War without the glorification (review of Stalingrad (2013) for the People's Voice)

War without the glorification: review of Stalingrad (2013) for the People's Voice

Stalingrad

directed by Fedor Bondarchuk, 2013,

reviewed by Saleh Waziruddin

Unlike other films about the battle of Stalingrad, this first Russian IMAX-3D film, the second of recent big-budget Russian World War II movies, doesn’t follow the twists and turns of this turning point in the war. Instead it focuses on a building held by five Soviet soldiers and a young woman, who we learn is the mother of the narrator. The building is the only Soviet strongpoint between the Germans and the Volga River, beyond which is “India” or the rest of the world.

The film has been criticized, both in the West and the East, by the capitalist as well as socialist press, for having Hollywood superficiality and, maybe an even bigger sin for some critics, making the Germans look like “the bad guys”.

The film may fall short as a work of art, and the slow-motion CGI-powered scenes of hand-to-hand mortal combat and destruction do look like a video game. But one important distinction between Stalingrad (2013) and the war films from the West is that it does not glorify war, let alone the invader. Even anti-war scripts come off like war propaganda reels in Western cinema, as happened with Das Boot.

The war between the Soviet Union and Germany was a different kind of war than World War I, or even the earlier phases of World War II. This is made clear in a scene where the Soviet soldiers break discipline and charge German soldiers who, merely to provoke the defenders, set a Jewish woman and her child on fire in full view of the building. Unlike the wars glorified by big business media, such as WWI being celebrated by the Conservative government, this was not a war between empires sending millions of working people to senseless deaths for a bigger share of the world.

The Nazis were the bad guys. This distinction is needed today when the hordes of NATO and “coalitions of the willing” are invading and destroying one country after another without a Soviet Union to stop them. The hypocrisy of those who unconsciously adopt the point of view of the invader is shown in a scene where a German officer, having just raped a Russian woman, complains to her of the horror of the “bandits” resisting the occupation of their country. The main merit of the film is that, in a time when war and militarization are glorified, whether in the news or the big screen or even sports, here is a movie that shows war as a horror of death and destruction, without glorification.

There is even a nod to the social system of the Soviet Union. We learn one of the soldiers was a juvenile delinquent who was taken in to work in a factory, where his talent as a tenor was discovered and supported, to the extent of sending him to a conservatory and eventually a singing career. It was only two decades earlier that monarchist Russia had collapsed in the face of a less successful German army. Surely the Soviet Union’s policies in the years between had something to do with providing the Soviet people the material means to overcome the invader, liberate Europe, and keep the Nazis from reaching “India".