Cinema: Images of War

The City That Stopped Hitler—Heroic Stalingrad (Central Newsreel Studios-Paramount), first Soviet film to be distributed by a major U.S. company, has been called the “mightiest war film ever” (by Manhattan’s PM). It has also been called “objectionable in part” (by the Legion of Decency). Reason: the picture “tends to incite hatred of the persons of enemies and to be excessively gruesome.” Stalingrad is not by a long shot the mightiest war film ever—Desert Victory (TIME, April 12), for one, was better. Neither can the Legion’s objections be entirely brushed off. Nevertheless, the 24 Russian cameramen who shot Stalingrad (eight of them were killed on their jobs) have provided history with some images of war as true as they are powerful. Some of the images: > A great, flaming city which seems to float on a tranquil river until the Volga also flames from the reflected holocaust.

> Atrocity shots (of tortured and dead Russian prisoners) more shocking than any ever made public before.

> Russia’s secret weapon (nicknamed Katushka), firing great whiffing coveys of rocketed projectiles.

But Stalingrad, like most films of real war, generates an even greater power from the dead-ordinary, rather messy shots which incontestably record the immense clumsiness, the spurts of craziness, the human ordinariness of war. The soldiers who crowd a boat to cross the wintry Volga, when the action turns against the Germans, do not look like a turn in the tide of world history: they look like a pack of freezing immigrants. When whole fields of guns go off, the spasm of trees, the twitching of grasses, the shuddering of the soil indicate war’s vast violation of nature.

But Stalingrad’s images are mere syllables, heroic or humble, in the terrific vocabulary of war which motion-picture cameras are now recording. They turn up in any war film, any good newsreel. What is done with them is what counts. Leonid Varlamov, who edited Stalingrad, is a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Cinema Art, and works in the great tradition of Eisenstein. He has produced a literal, well-organized film, which lacks the heroic imagination that might have made Stalingrad a memorial adequate to the subject. More damaging to Stalingrad is John Wexler’s commentary whereby the splendid screen images are undermined, overstated, or degraded by the propaganda of hate in which they are draped.