The Russian film maker, Alexei German, directed only five pictures over a career that spanned more than 50 years. Twenty Days without War, released after considerable censorship problems in 1976, was the director's second movie, although the first actually made available to the public. (German's first movie, Trial on the Road, reviewed in an earlier note, was completed in 1971 but withheld from distribution by Goskino, the Soviet censorship agency, until 1985). Notwithstanding its title, Twenty Days is a war picture (like Trial on the Road), beginning and ending with large-scale scenes showing combat. The film is an adaptation of a story by a Soviet writer, Konstantin Simonov, a well-known author and a close friend of German's novelist father, Yuri German. (Simonov authorized the adaptation of his story as a favor to Yuri German -- the movie was intended to revive Alexei German's career stalled as a result of the Goskino censorship of his first film.) Twenty Days without War is set around New Year's Eve in 1942 - 1943; a war-correspondent, Lopatin, has been transferred from Stalingrad to another theater of the war and, then, is granted a 20 day leave for rest and relaxation in Tashkent. Lopatin travels to Tashkent in crowded, claustrophobic railcar where he gathers stories from soldiers and refugees. In Tashkent, he visits his ex-wife. Apparently, Russian intelligentsia, including film makers and theater directors, have been sent into exile in Tashkent so that they can produce propaganda films there. Lopatin's ex-wife has remarried and is associated with the film and theater people working in the city. Lopatin argues with a technical advisor about accuracy in a film about Stalingrad that is being produced and gives an inspiring speech at a factory producing armaments. He has a brief sexual encounter with a seamstress who works at the studio and, then, returns to the Front. In the final scenes, Lopatin is huddled in a shell-hole under fire. He tells himself that if the bombardment ceases after three more shells fall, then, all will be well. The bombardment does, in fact, end on cue and Lopatin crawls out of the crater to march with other men across desolate war-ravaged moonscape of a battlefield. The soldiers agree that it will take them a long time to march to Berlin but they are determined to make that effort.
At one point in the film, someone says that Lopatin is fortunate to travel to Tashkent. "It's very nice in Tashkent," someone else says. "Nice," I suppose, must be viewed as a comparator -- "Nice compared to what?" Tashkent, in fact, is shown to be a rubble-strewn ruin where featureless, battered walls line streets hip-deep with mud. German's wide-screen shows a wasteland with columns of marching men in the distance, flares of fires, and, here and there, huddled figures of old women and children. Soviet films demonstrate great inventiveness in using different kinds of film stock as an aesthetic resource: Bondarchuk and Tarkovsky both, frequently, shifted from color to black-and-white in their films and Sokurov shot Moloch on film-stock specially compounded to simulate German Agfa-color processes used in Hitler's film industry. The film used in Twenty Days looks as if it had been buried for twenty-years in a mass grave -- the images are crepuscular and, often, scarcely visible and the footage has a raw documentary immediacy: it looks like the images were made at the very dawn of cinema; they are often ill-focused, exposed improperly, and action sometimes seems to accelerated, as if the cameras were handcranked. Although some of the film is reputedly shot on color stock, the pictures have been developed as monochrome -- one has the uneasy sense that there are colors, even rich colors, lurking in the murk, but that they have been physically tamped down in the darkness. German's images are frequently crammed with detail, but much of the detail is literally hard to see. The film proceeds as a series of episodes that are only loosely related. Peripheral characters have long, technically difficult monologues delivered staring straight into the camera and, then, they vanish from the film -- most impressive is a Red Army soldier who passionately complains about his wife's betrayal when he was fighting at the Front. (This man's agony and passion -- he intends to murder his wife -- is implicitly compared with Lopatin's nonchalance with respect to his ex-wife's new husband.) Lopatin gives a speech in a factory crammed with workers, almost all of them women -- there must be two-thousand people jammed into the big tin shed. Then, a local commissar physically lifts into the air two workers who have greatly exceeded production quotas -- somewhat surrealistically, the feted workers turn out to be scrawny little boys in rags who seem to be half-dead from starvation. The big Commissar with his shaved head has no trouble lifting them, one in each arm. The movie is filled with extraordinary images: there is a drunken New Year Eve's party and a quarrel on a film set where Lopatin challenges the accuracy of a movie portrayal of Stalingrad; this sequence is intercut with images from Lopatin's memories of Stalingrad, horrific stuff that looks nothing like the film that the long-haired propaganda director is producing. In the end, Lopatin's leave is far less than 20 days and, with some relief, it seems, he goes back to the Front where German stages a huge battle scene -- vast columns of men moving across a snowy steppe with huge tanks firing into the distance, everything characteristically twilight, murky, the enormous army marching into an ill-focused, foggy haze.
German's mature films have various remarkable characteristics. In those pictures, the director doesn't differentiate the periphery from the center of action -- we can't tell what is peripheral and what is important to the narrative. Further, German moves the camera through teeming crowds of people, most of them ugly, diseased, and ruined by their circumstances. The director achieves alarming levels of realism, often, by fetishistic attention to detail. (In Twenty Days, German insisted upon staging the railroad scenes on an actual train of the exact kind used to transport troops and refugees to and from the Front -- as a result, the scenes on the train have a kind of fetid immediacy; you can almost smell the claustrophobic train interiors.) His characters are, generally, passive, prisoners of the historical situation in which they are trapped. Although Twenty Days without War retains some vestiges of a standard war film -- it's superficially similar to other pictures about soldiers on leave in war, for instance, Vincent Minnelli's The Clock -- it is well-advanced along the path that would lead German to Krushtalyov, my Car! (1998) and Hard to be a God (2013). The final sound in Krushtalyov is a gurgle of phlegm and a muttered obscenity; the first thing we hear on the soundtrack of Twenty Days is someone coughing loudly into a microphone, so close and near that it seems to be some kind of a mistake. And, curiously, both Krushtalyov and Twenty Days feature some kind of Russian party-game involving balancing glasses of vodka on your head.
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