**** THE LAST BOLSHEVIK
It’s tempting to speculate about whom or what he might identify as the “director” of such Marker masterpieces as Sans soleil (1982) and The Last Bolshevik (1993). “The 20th century” seems a likely guess, for part of the meaning in both these alluring works of wisdom is the ambiguity of causes, of agency, of direction itself, in the dreams and nightmares of contemporary history–the issue of who is doing what to whom. Brilliant works of indirection, they employ narration written by Marker but spoken by someone else, as if the only route to truth was through intermediaries and filters. (To complicate matters further, in Sans soleil the narration is delivered by a woman, recounting letters sent to her by a man.) In the graceful English versions of these works the translation provides another form of mediation, as do the various transfers between film and video within each work. Sans soleil is a film and The Last Bolshevik is a video, but both make plentiful use of both media. Indeed, the incredibly rich palette of textures, lights, and colors Marker discovers in video in The Last Bolshevik (playing this weekend and next at the Film Center) sets new standards for the medium’s beauty and expressiveness.
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Surely the most pertinent aspect of this background is that Marker was an accomplished writer before he became a filmmaker–and that he remains a writer in his films. For writer Philip Lopate, a specialist in the personal essay who also happens to be a movie buff, Marker is “the one great cine-essayist in film history,” and it’s easy to see why: among other things, Marker “has the essayist’s aphoristic gift, which enables him to assert a collective historical persona, a first-person plural, even when the first-person single is held in abeyance. Finally, he has the essayist’s impulse to tell the truth: not always a comfortable attribute for an engage artist.”
A superficial reading of this video–a characteristic example is in the September 1993 issue of Sight and Sound, the English film magazine–would describe it as a simple documentary about Medvedkin, a neglected figure in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Certainly it is that, though this doesn’t exhaust its ambitions or achievements. More profoundly, it’s a contentious essay on the history of Soviet cinema and the Soviet Union itself; beyond that it’s a multifaceted self-portrait and autocritique by Marker of what it has meant to be a committed leftist for most of this century. The subject of The Last Bolshevik is what it meant to be a communist–and what it means to think about communism today.
One five-year plan of my own has been an ongoing effort to persuade the Film Center or Facets Multimedia to book a subtitled print of Lev Kuleshov’s The Great Consoler (1933) from the British Film Institute in London–a mind-boggling feature about O. Henry, in prison for embezzlement, writing a story about safecracker Jimmy Valentine that later radicalizes a shop girl. It’s long been my suspicion that the most exciting wave in Soviet cinema came not during the 20s, as is generally believed, but in the early 30s, before the Stalinist crackdowns, when most of the major directors were making their first talkies: Vertov (Enthusiasm), Dovzhenko (Ivan and Aerogard), Pudovkin (Deserter), Kuleshov (Horizon and The Great Consoler), and others. For a brief period, before the tenets of socialist realism took hold, communist idealism and radically innovative art were allowed to rub shoulders, and we still haven’t begun to deal with the dazzling results (alas, many of the best of these films are virtually unknown in the West).
By the same token, one might say that what Marker gives us is neither a video nor a film, but an exciting new means of expression–the beginning of a dialogue and discussion that flies in the face of the received wisdom that we can now safely put the 20th century behind us. After the glibness, the dullness, the despair we hear about the death of communism, of utopia, of idealism just about everywhere we turn, in the pages of the Nation as well as the National Review, Marker reminds us, even in his own disillusionment and bitter irony, that we’re much too eager to bury a history and a legacy we never really understood in the first place. Communism is over? Very well then: let’s take a good, hard look at what we’ve decided to dismiss. And weep, as Medvedkin once did when he found he could put two pieces of film together and have it mean something. “Nowadays,” Marker reminds us, “television floods the whole world with senseless images and nobody cries.”
