Outskirts

Outskirts – I watched this film on the same night that I saw Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia and the contrast between the two pictures was disorienting to say the least. Boris Barnet made Outskirts, a 1933 Sovet film about the inhabitants of small, provincial city somewhere in Tsarist Russia. I think that the Russian word, Okraina, the film’s title, probably means something like “boondocks.” The film was released in the United States as The Patriots, a complete misnomer. Outskirts is the kind of film that ambitious directors produced in the early sound era – rejecting expressionistic acting styles that dominated silent film, and adopting a less florid pictorial style, film makers worked verismo, attempting to produce documentary-style “slice-of-life” pictures. Early sound films by Renoir, for instance Toni, and Hollywood pictures like Wyler’s Dodsworth and Leo McCarey’s Make way for Tomorrow, exemplify this international tendency. Sound liberated film makers from the stylized beauty of silent films and offered the possibility of presenting something like the real world on screen. But audiences didn’t accept these pictures and by the mid- and late-thirties, more conventional narrative films won the day. Little pictures focusing on realistically portrayed characters, with a few exceptions, didn’t return to favor until the late sixties and early seventies when American independent movies, such as those made by Robert Altman, rediscovered this kind of filmmaking. Outskirts is puzzling because it seems, at once, far ahead of its time and, also, strangely archaic. The film has no real plot; the narrative meanders this way and that, taking surprising detours – you can never predict what the next scene will be, or how an encounter or confrontation will play out. The characters are intriguingly eccentric and the milieu is scrupulously mean, impoverished, and backwards. You don’t discover which characters will be important until half-way through the film – I will have to watch the picture again to better understand it. People that you thought were just odd-looking faces in the crowd later turn out to be central to the film However, that said, the picture is decentralized – each principal character gets a few scenes focusing on his or her dilemma before the picture moves on to chronicle the next character’s adventures. People who seem important to the film die unexpectedly or vanish from the movie. For instance, a German-speaking Russian who is close friend to an old man who’s family is integral to the film quarrels with his buddy over the War and, then, sulking, leaves the film never to reappear. A German prisoner of war is badly beaten after a discreetly filmed and chaste love interlude with a Russian girl – we expect the movie to reunite the lovers but this doesn’t ever occur. We last see the boy, wounded on his cot, in a prisoner of war camp. Periodically, Barnet indulges in Soviet-style montage – usually just a series of edits emphasizing some heroic stance or action. But these scenes clash with the austere naturalism of the rest of the film. There are Chagall-style jokes: horses comment on the action and, in one startling scene, steam blasting out from beneath locomotive engines seems to enthusiastically endorse the war with Germany: the steam cries “Hurray!” The tone of the film veers wildly from bathos to comedy to scenes of war-time misery. Barnet has no interest in glamorizing war and he shoots World War I as a series of explosions approaching the camera and, then, as a trench in which the soldiers are periodically buried alive by bursting shells tossing dirt all over them. A scene of fraternization between German and Russian forces played out in what looks like a huge gravel pit is filmed in extreme long-shot and represents a model of tactfulness – a sequence that other filmmakers would film sentimentally is here presented in two or three lucid documentary style shots. The town itself is major character in the film: it is a small city where everyone seems to be engaged in making shoes. In the opening scenes, there is a strike which results in the obligatory scenes of Cossacks riding down workers – but the sequence, shot like a poor man’s Odessa steps, ends with one of the shoe-makers escorting a woman away from the violence, turning to wink broadly at the camera in expectation of the sexual encounter he hopes to orchestrate from all the chaos. The film’s editing is haphazard and like works by Vigo and Renoir of the same era, nothing is beautiful or beautifully shot – you have to work with this film to understand it. Boris Barnet is now emerging as one of the more important Soviet-era filmmakers and some critics regard him as greater than his celebrated comrades, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov. I am going to have to study him in some detail – Outskirts resists me, but I think it important and interesting because of that.