Storm Over Asia (1928) - film review

Mongolia, 1918.  With his father too ill to sell furs at the market, Bair, a young herdsman, must take his place.  The only buyers at the market are western traders who pay as little as they can, knowing that the locals are so poor they will sell at any price.  Disgusted by what he is offered for his furs, Bair attacks the traders before fleeing into the mountains.  Here, he encounters Soviet partisans who are constantly at war with the occupying British troops.  Two years later, Bair is captured and sentenced to death by a British general.  As the herdsman is being led away, his captors examine his possessions and find a piece of silk on which is written an ancient text, which states that whoever owns the silk is the reincarnation of Genghis Khan.  The general sees an opportunity to bring the local population to heel, by elevating Bair to the position of a puppet king.  Unfortunately, his plan backfires.  Bair becomes a figurehead for the Mongol people, but once he has acquired this status, he uses his influence to turn on the British and drive them from his country.

With Storm Over Asia, the great Russian filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin completed his ambitious revolutionary trilogy, following his other two masterworks Mother (1926) and The End of St. Petersburg (1927) with a grand adventure epic to rival anything made by D.W. Griffith, the director he most admired.  This, his last silent film, was the highpoint of Pudovkin’s career.  Although he made a number of films in the sound era, he would rarely live up to his earlier achievements, and his enthusiasm for filmmaking was greatly diminished by the need to compromise artistic integrity to the party cause.  

Although it is obviously a political film, the sublime artistic qualities of Storm Over Asia make it far more than just a piece of revolutionary propaganda.  Pudovkin’s brief may have been to make a film celebrating the triumph of Bolshevism over Imperialism, but this did not prevent him from crafting one of the greatest of screen epics.  Not only does the film tell a compelling (albeit fictitious) story through some striking imagery, it also has a documentary purpose, providing a valuable visual record of Mongol culture and the alluring Mongolian landscape.

Storm Over Asia should be considered one of the most sophisticated films of the silent era, prefiguring the lavish adventure epics that Hollywood would make decades later.  Shot entirely on location (the first film ever to be shot in Mongolia), it has a scale and authenticity that is rarely found in a film of the 1920s.  Yet although the film contains some stunning photography, which contributes much to its poetry and realism, its strength lies in Pudovkin’s inspired use of montage.  

Along with his compatriot, Sergei Eisenstein, Pudovkin was responsible for developing the theories of film editing which are now an essential part of the language of filmmaking.  Whilst Eisenstein was motivated to use these principles of montage to convey political messages (valuable for propaganda filmmaking), Pudovkin saw how the same techniques could be used for purely dramatic purposes.  Eisenstein was interested in the abstract concept (such as the heroism of the Soviet people); Pudovkin’s focus was the individual (who would perhaps personify some noble ideal), a character with whom the audience could identify.  

Pudovkin’s mastery of montage is perhaps at its most evident in Storm Over Asia.  Frenetic cross-cutting between two scenes is used to ratchet up tension and suspense to an almost unbearable degree - a technique that is to be found in every action film and every suspense thriller made today.  Repeated cutting between two subjects establishes an inviolable link between the two subjects in the mind of the spectator - note how Pudovkin uses this for ironic effect throughout this film.  The juxtaposition of two seemingly unconnected shots works to create an impression that is contained in neither shot, a technique that Eistenstein termed dialectic montage; again Pudovkin uses this for ironic, rather than political purposes, to develop character, not convey an abstract idea.  

The film’s artistic highpoint is reserved for its cataclysmic finale in which breathtaking camerawork and skilful montage are combined to deliver one of the cinema’s most gripping battle sequences.  The pace of the last five minutes of the film is breathtaking, the fierce tumult of battle sending a sheer visceral thrill through the spectator.   If there is one film that shows the immense power of editing, that film is surely Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia, a true landmark in the history of cinema.

© James Travers 2010

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?