We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
which, according to General MacArthur, stands unequalled in military history for its scale and grandeur, was spread across the screen in a frieze of edited documentaries which, in some of their qualities, take their place with the finest achievements of film art. Moscow Strikes Back, The Siege of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and The Battle for the Ukraine were monuments to Soviet achievement which will in all probability outlast all the admired fiction films. They also differed markedly from their Western counterparts, Desert Victory, The True Glory, and the Capra Why We Fight series. No attempt was made to describe military strategy : instead, all aspects of the war effort were simultaneously presented in a form not unlike the structure of Intolerance. No other films brought out the vastness of the war so forcefully, and none, except The True Glory, approached so intimately the human atoms in the enormous totality.1 Post-war Soviet films have been slow in reaching the United States. Alexander Ptushko, whose The New Gulliver (1935) brilliantly used puppets to reconstruct Swift's satire with a class-angle, directed The Stone Flower (1946), a rather weighty fantasy in Agfacolor made in the Barrandov studios at Prague. The veteran Yakov Protazanov produced that delightful legend, Adventures in Bukhara (1943), a Moslem folk-tale redolent of its period and setting. This simple and childlike film makes all other Oriental fantasies, from The Thief of Bagdad on, look ponderous. There has also been the Festival of Youth, a colour kaleidoscope of the great gathering of athletes from all the constituent republics of the Soviet Union in the Leningrad Stadium in 1946. An amazing spectacle of mass-movement well shot by some thirty-five cameramen (including some remarkable zoom lens shots), the film dazed by its repetitions yet at the same time remained an astonishing technical achievement. The muchheralded reportage film of the Nuremberg Trials was
1 Many well-known directors worked on these films, including Dovjenko, Yutkevich, Dziga-Vertov, Gerasimov, Raismann, Belyaev, Varlamov, Zharki and Heifitz.
579