The New Babylon [USSR 1929]

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Directors: G. Kozintsev, L. Trauberg
Cinematographer: A. Moskvin

This brilliant silent film, which tells the story of the Paris Commune of 1871, is an innovative, enthralling piece of work, closely integrated with the score by Shostakovich and demonstrating a cinematographic style which has all the multi-sidedness of the early Eisenstein but with a less frenetic composition.

In comparison with one of Kozintsev and Trauberg's later works, Simple People, made 16 years later after much other collaboration, this film is far more stylistically interesting and certainly seems more experimental--there is only one stylistic echo that is really noticeable, which is that there are a couple of striking uses of silhouette in the later film; and what is most striking about New Babylon is the use of silhouette.

To be more specific, it is the use of silhouette, shadow, simple light and darkness to evoke powerful visual and emotive effects. The film is replete with these shots: horsemen, silhouettes of capitalists in the background, etc; but the most impressive by far is a scene of an exchange on a muddy track over which many soldiers and carts are passing. We see only the silhouettes of all the figures walking along the track, and the wetly textured surface is shown also in silhouette. The scene is highly evocative, not least because it has the effect of totally framing the two characters we are concerned with in the social situation, which is made less central to our direct attention but no less present to our minds by the silhouette effect.

Other visual effects used in the film keep with the theme of using restricted visuals to evoke more powerful imagery. A frenzied sale in the department store and the associated debauchery of capitalism is represented by the struggles of the individual workers, the debauchery of the individual capitalists, but on a background of twirling umbrellas and other textures which create a complete context for the characters without allowing the context itself to take over or to become individual enough that it is no longer stylised as what it is meant to be.

Aside from the pure visuals, it must be said that the score by Shostakovich and its integration is incredible. Of the films I have seen for which he wrote the score, this seems so far the one in which his voice is the loudest. For it is the music which holds together the thread and tone of the whole film. We are led by the music to feel disgust and also contempt for the frenzied overconsumption of the capitalists in exploitation of the workers. But more importantly the musical sense of mockery of grotesqueness that is created in these scenes is much later brought back in a much more shocking way, when in the middle of the most horrible circumstances, the massacre of the workers, we find ourselves being returned to the grotesque mocking tone of music--where we might expect tragic music, instead we are joltingly reminded of exactly why this is all happening. This has the effect of, through music, tying together the imagery of the spinning umbrellas at the beginning with the digging of graves at the end.

The most memorable musical sequence is, of course, the rendition of the Marseillaise, which metamorphoses into a can-can, as Kozintsev and Trauberg juxtapose imagery of the soldiers readying for attack at Versailles with the earlier debauchery of the bourgeois lifestyle. The musical sequence alone is brilliant but here the music and visuals are tied together as an integral piece, not only drawing the parallel and showing the connections, but making us actually feel the connections, feel the grotesqueness of it all and the grave consequences of the bourgeois existence.

Finally, the content of the film is a more or less ordinary Marxian account of the Paris Commune, told through the story of a few workers, in particular a female shop assistant at a department store. There are two main points of interest in the content. One is the centrality of the female shop assistant, the fact that she is pressing on the men to stand up for themselves when they do not want to, and in fact that she picks up a gun and fights in battle, and in the end demonstrates courage and honour. In other words, like many other films made in the USSR in those decades, such as Love and Hate, The Girlfriends, and Zoya, this film places a heavy emphasis on the protagonic role of women in fighting for revolution, acting bravely, strongly, and independently, and in many cases more so than men.

A second interesting aspect of the content of the film is the feeling that this film is trying to not only evoke a strong feeling of class consciousness in workers in general, but also to send certain messages about relatively recent events. The class consciousness aspect is clear from the story being told, but also from the message that even though the Commune has been defeated, it will return (a reference presumably to the Russian revolution and therefore a message to Soviet workers that they are the heirs and continuation of the Commune). The references to recent events seem to me mainly to be possible references to the first World War. That is, there is the historical parallel of a revolution of workers happening just as a defeat in a long war is happening and soldiers are returning home battle-weary--there a possible parallel with the Russian revolution--and there is a point at which the bourgeoisie try to appeal to the workers as Frenchmen, and the workers say 'We are not French; we are the Commune'--a definite attempt to emphasise proletarian internationalism and perhaps an implicit gesture against the kind of nationalistic fracturing that occurred in the second International at the outset of the first World War.

All in all a truly impressive film. Not only is it stylistically fantastic but it succeeds in being gripping, moving, and inspiring.