Mikhail Trofimenkov about "Combat Film Collection N4"

The fourth of the 12 "Battle Film Collections" (BC) - N13 was not released due to a change in the "format" of propaganda work - was luckier than its brothers, which were released, unnoticed, on DVD several years ago. Number 4 became an original addition to the collection of boring films by Lyubov Orlova. Her postwoman Strelka from "Volga-Volga", transferred to new, military, supposed circumstances, sews together the episodes of this most original film phenomenon. Well, he also catches a spy in an eccentric sketch. Pretending to be deaf, he yells nonsense throughout the entire area, alerting the vigilant collective farmers of the danger. And then, while waiting for help, she forces the poor guy to pump up the tires of her bicycle - Freud, where are you? - until you lose strength. In fact, any BC is an orgy of Soviet cinema: Arnstam, Barnet, Donskoy, Kapler, Kozintsev, Leonid Leonov, the only Oberiut director Klimenty Mints, Olesha, Pudovkin, Rowe, Savchenko, Chervyakov, Yutkevich. Everyone flashed before us, everyone has been here. N4 (September 1941) is just more modest when it comes to directing. The short story "Patriot" was directed by Vasily Pronin, Honored Artist of Kyrgyzstan, "The Order Is Completed" - Efim Aron, the famous Kazakh director. The first film that Strelka projects onto his magic screen is called “The British Navy”: perhaps the British themselves did not create such a montage hymn to the imperial Navy and Winston Churchill personally. However, N3 already opened with the plot “English anti-aircraft gunners”: the brave guys, running out of the barracks in response to an alarm, managed to drain their glass and complete the jazz melody they were playing on the piano with a spectacular staccato. And N5 is the story “London Doesn’t Give Up”, edited by Pera Atasheva, Eisenstein’s wife. BC, in general, was filmed under the banner of internationalism. “Belarusian Kotko” from Vladimir Feinberg’s “Meeting” (BK-2) scribbles at the enemy, saying: “this is for you from the Belarusians, from the French, from the Czechs, from the Spaniards.” But Pronini and Aron are neat and boring. In "The Patriot" only the sadomasochistic detail amazes the imagination. Tractor driver Zoya Fedorova, in order to carry fuel for a tank stuck in a small forest from a village captured by German troops, puts shackles on her bare feet so that the Fritz sentries are convinced of her obedience. The main quality of the first bookmakers is incredible creative freedom. And how could people who released almost full-length collections every 10 days not be free? What they did would be rediscovered by world cinema only in the late 1960s with their left-wing extremist film leaflets. Chronicle and game episodes, fragments from films of the 1930s and musical numbers are fused together. 10-15 minute films are free from any psychologism - yes, popular prints, yes, posters - and even more so from socialist realism. Compared to the short story “At the Old Nanny’s” by Evgeny Chervyakov (BK-2), the films of the 1930s seem like muddy pounding of water in a mortar. The notorious nanny, to whom the German spy, who was once nursed by her, showed up, snaps her scissors like Hitchcock, enveloping him in a network of supposedly senile chatter: only Hitchcock did not use scissors in his films back then. In the sketch “Dream in Hand” by Yevgeny Nekrasov (BK-1), Hitler was visited by a nightmare dog-knight who had risen from the bottom of Lake Peipus: from under his armor, fighting fish fell onto the Fuhrer’s table. And, finally realizing that in front of him was not a tanker or a pilot, but a drowned man, Hitler tried to break into the edited scenes from Eisenstein’s “Alexander Nevsky”.

"Combat film collection N4" (1941)

Other classic films

Magazine “Kommersant Weekend” No. 45 dated 12/06/2013, p. 43

Authors:

Mikhail Trofimenkov

Feast of the Military Spirit