Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Victor Khomenko (M) on July 22, 2005 at 06:15:45

Having spent another day thinking about it, and having viewed part of the film again last night (my wife dozed off at some point the night before), I am now feeling even stronger about recommending it.

It is truly a masterpiece, a marvelous film and should really be put next to the works of Eisenstein. The "End" is a powerful film with images every bit as poignant as many in Battleship Potemkin, but of course mostly on a more chamber-like, human scale.

I say "mostly", because the depiction of horrors of war in the "End" is simply second to none - so anyone seeking a so-called "war film" must investigate it... the images of WWI trench warfare are horrifying to the bone marrow and shall forever remain among the best such works... I am not saying this lightly, as I have seen probably all highly regarded "war films" - so take my word, the "End" is easily in the top five of ALL TIMES there.

The film is of course silent, but is done with such an artistic eye that you hardly need the titles. And of course the titles lose a lot of original text punch - nothing new there.

Being a propaganda film, this work comes with baggage, but fortunately it gets in the way in a rather benign fashion, and mostly towards the end of the film. But even there the director's mastery is such that you tend to concentrate on other elements, mainly the humans and the effects of the events on them, and simply see the historic events as a backdrop, not as the main message. A wonderful masterstroke here, and undoubtedly one of the reasons the film has not been widely shown in the USSR - not simplistic enough for the working class, and presumably way too sophisticated for the intelligencia, producing perhaps some unwanted associations.

The final scenes with the wife wondering through the emtpy Winter Palace are among the best episodes in any film, ever.

A few words about the disc. The Kino release contains three films - the Earth, the End and another small work by Pudovkin, his marvelous comedy called "Chess Fever". While I remember seeing references to it in some chess books, I have never seen it, and it is a delightful lighthearted work!

Therefore my STRONGEST recommendation for this disc - if every $18 you ever spent on movies produced such a return, we would be living in a different world today! I will be buying one for myself... but hey, there are 45 used ones on Amazon! I wonder what those people who are selling them now replaced them with?

If I have not been clear enough up to this point - GET IT, DAMN IT!

• http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00008WJBZ/ref=ase_imdb-adbox/002-9009250-9425611?v=glance&s=dvd   (Open in New Window)