![]() Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) desperately wants to find a way to survive Despite the ostensibly materialist nature of the Revolution, the deeply rooted spiritual bond between the people and their nation remained and was embedded in these movies through expressive imagery which imbued the characters’ suffering with a mystical quality. ![]() The War became a forge for shaping the Russian soul while that soul might of necessity be associated with the collective imperatives of Communism, it had its roots in pre-Revolutionary Russia and the literature of the 19th Century. Their films – Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957), Grigoriy Chukhray’s Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962) – mined the war for stories of individual sacrifice infused with the heroism of ordinary people, blending triumph with tragedy. Lesser talents no doubt leaned on cliches and propaganda, but the best directors managed to infuse the genre with greater depth. Winning the war against Germany forged a sense of shared destiny which Stalin was able to appropriate to himself but after the dictator’s death and a relative loosening of the political situation, the war could be treated as a more generalized expression of national identity rather than as a tribute to his leadership. The fight against Germany had consolidated a national identity which had been conflicted in the previous two decades as the Revolution violently worked to reshape and modernize a society rooted in the economic and class conditions of the 19th Century. Wounded and dying, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) seems to melt into nature in Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977)įor Soviet filmmakers in the 1950s and ’60s, a film about the Great Patriotic War was a rite of passage.
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