Peace today. No wonder the author wanted to call the film “Peace Today”. His historical view of the problems of the twentieth century is still relevant today, in the twenty-first century. History has not gone far: nothing has changed. Soviet film journalism has not yet created such complex and philosophical films - a true philosophical author's film. Before Koyaanisqatsi, it was still a long ten years, and other Soviet psych films, such as “Your Brain in the Sight,” were never independent of thought. “And yet I believe...” can also be attributed to psych films, but only partially, especially the part that Romm himself did not have time to complete. The bacchanalia of sounds and frames, designed to increase the impact on the viewer, today is not shocking. After all, such techniques were supposed to warn humanity about how terrible it would be to live in a ruined world full of chaos. But our world has already been destroyed, all the bad things have happened, and now we look at black and white cinema as a historical textbook. Even watching is hard, and it takes some heroism to overcome the timing of this picture.
Nothing is forgotten. Every achievement, every problem of the twentieth century is vividly depicted and stand close to the viewer. Technology, fashion, the arts, science, politics, war, drugs, nuclear weapons, famine, disease - go one after another, coexisting in a single era of the last century. Romm's comments add to the newsreel with a necessary and vivid meaning, and it's a pity that only a third of the film is honored with this liveliness. The author's comments are really irreplaceable, but the more their absence makes one bother to understand him, to understand the meaning of the image - the more their absence makes one think. Giving a subtle hint at the main problem in deep thoughts about the war, the author does not have time to turn to the future - to the new generation that does not know the price of peace, and leaves the viewer to draw conclusions for himself. A man comes to the fore. Disgust, boredom, withdrawal into oneself was already the problem that freedom and peace gave to man. “To be free from everything” is the slogan of modern man. The reluctance to recognize one's dependence on other people is one of the main mistakes of man and the causes of social separation, "atomization" of society. "The children of their society, they don't accept it" - has anything changed since then? “Rebellion lying down” – and now a popular tool. They understand how polluted the air is, how much energy is expended on weapons, but the problems are so many that all the thoughts in their minds are mixed - the problems of the world, generated by civilization and history, and their own, have mixed into a homogeneous mass. The new generation does not care, they have not seen war. Freedom. The resources of the modern world feed 12 billion people, but 2/3 of the world is starving. Everything blended and the world became like the surreal paintings of Salvador Dali. Our world is one big tangle of problems. Even advertisements proclaim injustice.
The second part begins with the title “Youth Rebellion” and begins with a talk about revolutions. By the time the film was made, Bloody Sunday had already taken place in Northern Ireland and Days of Wrath in Chicago were thundering, with students united under the slogan “Destroy the consumer society” organizing rallies and organizations to fight for their ideals. Their means were terror and destruction. Freedom, cults, ideologies, authoritarianism – these seem to be the symbols of that era. Revolution. Perhaps the author criticizes native Soviet communism by drawing a caricature of Chinese, perhaps even unconsciously or accidentally criticizing it. It’s like Mao’s coming back to life, like he’s playing a new role specifically for Romm’s film, so it’s fair to say: Mao was filming with Romm. “If you read a lot, you will not become an emperor”; “100,000 years of Mao”, “Thousands of thousands of billion years of Mao”, “In our opinion, the intelligentsia is the most ignorant part of society”. As funny and crazy as the result of draining the swamps – the fire of peatlands in the early 70s in the USSR, looks the extermination of sparrows in China, which resulted in ten million deaths from hunger. It's about happiness. “Deprivation is happiness,” “Poverty is good,” “The worse, the better,” says Mao. “When racism disappears, happiness will come,” is how a black American understands happiness.
The whole film is an encyclopedia of twentieth-century problems. Problems of human, natural, philosophical. At the end of the film, a circle of problems is outlined and a conclusion is drawn in which the dream of peace, solidarity and happiness sounds. A call to life and common sense. But in all this there is a too secular, scientific approach, as if there is no soul, and all the problems are only the problems of mankind. To convince that humanity is us, one line in the last frames of the film co-authors Romm fails. Well, you can be content with the rationalism of the film, because the question of the soul is a much older and insoluble problem, and for a Soviet director - even dangerous! So in another sense, this film is extremely spiritual.