Born in Penza in 1900 into a working-class family, Alexander Medvedkin rose from complete obscurity to the heights of Russian cinema. Marked for life by the revolutionary enthusiasm of his youth, he joined the Red Army in 1919, served as a propaganda specialist in Budenny’s Red Cavalry, and became a lifelong Communist Party member in 1920. After directing satirical theatrical skits and propaganda films (agitki) for Budenny’s cavalrymen on topics such as personal hygiene, out-of-touch bureaucrats, and poor work habits among Soviet workers, Medvedkin moved to newsreels, feature films and, in his last decades, political documentaries. While his early short documentaries and newsreels earn high praise from Widdis for presenting ‘a uniquely unvarnished document of real life’ (p. 2’7), Medvedkin always favoured satire as the most effective tool for correcting the flaws of Soviet society. Like his ideology, Medvedkin’s cinematic style was set once and for all in these early formative years… read more
Born in Penza in 1900 into a working-class family, Alexander Medvedkin rose from complete obscurity to the heights of Russian cinema. Marked for life by the revolutionary enthusiasm of his youth, he joined the Red Army in 1919, served as a propaganda specialist in Budenny’s Red Cavalry, and became a lifelong Communist Party member in 1920. After directing satirical theatrical skits and propaganda films (agitki) for Budenny’s cavalrymen on topics such as personal hygiene, out-of-touch bureaucrats, and poor work habits among Soviet workers, Medvedkin moved to newsreels, feature films and, in his last decades, political documentaries. While his early short documentaries and newsreels earn high praise from Widdis for presenting ‘a uniquely unvarnished document of real life’ (p. 2’7), Medvedkin always favoured satire as the most effective tool for correcting the flaws of Soviet society. Like his ideology, Medvedkin’s cinematic style was set once and for all in these early formative years. Widdis describes how he developed his unique blend of avant-garde technique, political satire, and Stalinist propaganda out of influences that included Russian folklore and the American silent comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, Mayakovsky’s satirical plays and ROSTA windows, the theatrical experiments of Meyerhold, Kozintsev, and Trauberg, and Eisenstein’s theory of the ‘montage of attractions’.
Medvedkin’s most important work belongs to the second half of the 1930s, when, in an amazing burst of creativity, he wrote and directed three feature films, as well as writing an epic screenplay about the Russian peasantry’s search for happiness. This project, The Accursed Force [Okaiannaia sila], tragically, was never approved for filming. His greatest movie, Happiness [Schast’e] (1935), is a brilliant comic parable of a collective-farm peasant who discovers true happiness when he outgrows his pre-revolutionary obsession with private property. The hero of Happiness, Khmyr, is familiar from Russian folklore: the fool who, after a series of comical adventures, stumbles into success. But Medvedkin treats the fool’s victory as the result of an ideological transformation, which occurs when Khmyr saves the collective farm’s stables even though it means letting his own home burn. Fortunately, Happiness transcends this basic myth of socialist realism. Modern viewers appreciate the film for its richly imagined satire of pre-revolutionary Russia, populated by rich merchants, greedy priests, sexy nuns, and grotesque soldiers, and its many inspired comic moments.
While Medvedkin’s other films of the 1930s show occasional sparks of comic genius, The Miracle Worker [Chudesnitsa] (1936) was a box office disappointment and New Moscow [Novaia Moskva] (1938) was a complete disaster. Two months after it was approved for distribution, for reasons which remain obscure to this day, the film was suddenly and inexplicably banned. Although he continued to direct films until his death in 1989, after the disaster of New Moscow Medvedkin would spend the next fifty years of his life in a kind of cinema purgatory, filming and directing newsreels during the war and then propaganda documentaries in the post-war period.
While Widdis is certainly right to decry this colossal waste of talent, her argument that, contrary to all appearances and to his own repeated professions of loyalty to the Soviet system, Medvedkin was actually satirizing the central political events of his lifetime (e.g. collectivization, the reconstruction of Moscow, and Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands programme) ultimately fails to convince. After the minor miracle of Happiness, his films are consistently undone by idealized and unreal characters, inert ideology, and a totally falsified representation of Soviet reality. The irony of Medvedkin’s life and career is that, despite never questioning the uncompromising and Romantic Bolshevik faith of his youth, this loyal servant of the Revolution was for decades harassed and obstructed by obtuse censors and critics. His tragedy is that a film-maker who showed a genius for capturing something close to unvarnished reality in his early documentary films ended as the creator of crude and propagandistic political documentaries in which he defended the peaceful and democratic policies of the Brezhnev regime against ‘the destruction of moral norms and the moral degradation of contemporary capitalist society’ (p. 120). Unfortunately, Widdis’s enthusiasm for Medvedkin the political satirist blinds her to this less attractive aspect of his work. And this is a shame because the full story of Medvedkin’s career would make an even more intriguing book than the somewhat truncated version that Widdis presents. —The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg Anthony Anemone
