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Rating: “I want to smell the heavenly taste of iron, I want to see the bloody scent of fire: it exists, I know it!” / CCCP – A ja ljublju SSSR
The eyes open to the black and white of the film: three dizzying shots stage the Russian plain. The second glimpse is initially gloomy, then the moving away of a cloud reveals the sharp rays of the sun. With this gentle force, The General Line opens, a crucible of some of the treasures of the Soviet genius Sergei M. Eisenstein. Today progress slips into regression, but it is not this way for the Russian director, it is not this way for the Soviet Union. One feels an inexorable force, through the threads of the film, the aegis of the Communist Party, guiding society by tracing a furrow, just as a plow does when passing over the fields. Is it the summers of the party? Yes: it is ecstasy of the party, only with some moustache twists. The author insinuates a critique of the bureaucratic machinery of the state, he even inserts a handful of tenderness—unprecedented and sharp—scattered by the wind that ignited distant times, over lands now dominated by another man. No longer the creature dreamed of by Eisenstein, but rather the prostrate one of the third millennium, a man no longer bent over the earth but over himself. In this work, the human being lives thanks to the heartbeat of the livestock, later doing so in symbiosis with the pulse of tractors: he does not do it out of the obsession hovering in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo, but out of the need to eat, to drink, finally to enjoy the leisure time he has earned through fights. The man: in The General Line he is a great body in tumult, a collection of lean, shadowed, expressionist faces; he serves the cinema, the industrial tool of knowledge, a serial forger of souls. All this appears clear as water, in Soviet propaganda cinema, with that honesty that only permission from a Politburo could permit and perhaps with the pressing control of the NKVD; it is a cinema crystalline and devoted to elevation—beyond politics, if you will—and not to decay. In short, here we are at the antipodes of cinema in the era of globalized capitalism—far from the end of ideologies!—where the pass no longer comes from a supreme commission but from the market, which presents itself to the masses as a formally free entity, sly as it is, yet with its intrinsic laws always ends up doing politics: what immense dishonesty!
What also strikes, moreover, about the man molded by the Russian filmmaker, is his visceral speech about him—depicting him alone, away from the state, forced into collective life not to be extinguished—using an abstract and surreal mise-en-scène, in short, that arsenal which would seem the opposite of Marxist materialism: fields and counterfields exasperated in the limit of a few seconds, bodies like blades tracing lines on the film. Even the captions explode between one frame and another in characters of varying size and workmanship. Eisenstein masters the medium and forges a weapon, with meditative frenzy, unparalleled for the unprecedented combination of metaphysicality of form and concreteness of content. Minute by minute, we are in front of pearls of all cinema: think of scenes like that of the “milk condenser”, the arrival of the first tractor in the kolkhoz, the incursion of the peasants into the palaces of Soviet power, where the impetuosity of the men of the countryside explodes against the party bureaucrats—Eisenstein uses sequences of explosions here, it’s not a metaphor. At these latitudes, even the use of the most popular symbolism becomes art. The General Line has the ability, like all the other masterpieces of Eisenstein, to examine in every frame the post-revolutionary movement, its feelings and its bitterness, whether it is that he speaks of it or he is silent about it. This magical and irrational touch, irony of fate, has seized many of the works of the world’s first Marxist state.
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