The end of Saint Petersburg

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Movie
German title The end of Saint Petersburg
Original title Конец Санкт-Петербурга (Konjez Sankt-Peterburga)
Country of production Soviet Union
original language Russian
Publishing year 1927
length 105 (German version) minutes
Rod
Director Vsevolod Pudovkin
script Nathan Sarchi
production Meshrapom-Rus, Moscow
music Vladimir Lurowski
camera Anatoly Golovna
cut Alexander Dovchenko
occupation

The End of Saint Petersburg is a 1927 Soviet silent film directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin .

action

Russia, on the eve of the First World War . The first settings take place in the country. There in 1914 a simple, uneducated and politically completely unskilled young farm boy worked in the field. One goes hungry, the work is difficult and not very profitable. When the mother gives birth to a child and dies exhausted, one day the young farm worker sets out for St. Petersburg in the hope of finding work there. A simple worker who comes from the same village as he does is supposed to help him. The factory workers in the outgoing Tsarist Empire are doing very badly. Labor standards rise and rise, as do stock market listings. While the shareholders are rubbing their hands on the stock exchange, the workers are becoming more and more enslaved. Strike is in the air. The farm boy is currently looking for work when he joins the passing strikebreakers. Having seen the leaders of the strike immediately before, ignorance and inexperience make him an informer: the farmer believes in the need to obey the state and the police and betrays the rioters to the factory manager, his direct superior.

There are arrests that also hit the worker who once got him, the farmer, this job. The young farmer wants to do something for his work buddy and asks the factory manager to intercede for this man. But he only gives him a coin, his Judas wages , and the promise to give him work tomorrow. When the woman of the arrested man, who had given the farm boy shelter, learns of the betrayal, she angrily approaches him and shakes and shakes him with bitterness and disappointment. Sensing the contemptuous looks of the other women in the inner courtyard of the tenement, the traitor and informant leaves the building complex and goes to the factory manager to ask him once more to stand up for his arrested friend. But he only pushes him away for a moment, whereupon the farm boy becomes violent. He shakes his employer until he finally falls to the ground. There is a lot of excitement in the office, furniture is broken and the angry farmer worker is now attacking the factory owner who is also present. The office workers fail to contain the angry man. Only the summoned police can finally arrest him and lead him away. At the police station, the farmer's boy is beaten for his resistance and then thrown into a cell.

When the war breaks out, the population cheers. The patriotic enthusiasm is huge. The farm boy is taken out of prison and put into a tunic. While the common soldiers drown in the trenches and perish in machine-gun and shell fire, the war profiteers at home get ecstatic at the rapidly rising stock market prices. A symbolic wooden cross indicates the year 1917. The people are starving more than ever. There are street battles at home. The tsar has been deposed and Alexander Kerensky is the new head of government. This acts as a vain self-promoter. For the majority of Russians, nothing really seems to be changing. The bourgeoisie continues to indulge in the joys of luxury and gluttony, while the common people in soldiers' coats perish miserably at the front or beg in the streets. The worker, who has since been released from custody and a friend who was once betrayed by the farm boy, is wanted by the police again as a rioter and leader of another strike. One waits for him at his wife's home. When she sees his boots through the basement window, she throws the teacup through the window and warns him about the police officers. Her husband can escape the police henchmen who are chasing after.

The terrible experiences in the trenches and the realization that you were serving your life for a rotten, morally depraved and depraved system gradually turn the apolitical bullfinch in the trenches into one of them after encounters with Bolsheviks. When the regiment started before the commander, the former instigator of the strike, which the young farmer had betrayed to the police out of stupidity at the time, comes back. The traitor of yore now stands by his side, and both call for rebellion. With volleys of rifles, the regiment drives away their commanders, who gallop wildly into the endless expanses of it. Meanwhile, in St. Petersburg, where the need is terrible and the mood is charged, the storm on the fortress begins in the morning hours. The revolt against the ancien régime began with machine gun salvos and cannon fire from the Aurora . The now convinced communist also takes part in the storming of the Winter Palace. After all, victory is certain, the fighters lie exhausted or wounded and in the conquered magnificent building. The wife of his working-class friend takes the wounded farmer comfortingly in her arms and gives him a few potatoes that have been boiled at home as revolutionary food. The other men participating in the storming are also supplied with potatoes by her.

Production notes

The End of Saint Petersburg premiered in the Soviet Union on December 14, 1927. In the same month the film could also be seen for the first time in Germany (Illustrierter Film-Kurier No. 777).

Vsevolod Pudowkin shot his film almost at the same time as Sergei Eisenstein's opus Ten Days that Shook the World ( Oktyabr ). Pudowkin later knew about both filming: “I bombed the Winter Palace from the 'Aurora', while Eisenstein stormed it from the fortress of St. Peter and Paul. One night I blew up part of the roof balustrade and was afraid of getting into trouble, but fortunately Sergei Mikhailovich smashed the panes of 200 bedroom windows that same night. "

Unlike Eisenstein's powerful work, which focuses entirely on the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and describes in detail the storming of the Winter Palace and the establishment of a Soviet council in the last twenty minutes, Pudovkin's film concentrates more on the gradual will-formation of the individual (here: der Bauer), which, due to social conditions and injustices, is going through a metamorphosis from simple, apolitical citizen to staunch revolutionary.

