Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff (1931)
Directed by Fyodor Otsep

Film Review

Fyodor Otsep is a not a name that is well-known today but in his day he was as well-regarded as his Soviet contemporaries Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin and might, had things been different, even outshined these two luminaries of the seventh art.  Like Eisenstein, Otsep started out as a film theorist and he scripted a number of films before making his directing debut with a lively comedy thriller, The Adventures of the Three Reporters (1926).  It wasn't until Otsep moved to pre-Nazi Germany in the late 1920s  that his potential as a world class film director became apparent, most noticeably in his inspired adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic novel The Brothers Karamazov. 

Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff, to give the film its German title, was one the most prestigious films to be made by Terra-Filmkunst, one of Germany's leading film production companies.  In parallel, Otsep directed a French language version entitled Les Frères Karamazoff for Pathé-Natan, with the same cast but a different crew of designers and technicians.  It was on the strength of this latter film that Otsep immediately became one of Pathé-Natan's star directors and he was invited to direct a series of big budget productions in France, including Amok (1934) and La Dame de pique (1937).  Otsep's blossoming career in Europe was cruelly thwarted by the rise of Hitler and onset of WWII.  Fleeing the Nazis, Otsep settled in the United States but failed to make much of an impact as a director in Hollywood.  He died in 1949, aged 54, and his passing was scarcely noticed.

Fyodor Otsep may not have secured lasting fame but there is no doubt that his revolutionary ideas about film, and the cinematic gems which put these ideas into practice, had a great influence on other filmmakers of his generation.  Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff was to the early sound era pretty well what Abel Gance's La Roue (1923) had been to the silent era, and it is no accident that Otsep employs and extends many of the techniques that Gance used on his film.  With the introduction of sound in the late 1920s, cinema temporarily lost a great deal of its artistry and poetry.  The early sound recording equipment presented filmmakers with technical challenges which greatly limited what could be achieved artistically.  Otsep was one of the few film directors of this time who did not allow the limitations of sound to restrict or impair his artistic vision.  Indeed, he was able to retain the visually expressive power of silent cinema whilst using sound to accentuate its dramatic impact and realism.

Essential to this masterfully executed synthesis of sound and image was Otsep's genius composer Karol Rathaus, whose work on Otsep's early sound films was both an innovation and an inspiration, revealing how much more emotionally engaging and eloquent a film could be with music played in synchronicity with its images.  One of the most successful elements of both the French and German versions of Otsep's The Brothers Karamazov is Rathaus' magnificent score, which doesn't just complement the pictures on the screen and give them an authentic Russian feel, it actually endows the film with a much deeper meaning.  With dialogue used sparingly (another wise move on Otsep's part, given the primitive nature of sound recording at the time), the music plays a crucial part in telling the story, and today's filmmakers can learn a lot by how music is used in this film to guide the spectator's feelings without degenerating into a gushing torrent of false sentiment.

For its time, Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff is almost implausibly fluid.  Whereas most films of this era were rendered theatrical and airless by a crippling over-dependency on long, static shots, Otsep's film has a dazzling vitality, which is achieved by a combination of rapid editing and carefully orchestrated camera motion.  The intensity of Dimitri's overwhelming passion for Grushenka is powerfully conveyed in a sequence in which the most irresponsible of the Karamazov brothers flies across the bare Russian landscape in a horse-drawn cart.  The pace of editing is exhilarating and as you watch this sequence you can hardly fail to share Dimitri's wild delirium as he is slung like a stone from a catapult towards the object of his desires.  In a later scene, in which Dimitri gets blind drunk whilst carousing in a brothel with Grushenka and her seedy entourage, the montage becomes ever more frenetic, accelerating to a dizzying climax as a potent cocktail of lust and liquor drive Dimitri into a mad frenzy. 

Crosscutting is used throughout the film, most effectively in the sequence where the Karamazovs' aged father is murdered - by cutting between Dimitri and Smerdiakov, their shared paternity is underscored as their crimes and their destines become inextricably intertwined.  Finally, there is the use of visual metaphor, which not only helps to truncate the narrative (one fleeting shot can say more than ten minutes of dialogue) but also introduces a perspective that is not otherwise apparent.  The morning after Dimitri's first night with Grushenka, there is a crisp montage of landscape shots showing trees dripping with dew, as if to mourn Dimitri's betrayal of Katya.  Immediately after Fyodor  Karamazov's killing, there is a similar montage, but now the landscape is dark and forbidding, the trees watching like silent sentinels.  The steam-driven locomotive which both starts and closes the narrative is symbolic of the story's coldly mechanical fatalism, another overt reference to Gance's La Roue.

Comparing Otsep's film with later adaptations of The Brothers Karamazov (including a more faithful American version made by Richard Brooks in 1958) it is apparent that few, if any, do as much justice to Dostoevsky's novel.  Rather than attempt a complete page-to-screen translation, Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff instead seizes the essential core of its source novel and fashions this into a startling piece of cinema, using the moving image as powerfully as Dostoevsky uses the printed word to tell a story of remarkable power and immediacy.  This is how great works of literature should be adapted for the big screen, and you can't help wondering how much richer, how much more genuine and liberated cinema would be if other filmmakers were to follow its example.  Why then is this masterpiece of early sound cinema virtually forgotten?  God knows...

Film Synopsis

In Russia during the mid-1800s, Dimitri Karamazov takes his leave of the woman he intends to marry, Katya, so that he can return to his home town and extort money from his father, Fyodor.  Dimitri is appalled when he learns that his father has been living a life of debauchery with his mistress, a 20-year-old prostitute named Grushenka.  When the old man refuses to give him any money, Dimitri visits Grushenka in person, but instead of reprimanding her he merely becomes the latest addition to her amorous conquests.  Overcome by passion, Dimitri declares that he will murder his father if he continues seeing Grushenka.  When Fyodor's epileptic servant Smerdyakov tells him that the old man is expecting a visit from his mistress, Dimitri wastes no time putting his threat into action...