The End of St. Petersburg (1927) - film review

A village lad leaves his impoverished home and heads for St Petersburg, hoping to find work in the city.  He seeks out another man from his village but is given a cold reception.  The man and his wife have barely enough to feed themselves and their children, thanks to the meagre wage the man is paid by Lebedev, the owner of the factory where he works.  Lebedev, by contrast, is a capitalist prince who is rolling in wealth.  When his factory wins a government contract, he tells his workers that they must work a longer day, words which bring about an immediate strike.  Lebedev has no intention of being blackmailed by his workforce, so he hires unemployed peasants to replace the strikers.  The lad from the village betrays his compatriot, a communist activist, to the factory manager, who arranges for him and the other strike leaders to be arrested by the police.  When he realises what he has done, the lad tries to atone for his actions, but merely gets himself thrown into prison.  After Russia has declared war on Germany, the lad is volunteered into the Russian army, and experiences firsthand the horrors of trench warfare.  As Russian men fight and die on the mud-soaked battlefields, Lebedev’s shares skyrocket.   The factory owner’s belief that the war will prevent a revolution proves to be ill-founded.  The appalling experience of war merely fuels the revolutionary cause amongst the working classes.   The troops who are brought back to support the coalition government lend their support to the revolting masses.  And so the revolution begins!  The destruction of the Tsar’s Winter Palace will mark the end of St Petersburg and the birth of a new city, Leningrad...

It was his 1926 film Mother that earned the filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin a commission from the Soviet Union’s October Revolution Jubilee Committee to make a film celebrating the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution.  Originally, Pudovkin intended to make an epic film that spanned two centuries of Russian history.  This undertaking was too much for his screenwriter, Nathan Zarkhi, and so the film’s scope was reduced to the few years that led up to the 1917 revolution.   The resulting film, The End of St. Petersburg, forms the middle section of Pudovkin’s acclaimed revolutionary trilogy, which would be completed with his masterpiece Storm Over Asia (1928).

It is interesting to compare this film with October (1928), which was the contribution of Pudovkin’s contemporary Sergei M. Eisenstein to the 1927 jubilee celebrations.  Both films rely heavily on the recently developed principles of montage which Eisenstein had developed, although the two directors use these in subtly different ways.  Whereas Eisenstein deals with abstract notions, such as the heroism of the Soviet people and the innate justice of Communism, Pudovkin focuses on individuals, and shows how their lives are affected by the revolutionary cause.  Crudely speaking, Eisenstein employs crowds whereas Pudovkin uses individual characters, but with the same objective in mind: to glorify the Soviet principle whilst portraying capitalism as an evil that must be resisted.

Whatever your politics, it is hard not to be blown away by the sheer visual power of this film.  Pudovkin captures the hardship and sense of injustice felt by the ordinary Russian worker with an extraordinary, almost visceral, intensity.  In contrast to Eisenstein, who uses broadly intellectual reasoning to condemn capitalist imperialism, Pudovkin employs a more emotional approach.  Eisenstein’s October is a cold propaganda piece in comparison with the stark humanity of Pudovkin’s film, which shows us not how the revolution happened, but why it had to happen, to relieve the unbearable suffering of millions of ordinary men and women.

Pudovkin’s use of montage is every bit as effective as Eisenstein’s and is best illustrated in the wartime middle section of the film.  Here, harrowing images of WWI battlefields are inter-cut with scenes in a busy stock-exchange, the frantic behaviour of greedy traders mirroring the desperate fight for survival of the soldiers.  As the young warriors fall, one by one, into a muddy grave, the share prices chalked up on the walls of the exchange are seen to rise inexorably, as though the loss of each life were helping to inflate the capitalist balloon.  

Pudovkin uses this kind of overt cinematic manipulation much less than Eisenstein, and patently doesn’t need do.  The low-key sequence at the end of the film, where a poor woman shares her last few potatoes with wounded soliders, is just as effective at conveying the film’s central message, which is the moral superiority of communism over capitalism.  The  power of this film lies not in its fancy use of montage but in the ease with which Pudovkin evokes the raw anger and suffering of the individual.  The visual artistry of this film is surpassed only by its humanity.

© James Travers 2010

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?