The main film about Lenin It's really an outstanding film. Twice awarded: he received the State Prize in the USSR and the Golden Palm for directing in Cannes. The avant-garde formalist director Sergei Yutkevich, who always had a special view of cinema, found an unexpected way to realize two tasks: to show Lenin, the theorist of the revolution and Lenin the man. Even combining these tasks in a single cinematic image is a task that proved impossible for Soviet cinema.
With the filing of Mikhail Romm (" Lenin in October, Lenin in 1918), then Yutkevich himself (" The Man with a Gun), the image of the leader for a long and lost time became pathetically caramel, a kind of fussy good-natured friend of children. “It is bequeathed to believe,” writes E. Gabrilovich in his book, “that he was like a Christmas tree grandfather – kind, caring, soft ...” Such an image was sharpened to form a positive feeling, love for the leader, but completely deprived of the opportunity to understand him. The most important thing in Lenin, as it was and will be, is his struggle. Opportunities to understand the full power of Lenin’s thought (not for humor and kindness, he became the leader of the world proletariat!) masters of Soviet cinema could not give the viewer. To do this, it would be necessary to burden the viewer concretely, to tell him about the incredibly complex and irreconcilable political struggle of the early 20th century, about the different suits of socialist and bourgeois parties, about the monstrous conditions on the verge of life and death in which Russia was then. The propagandists-creators of Leninians decided to follow the easy, “Chapaev” path. This was a fatal mistake, as time has shown.
But in 1965, Sergei Yutkevich took this decisive step, boldly changing the canons of classical Leninianism. His avant-garde technique was the introduction of a voice-over speech on behalf of the main character - neither before nor after him, not used by anyone. Thanks to this scenario, the viewer gets an opportunity to really get in touch not only with the complex world of political struggle, but also to understand Lenin in a human way - through identification with the main character. And, of course, it is impossible not to say about the outstanding work of Maxim Strauch - in my opinion, he is the best film Lenin of domestic cinema.
Later, already in 1981, Sergei Yutkevich will make another radical act - he will shoot a semi-futuristic picture with the predictable title "Lenin in Paris", where he will make an attempt to warn about the inevitability of political struggle. But his voice will no longer be heard by the domestic viewer, who has been forced to lazy on political fishlessness, accustomed to ready-made formulas. It is a pity that they did not make a good political detective or militant about Lenin. Maybe history would have been different. Alas... Cinema was unworthy of this powerful figure, with rare happy exceptions, which, of course, includes the film “Lenin in Poland”.
10 out of 10