Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER JANUARY AND FEBRUARY 1944 LETTERS FROM RUSSIA By permission of Ivor Montagu to whom the letters were sent. From Pudovkin DEAR IVOR, I was glad to receive news of you although, to my regret, this was merely in the form of a telegram. I don't know whether you've had the letter I sent you last winter. You already know that I've finished the film of The Russians. I hope you'll see it on the screen soon. You won't be surprised that the play has been changed a good deal. You're an old film man and don't need reminding that the scale peculiar to the film dictates compression of the story, in every scene as well as of the play as a whole, to a much more thorough degree than needs to be done in the theatre. Simonov and 1 together took out a whole number of characters, distributing their plot functions among the not very many that remained. We did this, for example, with the Germans, working out a new sort of synthetic character for the General, whose part — I may say by the way — interested me particularly. Well, for the first time since Tolstoy's The Living Corpse I've had a go at trying out my acting talents. The unfortunate "corpse" and the responsibility for his posturings could, after all, be shifted on to Otsep, who directed it. For any possible ill-success of the General, I and I alone am answerable. Even Simonov can't be made blameworthy. In putting the General on the screen, I was partly anxious to pay the Germans a personal score on my own account. During the first world war, I spent some time with them as a prisoner. I very well remember an elderly General who used to come to our war prisoners' camp in the capacity of an Inspector with the special job of making harsher the harsh conditions under which we uncomfortably lived. I very well remember how he used to pass down the ranks of ragamuffins among whom I stood and bawl out to his officers, accusing them of "soft-heartedness" and "liberalism". A tall, oldish fellow, with broad, stooping shoulders, on which hung loosely his grey military greatcoat embellished with turned-back red lapels. From time to time he would turn his deadpan face toward us and direct upon one or other of us a gaze completely devoid of expression. Then that gaze would crawl over the man he was looking at, with the slow deliberation of a dreadnought manoeuvring. I've remembered that fellow all my life long. I've remembered with a kind of horror that there can be human beings in existence with the mental make-up and horizon almost of some sort of mangy chained watchdog, whose visual world is bounded by a view of feet, either those of his master — which he must lick — or those of other people against which he must hurl himself, snarling and slavering. I was pretty much of a youngster, endowed with a natural respect for grey hairs, and the impression it made on me was truly abominable. And if I've succeeded, playing in my picture, in giving even an approximate rendering of this vile spiritual emptiness of a German "patriot", then I shall be most happy, and feel I've paid back a bit of my debt to the noble "Aryans ". The main thing we've tried to do in the film is exactly to portray its title : The Russians. They are a very varied people, the Russians in this story, with sharply distinguished ages and characters, with different sorts of education and differing experience of life. The twenty-year-old fresh and spontaneous Valya ; the sixty-year-old sagacious, experienced and rigidly firm-ofprinciple Vasin ; the forty-year-old Safonov whose will-power, hardened in battle, directs his every word and action; the life-loving Globa, fussing about comfort whatever happens; the hysterically weak-willed wife of Dr. Kharitonenko — all these at the given moment march on the one path, not one determined in accordance with their individual characters, but the one belonging to the people as a whole. To that same "soul of a nation" of which Tolstoy tells with such power in "War and Peace" and in whose final victory we all of us today invincibly believe. My next job is tied up with exactly that alldeciding strength of the "soul of a nation". Simonov and I are working on a film of the great battle near Moscow. It's not, of course, going to be an affair of battle scenes and panoramas. Nor of duplicating what has already been done in newsreels and newspaper stories. No, the job is to perceive and portray those deep "root" causes that brought about the inevitable first defeat of the Germans, despite their then clear superiority not only in material but also in military morale, exalted by their uninterrupted victories. I can't tell you any more about that film — it's now in the stage of being worked out. Simultaneously with this pretty large-scale job, I am, as I do always, working on the parallel preparation of another. I'm planning to make a picture about "Admiral Nakhimov". He was a naval hero of ours dating from the days of sail. I should like to ask your help and I'll tell you in what direction. The traditional uniforms of the English fleet in sail-boat days were pretty well international at the time. They were imitated in all countries, our own among them. If you could get hold of a reasonable quantity of pictorial material dealing with naval sailing fleets of about 1840-1860 for me, I should be most heartily grateful. Any daguerreotypes of the period you could get hold of would be especially valuable, because photography was so poorly developed in our part of the world in those days. I can't let this opportunity go of telling you what 1 thought of the picture In Which We Serve. It's a splendid job, overwhelming in its complete and well-thought out frankness. One of my comrades called it profoundly national, and I fully agree with him. The picture is English through and through. You can see the face of the real England in it. The scene in which the Captain, taking leave, shakes the hands of a whole file of his compatriots, and each conducts himself as though he were like no one but himself, and yet at the same time alJ are like each other, will remain long in my memory. Please give my warmest and most cordial greetings to the author and to all who worked On the film with him. Yours, V. 1. Pudovkin From Rowan Karmen DEAR MONTAGU, Returning from the front I found your cable which I answer immediately. I have always been a strong opponent of uniting documentary and acted material. And long before I saw the Davies film I was interested in how far Curtiz had succeeded in integrally blending the newsreel and studio shot, in the means used to enable the actors to recreate political figures and to reconstitute political events. I think Curtiz has succeeded in this. And the success he has achieved is not merely in making a good production in comparison to the ordinary run of film, but in establishing an interesting new genre of feature films, that one might call journalistics. I am sure that many new films, well appreciated by audiences, will come to be made in this genre. The new material embodied in the film and forming an inseparable part of it creates, in my opinion, a stronger impression than acted versions of the same scenes would have done. It is possible, by the way, that our appreciation of the film is a bit handicapped by the make-up of the actors who personify the political figures of our country. Soviet spectators can hardly restrain a smile when on the screen appear Kalinin, Vyshinsky, Litvinov, Molotov — all utterly unlike themselves as they are in real life. But it is obv ious that the director did not set out to create exact resemblances, just as he is content to show Walter Huston, who appears on the screen immediately following the authentic Davis, also not at all like the original. Huston is a talented actor. From the first moment he appears he stands out as the film's main character, its author and commentator on major events which, though recent, have already entered the realm of history. We see how the war of to-day which is costing mankind so much blood and suffering was unleashed. We see Berlin — that robber's den in the centre of Europe, wherein steel wings were forged upon the .dove of peace. Before the spectator's eyes pass the frenzied bacchanalia of Hitler's military parades. Everything in that country — from the crazed Fiihrer to those children he corrupted to become tin soldiers — everything is directed toward the aim of conquering the world. And in what striking contrast to those scenes in the film showing the gloom and pitiful stupidity reigning in Nazi Germany appear the scenes on the screen depicting the peaceful building up of the Soviet Union. Thousands of people have seen this film in our country. Soviet filmgoers have unquestionably appreciated the noble aspiration of its author, which permeates it with an appeal for mutual understanding and mutual trust between the democratic States in the interests of speediest \ ictory over the enemy and the building up of lasting peace after victory has been achieved. For us film people the picture Mission to Moscow is of great interest as typing a new genre Film Journalistics. We welcome it as a work strengthening the friendly relations between great peoples, cementing the firm alliance of the democracies without which final victor) over Hitlerism, the enemy of progressive mankind, is impossible of achievement. Yours sincerely, ROWAN KARMEN Transmitted by S.C.R. (Kislova)