Between Tsar and USSR: The Unique Perspective of "A Revolutionary"
Evgeny Bauer's 1917 drama provides a rare example of Russian cinema caught between monarchy and communism.
Disclaimer: This article details the plot of A Revolutionary in full. The limit on discussing spoilers for a film that is over a century old has long-since passed. But, if you’re interested in seeing the film before reading this, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the link to watch it. The movie runs 35 minutes, has musical accompaniment, and contains English subtitles.
The primary lens through which we view Russian cinema is through the lens crafted in the Soviet Union. The experimentation of Eisenstein, the philosophical dramas of Tarkovsky, the bombastic war pictures of Bondarchuk, all of it is connected with that era between 1920 and 1991. Russian cinema after its dissolution is somewhat less known in Western circles, though it is not without its celebrated auteurs and accolades. What is far less known is Russia’s cinema before the Federation, before even the Soviets.
The Tsardom may feel to many almost like ancient history. But the reign of Nicholas II, the last emperor of the Russian Empire, fell neatly into the time period of the birth of moving pictures, and Russia’s film industry during the time of the Tsar proved to be as fascinating and worthy of study as other art forms extant in Russia at that time.
The cinema of the Russian Empire was defined by its showcases of melancholic drama, doomed romance, the call of the inevitable embrace of death, and darkness hiding underneath the fabric of society. These themes may ring familiar to those acquainted with the country’s defining literary works from authors like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. While there were many directors who dealt with these stories, none where perhaps as prolific and as groundbreaking as Evgeny Bauer.
Bauer, like so many in the silent filmmaking world, previously came from the world of the stage. He had been a set designer and a photographer, and utilized both these honed talents to construct films that looked and felt unlike most that were being made anywhere else in the world in his time.
The actual scripts of Bauer’s films were almost always threadbare, only enough to establish basic dialogue and context of setting that would otherwise be incommunicable. What makes Bauer’s films so enduring, that being their shocking complexity of characterization and their immense depth of emotion, is almost all visual. Bauer’s innovations were innumerable, through cinematography, editing, set dressing, even something as simple as color tinting, and all were utilized to create lived-in worlds for his actors to inhabit, and moreover was unafraid of trying to find new ways in such a nascent art form to express complicated emotional dynamics through visuals, with as few words on screen as possible.
Arguably Bauer’s primary trait was patience. How long he held his camera on a character’s look of longing, of sadness, of disastrous realization, of to-be-short-lived contentment. This, despite Bauer’s noted total lack of patience in actually making the films. He would make over 80 films over the course of only 4 years before his death in 1917, and did not stop for personal injury nor national upheaval. A Revolutionary, a film he would make in the last year of his life, was one of them.
When the Tsar was overthrown in the February Revolution of 1917 (which shortly preceded the much more famous October Revolution), the film industry did not stop on a dime alongside it. The years-long transition between Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin, the Russian Civil War, would see that entropy ruptured eventually, but not instantaneously.
While the span of time between the overthrow of the Tsar and the Bolsheviks coming to power was only 7 months, there still were some films created and finished during that time, however few, with even fewer of that collection dealing with the events of the time. Some of those, such as Father Sergius, a Tolstoy adaptation, only made it to screens after the Bolsheviks came to power.
A Revolutionary, on the other hand, was produced at a sheer breakneck pace.
Within less than a month of the February Revolution that saw the Tsar ousted, the film was conceived of, written, cast, and shot, finishing production before the month of March was out, and was released to the public in April.
A Revolutionary is a fictional story based on real events in the early 20th century. It begins in the immediate aftermath of the Coup of 1907, where Nicholas II stripped powers from Russia’s then-nascent democratic legislature and arrested many of its members who had threatened the power of Russia’s powerful landlord class. An socialist opposition agent, codenamed “Granddad”, is one of those caught up in the wave of arrests. He is forced to say goodbye to his family, only having time to tell his young son that he “will be back.”
Granddad is sent away into exile in Siberia, surviving its many harsh winters alongside two fellow prisoners in a ramshackle shelter, one of whom dies in Granddad’s embrace, having never seen the end of the Tsar’s reign.
