takes place over five episodes that form a narrative arc set during the 1905 Russian Revolution. Sailors on the warship Potemkin sympathise with workers rebelling in St Petersburg over their inhumane treatment by bourgeois employers and an autocratic government. The seamen get a taste (literally) of that treatment themselves when their officers try to force them to eat meat tainted with maggots. The captain forces the sailors to assemble on deck, separates those who refused to eat the borscht made with the meat and orders a firing squad to shoot the rebels. Ordinary seaman Grigory Vakulinchuk appeals to the firing squad not to shoot. The shooters put down their weapons and a brawl between the officers and the crew breaks out. In the melee, which the sailors win, Vakulinchuk is shot dead by two officers.

The grieving sailors lay Vakulinchuk ashore at the port of Odessa. Local citizens view his body, see the message attached to it that explains his actions and death, and are moved to rebel against the local government and military authorities. The tsarist government cracks down hard on the citizenry in memorable scenes that take place on the boulevard steps: a boy and then his mother are shot dead in a horrific sequence that underlines the inhuman, machine nature of the advancing troops upon the panicked crowds; a young woman is killed and the pram with her baby runs down the steps, the baby’s ultimate fate remaining unknown; and a woman doctor, appealing to the troops’ humanity and brotherhood with their fellow Russians and Slavs, is mown down along with other innocents.

The Potemkin gets a call for help from the Odessans and the sailors rally by firing on the headquarters of the military authorities, destroying the building. A fleet of warships is soon on the Potemkin’s trail. The sailors know their firepower is as nothing against the might of the Russian navy: how will they and their cause, and the Odessans as well, fare when the battleships catch up with them?

Although the film has probably been over-analysed, not necessarily for the right reasons, and its use of montage, clever and imaginative though it is, has also been over-emphasised, Eisenstein’s work remains compelling in its brisk, no-nonsense way of putting together otherwise unrelated shots so as to suggest not just a story, but a story with a message about revolution, and how revolution and mass movement can only succeed if the people believe in equality and brotherhood, and are not simply out for personal liberty. (And clever montage cannot work without good camera-work that has a feel for drama, emotion and visual artistry, framing each and every scene like a diorama in itself, and equally clever and brisk editing that brings pacing to suggest increasing tension leading towards a climax.) In this film, personal sacrifice is a significant part of achieving a freer and more equal society. Vakulinchuk acts as a catalyst but his role as leader cannot be over-stressed as it would be in a Hollywood film.

Also significant to the film’s enduring success is its cinematography which stresses crowd scenes, often shot in panorama and in imaginative ways to boot, and the clever use of black-and-white imagery that approaches German Expressionism’s use of black and white and all the shades of grey in-between. Violence in the film is not explicit yet the discreet ways in which it is filmed make a deeper impression on viewers than all the cartoon hyper-violence of much current film-making which tends to numb the senses and prevent a proper and appropriate emotional reaction to visual brutality.

The actual plot might be thin and heavy-handed, the acting (all by non-professionals) overdone and the characters very stereotyped, but what Eisenstein brings out of his material is a film of great drama, power and passion.

Ironically, at this time of writing, the people of Odessa (in Ukraine) continue to struggle for freedom, equality, brotherhood and justice for their fellow citizens who were tortured and butchered by neo-Nazis in the trade union building in early May 2014, and whose suffering continues to be denied in the West.

Deduction and reason versus propaganda in pursuit of the truth in “Through Sherlock’s Eyes: The Case of Alexander Litvinenko”

Alexander Korobko, “Through Sherlock’s Eyes: The Case of Alexander Litvinenko” (2015)

Not only does this 23-minute documentary present an intriguing scenario of the death of the Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko from polonium contamination – a scenario that, among other things, not only exonerates his supposed murderer Andre Lugovoi (a former KGB guard later turned businessman and Russian State Duma representative) but also possibly explains why the British inquests into Litvinenko’s death go nowhere – but it does so in a calm, laid-back way that eschews Hollywood-style hugger-mugger razzle. Taking us into the matter is Vasily Livanov, posing as the Russian Sherlock Holmes, sitting at ease in his armchair and reading out aloud the work done by amateur Russian and British sleuths who shared their information online.

The documentary presents its case that Litvinenko contaminated himself with polonium and carelessly left traces wherever he went, which explains how not only Lugovoi himself ended up contaminated but also other places in London that Litvinenko frequented (but which Lugovoi never visited) also were found to have traces of the element on their premises. Firstly Lugovoi is subjected to a polygraph lie-detector test administered by expert Blake C Burgess and is found to be innocent. The documentary then turns its attention to the US writer Masha Gessen’s scribbling about Litvinenko’s case in her book on Russian President Vladimir Putin (“Putin: the Man without a Face”) and, using information obtained from an interview conducted with an American nuclear physicist, demolishes Gessen’s weird claim that the isotope of polonium that killed Litvinenko was made only in Russia by government workers in 2006 and that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered the hit on Litvinenko. The US scientist adds that polonium can be ordered online in tiny amounts. (Plus polonium is used in textile factories throughout the world, including the Indian subcontinent where the bulk of the global textile manufacturing industry is located.) Finally a British citizen journalist visits the Abracadabra Club in London, where polonium traces were found, and speaks to the manager there. The manager recognises photos of Litvinenko’s employer Boris Berezovsky and an associate, Mario Scaramella; but on seeing Lugovoi’s photo, says he does not know the man.

The documentary is easy to follow though its case is not entirely persuasive. The polygraph lie-detector test is not infallible as Burgess himself admits. The Yes / No questions asked of Lugovoi might have been phrased and framed in such a way that a bystander could easily predict the answers he gave. Only one employee at the Abracadabra nightclub is interviewed. Viewers may need more convincing that Gessen is not simply a jealous Putinophobe and that other people have criticised her writing and research. Other possibilities as to how Litvinenko might have died – he might have died from some other toxin and the polonium story is simply a cover to hide the real cause of death – are not considered.

How Litvinenko originally came in contact with the polonium and why is not part of the documentary’s scope so some viewers may be disappointed that the sleuthing done by citizen journalists only exonerates Lugovoi of murder but goes no further. The aim of the program is basically to strip the politics away from the circumstances of Litvinenko’s death and by doing so, demonstrate how the man and the way he died are being used to demonise Russia and its government by the British and other Anglophone news media. Implied here is the notion that the British news media is acting as the propaganda arm of the British government in pushing an agenda that wilfully separates the peoples of Russia and Britain from pursuing common interests and values by fanning the flames of conflict between them.

The documentary treats its viewers intelligently and does not condescend to them with blaring lights, a hasty pace, jagged editing and flashy special effects. Not for the first time do I find myself wishing all documentaries could treat its viewers with respect.