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| The Russian folk hero and his right hand man on this poster for Sergei Eisenstein and Dmitri Vasilyev's Alexander Nevsky |
During Stalin's dictatorship in the Soviet Union, the country's most prominent filmmaker Sergei M. Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin (1925)) was engaged to make a film of a Russian prince, who protected Russia against the German Teutonic Knights in the 13th century.
Nevsky stands up to the incoming Mongols and speaks many a passionate word of Russia's greatness, as he ventures out to lead his army against the German imperialists.
The Nevsky legend obviously fit the times well in the late 30s, as Russia, along with large parts of the rest of the world and Europe in particular, were anxious about Germany's aggressive new direction under Nazi leadership. And Alexander Nevsky is obviously a propaganda film.
It is also made under strict restrictions to the freedom of expression:
The film was screened directly for Stalin before its release, as Eisenstein had publicly compared Nevsky to Stalin, and it apparently lost a reel at the event; probably a piece of the film that didn't suit the butcher. The filmmakers were awarded the Stalin Prize for the film in 1941.
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| Nikolai Cherkasov as the title character in Sergei Eisenstein and Dmitri Vasilyev's Alexander Nevsky |
The details:
Unsurprisingly, a good film doesn't materialize in such a context:
Nevsky lacks the experimental excitement that characterize other Eisenstein works: It is a conventional story of a hero without any depth to him, who speechifies at any given moment and seems much more like a blown up figurine than a real man. He is played by Nikolai Cherkasov (Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1958)), who leads a cast, who are all uniformly stiff and have uniformly bad haircuts.
None of the other characters in the film are any more believable or interesting than their dull leader: The big subplot in Nevsky concerns two soldiers in his army, who are courting the same honorable woman. - This plays out about as romantic as dried toast if you were wondering.
It is all executed in oddly staged scenes in front of what is obviously immobile backdrops. The fight scenes are technically pathetic by any contemporary standards. Any seriousness of struggle, sacrifice, pain and the nature of war is lost, also due in part to the strangely celebrated score by Sergei Prokofiev (Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1945)), which plays circus-like, high-spirited melodies during scenes of mass-slaughters and religious ceremonies indiscriminately, seemingly ridiculing, satirizing or just distancing what goes on for the audience. The film awakens no emotions whatsoever.
Eisenstein co-wrote it with Pyotr Pavlenko (Man of Music (1953)) and co-directed it with Dmitri Vasilyev (Lenin in October (1937)).
Alexander Nevsky is praised by some, but it is little more than a boring, blatantly nationalistic piece of uncompelling propaganda from a time when film was actively used in instances such as this as a direct tool to control entire populations by their mad rulers, in this case one of the biggest murderers of the 20th century, Joseph Stalin.
Watch the film in its entirety with English subtitles here
Cost: Unknown
Box office: Unknown
= Uncertainty
[But reportedly a huge hit. Nevsky was Eisentein's first Russian feature in about a decade, (he had made a few in Mexico during the period), and it was reportedly seen by as many as 23 mil. Russians! It also made Stalin call Eisenstein, who had previously been criticized for being a 'formalist' (prioritizing style and cinematic experiments over substance and ideology), "a true Bolshevik." The film was taken out of circulation in the summer of 1939, as Russia and Germany agreed on a non-aggression pact, but when Germany invaded Russia in 1941, the film was released again. Eisenstein himself was very dissatisfied with Nevsky, as is known from his private notes. The opportunistic and programmatic nature of the film, his servile product to please the empire's tyrant more than anything else, and the film's unexperimental straightforwardness really bothered the man, - understandably. He returned to more personal, experimental and wild filmmaking with Ivan the Terrible. You can read more about this here.]
What do you think of Alexander Nevsky?
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