Reviews

Although it was touted as a masterpiece decades later, the film was sometimes harshly criticized during the height of Stalinism . As Jerzy Toeplitz reports in his first volume of “The History of Film”, Pudowkin was accused of the symbolism he used in film and also criticized the alleged 'monumentalization' of the bourgeoisie, “that in the recordings with the factory owner Lebedev, in which he similar to the Peter III monument. is posed, was clearly expressed. "

Toeplitz also wrote:

“ A large historical fresco, and one of these is the film The End of Saint Petersburg , could not contain precisely drawn and extremely psychological human figures in the manner of the silent film. Even though the situations are not becoming more acute and the events are perhaps all too similar, the people portrayed here and their fate evoke emotion in the audience. And that was what mattered to the creators of a revolutionary film. The symbols are clear and understandable compared to Eisenstein's intellectual montage. The feudal facade of Petersburg, which hides its capitalist and bourgeois owners, may also be due to the peasant lad's subjective view of the tsar's residence. The character of Petersburg is revealed by the hero in the following scenes in the film, when the manufacturer's manipulations with the war mechanism and the stock exchange come to light. In The End of Saint Petersburg, Pudovkin has significantly developed his means of directing, especially with regard to the full exploitation of the landscape in plastic and dramaturgical terms. "

- History of the film. Volume 1. 1895-1928. : Berlin 1972, p. 332

After 1945, the West realized that The End of Saint Petersburg was one of the most artistically significant films of the Soviet era. Below is a small selection:

Reclam's guide wrote: The film is “a counterpart to Eisenstein's Oktjabr ; Counterpart also insofar as Pudowkin again placed an individual fate at the center of his film. He describes the consciousness of the simple farmer Ivan and makes it clear that this realization leads consistently to the revolution. However, at the same time, Pudovkin also tried to fit the hero's personal experiences into the general situation. There is, for example, a large montage of the enthusiasm for the war in 1914, in which the bronze statue of Alexander III. Shedding tears. There is an attack against the war profiteers who are celebrating the rise in share prices on the stock exchange and, between their demonstrations of joy, Pudovkin has cut images of the horror of the war. "

In Kay Weniger's Das Großes Personenlexikon des Films , the following can be read in Pudowkin's biography: “Above all, Pudowkin's next film project was in competition with Eisenstein. To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the October Revolution, Vsevolod Pudovkin recreated the events that led to the fall of the Romanov tsarist rule and the beginning of the Bolshevik era in “The End of St. Petersburg”. From the point of view of a simple peasant boy, who over the years has undergone a metamorphosis from the apolitical gateway to the conscious revolutionary and fighter for the new order through his knowledge gained, Pudowkin's film illustrates the imperative for the upheavals of October 1917. "

Bucher's encyclopedia sums it up: “Pudovkin initially intended to shoot a two-hundred-year history of St. Petersburg, but had to abandon this overly large subject in favor of a report on the consequences of the events of 1917 for an uneducated farm boy. The film was shot in competition with Oktjabr and used the same locations, so that the films allow an interesting comparison of their directors. Because of its directness and its emotional impact, Konec Sankt-Peterburga was , at least at the time, with the public and officially more successful than Eisenstein's work. "

Georges Sadoul drew parallels between Pudowkin's three most important silent films and came to the following conclusion in his analysis: “The three masterpieces deal with one and the same subject:“ becoming conscious ”. “The mother”, the young farmer from the “End of St. Petersburg” and the “Son of Genghis Khan” from “Storm over Asia” are disappointed people who are slowly coming to terms with the task of their classes. Social in content, Pudovkin's films are psychological works in form. "

In Films 1971–1976 it says: “Significant in terms of film history and enthralling in human terms”.

The Lexicon of International Films only called the film "media-technically important".

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ the lengths vary a lot from country to country: the Soviet-Russian versions shown have sometimes 80, sometimes 89 minutes, the French. 91 and the engl. 80.
  2. ↑ Michail Doller assisted him .
  3. ↑ quoted from Dieter Krusche, Jürgen Labenski : Reclams Film Guide. Reclam, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-15-010205-7 , p. 81.
  4. ↑ a b Jerzy Toeplitz : History of the film. Volume 1: 1895-1928. Henschelverlag, Berlin 1972, p. 331.
  5. ↑ Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 6: N - R. Mary Nolan - Meg Ryan. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 352.
  6. ↑ Liz-Anne Bawden (ed.): Buchers Enzyklopädie des Films. CJ Bucher, Luzern et al. 1977, ISBN 3-7658-0231-X , p. 422.
  7. ^ Georges Sadoul : History of the cinematic art. Extended German language edition. Schönbrunn-Verlag, Vienna 1957, p. 185.
  8. ^ Catholic Institute for Media Information eV, Catholic Film Commission for Germany (ed.): Films. 1971-76. Critical notes from six years of cinema and television (= Handbook of Catholic Film Critics. Vol. 9). Bachem, Cologne 1977, ISBN 3-7616-0388-6 , p. 78.
  9. ^ Klaus Brüne (Red.): Lexicon of international films. Volume 2: D - F (= Rororo 6322 rororo manual ). Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1987, ISBN 3-499-16322-5 , p. 859.

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