After a decade in Siberia, Granddad receives news of the overthrow of the Tsar in February of 1917, and finally returns to Moscow. He reunites with his son, now a grown man, and finds that while the bonds of family have remained, they have now gone down different paths. Granddad remains a socialist revolutionary, but his son is now a devoted Bolshevik, who has absconded from the patriotism that drove his father’s rebellion, in favor of the worldwide and borderless revolution of the working-class, a position which his now-aged father cannot comprehend.
Bauer’s melancholic oeuvre was ripe for this kind of story, and how it works, and moreover clashes, with the material is fascinating.
Bauer shoots the scenes of Granddad's exile in Siberia with a painterly eye, with figures illuminated only by the shreds of the sun of the winter sky and the low flames of a fireplace fighting against the frost that surrounds it. The camera holds for long periods on the prisoners in the cold, and rarely hard cuts out of the frame. Instead, Bauer fades out many of the shots into a low exposure, almost forcing us as the viewer to stick with the characters in real time as they wait out their imprisonment.
Even in times of apparent celebration, the sadness never truly leaves. We see real authentic footage of the crowds of February 1917 intercut with the quiet of Granddad’s Siberian prison, where the rush of revolutionary fervor, the advancement of the country’s politics, the waking of the working class, and indeed, the growing-up of his son, have all but passed him by, left to freeze over.
The death, the cold, that seeming futile yearning to be free, never leaves once the film stops running. It continues on in their lives, beyond the mere minutes that the camera is rolling, and the extent of their pain, their anguish, is unknowable, unconscionable.
It is in this unflinching depressive atmosphere that the optimism of the revolutionaries finds such deep contrast. Many of the film’s lines, such as affirmations of the will for comrades to fight on, or the proud announcement of Russia’s freedom, are placed against shots of snowed-over graves and endless frozen horizons. The effects of the crimes committed in the Tsar’s name are unable to be unshackled from the present, reverberating on, beyond the walls of Moscow.
Still, the quick turnaround on release, while being able to capture the dynamics and complexities unique to a brief and fleeting point in time, is also unable to escape its myopic thinking. Bauer, despite not being a Tsarist, was a supporter of Russia’s involvement in the First World War. He had made a film on the subject in 1914, Glory to Us, Death to the Enemy, releasing it only 3 months after the war began.
While the title gives off an air of being so absurd it would have to b an expression of how the horrors of war render make slogans such as that meaningless, it is in fact an entirely honest rendition. Bauer has a wife avenge her fallen Russian officer husband by infiltrating German lines and strangling a German soldier to death with her bare hands, ending with the wife receiving a medal in a scene that can only be described as Star Wars-esque in its clear “good vs. evil” dichotomy.
While Bauer’s filmography was always colored by granting his characters intense complexity and stories that blur the lines between protagonist and antagonist, his treatment of the issue of World War I is uncharacteristically black-and-white. The film appears to be setting up the father and son to continue to be split across ideological lines, barreling towards the traditional Bauer trademark of an ending of complete desolation, where a family is forever frayed by the passage of time and the inability to fix the fissures of the past.
Instead, Bauer gives us an unusual happy ending, with two of the largest sarcastic quotation marks placed around “happy” that you can muster in your mind. Granddad’s Bolshevik son, on a dime, realizes the error of his ways, and father and son, despite the father’s now advanced age, join the army of the Russian Republic. The film ends with the two on a railcar, happily going off to the Eastern Front.
Nevertheless, despite the unfortunate nature of the film’s ending, Bauer’s A Revolutionary, like so many of his surviving work, is a masterful sight to behold, at least for most of its running time. It is a gorgeous example of visual storytelling, of how simple editing can grant a film so much meaning, and more objectively, how a country’s cinematic tradition responds to radical societal change. It can only make you wonder how Evgeny Bauer would have responded to the second revolution that was to come that year, had he lived to see it. Would he have embraced its newfound cinematic experimentation, or faltered under its impositions?
Evgeny Bauer would die on June 22, 1917, only 4 months before the October Revolution.