A Couple Crimes-of-Communism Films
A big French documentary on the Soviet Gulag, & the "diorama" films of Rithy Panh on the Cambodian Genocide
A decade ago, when Flagg Taylor and I published Totalitarianism on Screen: The Art and Politics of ‘The Lives of Others,’ I wrote in the introduction that there had been few good films on the crimes of communism, as opposed to ones on those of Nazism. The situation has mercifully improved since then—Burning Bush, Katyn, Mr. Jones, The Death of Stalin, and Donnersmarck’s second masterpiece, Never Look Away, all come to mind, and I wanted to share a couple of my more recent discoveries.
First, in 2019, a French group led by Patrick Rotman released Gulag: The History (original title: Goulag: Une histoire soviétique), which is presently available w/o ads on youtube, albeit with some blacking out of the photos of corpses and a few written bits in untranslated French. It has three parts, is appropriately near three hours long, and its very structure is highly influenced by Solzhenitsyn’s great work The GULAG Archipelago, 1918-1956 (I here link to the authorized abridged version, which is what you should start with), though it avails itself of testimonies, photos, and footage not found or referenced in that work, and it discusses several other important works on the Gulag, such as Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories.
It is pretty straight documentary, and while nothing can approach the power of Solzhenitsyn’s prose, and no mere three hours of sights and speaking can begin to approach the scope of his and his collaborators’ investigations, this is fairly thorough, and features quite a bit of actual footage of the camps and labor projects which I would have assumed had been destroyed, or never shot. For now, this is the best single-documentary on the subject.
I hope someone will eventually give us an even more fulsome look, something like a documentary accompaniment to Martin Malia’s authoritative history The Soviet Tragedy, perhaps done along the lines of the other best documentary-on-communism I know of, the multi-part China: A Century of Revolution 1949-1976, The Mao Years. It is encouraging to see how this French team got a hold of all the footage and interviews that they did, thanks I assume to Russian remembrance organizations.
Second, in 2013, in time for our book’s notice had we been hip enough to be aware of it, the Cambodian director Rithy Panh released The Missing Picture:
Since the primitivist Khmer Rouge filmed much less than the Soviets did, destroyed most of what they did, and had a much higher kill-rate of their prisoners, the challenge faced by any director wanting to tell stories about their genocide was extreme. Pahn sought to overcome it by carving figurines, and placing them in little static dioramas he would wheel his cameras around, and then interspersing these totally unique scenes with what standard documentary footage was available to him.
Real art will find a way…
And as Donnersmarck put it, it will never look away…
The depths of totalitarianism’s horror and absurdity, made in a way, beautiful.
Panh has done at least two films since The Missing Picture, Exile and Irradiated, which I haven’t seen yet, but definitely plan to. They’re available on the Criterion Channel streaming service, which once again, I highly recommend, but you can rent The Missing Picture through other streamers.
P.S. Titus has excellent American Cinema Foundation podcast conversations on several of the films mentioned in the top paragraph. Look for the “European Cinema” set. Flagg Taylor is in several of those, and I’m in the one on Never Look Away.
Thanks for this resource. I had not heard of most of these films.
Ditto what Rightful Freedom says below. I've not heard of ANY of these films, but will have to rectify that presently.