Thursday, September 08, 2005

Why We Fight 5: The Battle of Russia

US 1943. PC: 834th Signal Service Photographic Detachment, Special Services Division, U.S. Army. No personal credit titles in the film. [In charge of production: Frank Capra, with a mighty staff of film professionals]. A fine Imperial War Museum print. 81'. Viewed at Orion, Helsinki, 8 Sept 2005. For James Agee, the mightiest American war movie ever besides The Birth of a Nation. It is the film about the greatest war operation in history: Operation Barbarossa. USSR, a sixth of the earth, is presented in its multi-ethnicity and variety of resources. Hitler's way to the Eastern war is summarized: Hungary, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria. Albania, Greece. The giant attack of 22 June 1941 focusing on the directions of Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev. The animations of strategy are excellent, illuminating the German wedge and trap and the Russian defense in depth strategies. The cities as strongholds. Sevastopol. Beautiful montages of faces. The Russian strategy of scorched earth; destroyed giant dams. Guerilla war. The Volokolamsk highway. The museums of Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy vandalized. Great emotional force in footage on Russians burying their loved ones. Retreat in spring 1942: the legend of Nazi invincibility defeated. The siege of Leningrad, a powerful sequence; the road to life across Lake Ladoga. The strategic meaning of Stalingrad for the whole war. Everything else in WWII was a prelude to Stalingrad. Finally the Germans get to taste their own wedge and trap strategy. The greatest battle in history, the turning-point of WWII. Finns under Mannerheim are not mentioned together with Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria as Hitlerite allies; Finns are mentioned as co-belligerents in Operation Barbarossa, with a strategic importance in the siege of Leningrad. This films omits any critical remark on Stalin's Russia. In WHY WE FIGHT, Finland is first mentioned here, and fleetingly in the same context in the last film. In its bias, still extremely impressive.

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