(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Red Army
Directed by Gabe Polsky
In the historical relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, we find a parallel between film and ice hockey. This relates to an artistic as well as a political issue: the contradiction between individualism and collectivism.
The Soviet ice hockey national team in the 1980 century, often regarded as the best of the time, was based on a style of play that emphasized the interaction between the individual players. Looking at video footage from games of this decade, you see an organic whole moving: It is as if every player intuitively knows where his fellow players are. Each player makes himself the least possible, dances out of pass shadows and sacrifices his or her own hero status for the best team strategy: to win.
The American hockey national team became known for a more individualistic style. There it was allowed to be one.
We can see a similar contradiction in films from the 1920 century: where the Soviet montage film emphasized collective values, the American film focused on the individual. This was evident in the choice of motive: where the Americans portrayed the individual as a hero, the Russians did people to heroes.
But the emphasis on community was also evident in the understanding of film as a construct of meaning. Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergey Eisenstein talked about the whole of the film as an organism: The individual parts of the film – pictures, scenes, sequences – are understood as cells in an organic whole. The film's decisive expression and thought activity is first created in the relationship and interaction between the individual parts.
It can be argued that the relationship between the individual elements is also central to the classic Hollywood film: the clip's ability to create context from fragments. But this is a tradition that has largely added prestige to individual scenes, individuals' actions and independent star faces. The pragmatic Howard Hawks, one of the great Hollywood directors of the 1920s to 1950s, expressed this attitude when he suggested that only three good scenes – and no bad ones – are needed to make a good film.
Each player makes himself the least possible, dances out of pass shadows and sacrifices his or her own hero status for the best team strategy: to win.
Or as the protagonist of the heroic King of Hockey (Noel M. Smith, 1936), an apple-jockey hockey player, answers the question "who is that girl in the stands?": "Another admirer."
Political play. Gabe Polsky Red Army (2014), a documentary about the Soviet hockey team in the 1980s and 90s, is a playful, but also seriously heavy, commute between Eisenstein and the Hawks; a tribute of Soviet interaction (on the ice) and an admiration of the individual (off the ice).
In a humming, nostalgic and ambivalent way, it alternates between individual-oriented interviews of charismatic personalities, expressive montages of hockey socialism (where the sounds of ice dancing, fits and goal scores are scaled up to heroic heights) and more overarching reflections on the freedom of materialism and private capitalism.
The film may ridicule the perverted American individualists – they look like villainous idiots out on the ice, while the Soviets incarnate the ideals of the French Revolution – but at the same time cast a critical look at how the lives of Soviet players are controlled and limited by the interests of state power.
Red Army is a good movie for several reasons, but not because it has three good scenes and no bad ones. One of the film's great qualities lies in its formal and valuable whimsicalness, in tonal shifts, quick twists and collage-like leaps from ice dance through big politics to personal pathos (here it is like an unpredictable hockey puck on the ice). The film never rests in one mode or one mindset, but creates a playful and non-conclusive "dialectic" between personal and social, and political and sporting ideology. Here it is entertaining in a reflected way, and reflected in an entertaining way. IN Red Army the well-used metaphor "political games" gets a flamboyant, laughable, but also tragic figure.
Main character. Much of the film's humor and pathos come from the main character Slava Fetisov, one of the stars of the Soviet team. The film gives a lot of space to his personality and utterances, and finds much of his peculiar humor and idiosyncratic personality precisely in the dynamics between Fetisov and director and interviews Polsky. Red Army has been marketed with Werner Herzog as "executive producer" and although this does not indicate that he de facto has had something to do with the film's creative process, there is undoubtedly something herzog about the subtle humor in the interview settings.
Entertaining in a reflected way, and reflected in an entertaining way.
I Into the Abyss (2011), Herzog interviews a young man who chews tobacco. Although the chewing tobacco is apparently insignificant, the director includes footage of the man's cumbersome and repeated tobacco spitting against the asphalt (the appears at least complicated by being included in the movie). Polsky does something similar Red Army: He includes what appears to be breaks in the interview sessions with Fetisov. It is not uncommon for Fetisov to sit and look down on the mobile screen as Polsky asks him a curious question. This metaphilmatic grip includes US in a personal, unpredictable space between Fetisov and Polsky, and let's get closer to the individual Fetisov, who is not so easily captured by historical narratives.
However, the documentary will not be a one-sided individual-oriented portrait. Polsky lets all the "big five" Soviet players (first row in the 80's) get involved and come up with their perspectives. He is also careful not to abstract these personalities from the historical-political climate of which they were a part. In the interview settings, they stand alone, far from the collective harmony of the past, someone with melancholy and perhaps nostalgia in their eyes.
Utopia. Was it out there on the ice, and just there, one felt an intuitive interaction while retaining one's individual freedom? Was that where you felt free and at the same time with your fellow players? Life out there on the track appears as a realized utopia in the midst of the Cold War, and as a free sphere between two otherwise depriving societies; an Eisenstein montage that hammered in goals and realized the ideals of collectivism without resorting to violence against the individual. As Fetisov quoted in the New York Times article "Bits of Dance and Chess Found in a Vanished Style of Play" (Nov. 12.11.2014, XNUMX): "We knew each other in our cells."
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