User Reviews

From the director of The Cranes Are Flying, Letter Never Sent and I Am Cuba, this is Kalatazov's most famous silent film. This is very much Soviet propaganda. It started off as a ethnographic film with a fictional story. The Svans are people of the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, and they have a very ancient culture. The studio (or perhaps the government) made Kalatazov turn it into a documentary (semi-documentary) about Stalin's Five Year Plan and the way it was bringing backward peoples into modern society. The film ends with a montage on Soviets madly building a highway to Svanetia. Near the beginning of the film, there's some angry finger-pointing at Svanetia's supposedly unfair class system. Besides those injections of propaganda, though, the film is mostly about how difficult surviving in Svanetia is (they can't get salt - that's what the Soviets will bring them!). In that way, it's not unlike Bunuel's Las Hurdes or Shindo's The Naked Island or Flaherty's Man of Aran. While Kalatazov's utterly mad cinematography hadn't quite been perfected yet, the man is still a genius with his images. The montage pounds away violently and leaves you breathless. This should really be included in any list of the great Soviet silents.

The start of the film gives truly gives an authentic glimpse at a war-torn time in the Soviet Union's history. Many of the techniques used in the film provided for a great production overall. The use of the camera is especially notable. The way that the camera follows the rock down the tower gives the whole starting scene a more dramatic introduction. For the rest of the film shots of the landscape are also noteworthy in their beauty. Not to mention the faces of the villagers who seem rugged with exhaustion. The fact that there were children out working on the fields alongside their mothers is representative of the times. Seeing how the townspeople were able to create so many things out of the wool was inspiring. It was amazing to see what people left to their own undeveloped devices could come up with. Their multiple uses of the abundant stone were resourceful and innovative to say the least. The town practically sustained itself in every sense without the need for technology or outsourcing. It was definitely interesting to see the amount of determination that each town member had. It was definitely insightful considering the religion aspect of it all. The film was very informative and enjoyable to watch because of the way it was set up with its occasional short burst of comedic relief and its ahead of its time editing technique. It is a great film to watch if you would like to get transported into a different world from ours entirely.

The idea of the documentary is to present the life situation of people in extraordinary circumstances, living in an isolated community in one of the far ends of the Soviet Union. The lives of these people are fascinating for today's audiences and for the audiences of the 20s who already lived in modern, industrialized cities or collectivized villages. Kalatozov's documentary delivers to what it promises to be: a realistic image of a still secluded world, of a community with its own habits kneeling to an all-powerful nature.

The film starts with some natural scenes, presenting the geographical setting and remoteness of Svanetia. We learn early on that the people of Svanetia live in hardship, struggling every day to survive. From a political and administrative point of view, the village has barely managed to get over the feudal period, with barons asking their due and attacking the community. Towers are an important way of protection, the pride of Svanetians. Resources are scarce and people work hard; the daily occupations of the villagers are beautifully captured by the director through shots of laboring with animals, taking care of cattle, weaving, building a bridge. Every community, however small, has its own individuality. In this case, Svanetians have their own hair-cuts according to their fashions and make things with the materials that are readily available to them. To depict these scenes, Kalatozov handles the camera excellently and knows when and what to capture: we have close-ups which present the often desperate and exhausted faces of the villagers; blurs and sharp focuses; and a wonderfully executed scene of the carriage encircling a field of barley, and the camera making circles, and circles, and circles.

Beyond the ideas that the film conveys and the evocative imagery, there exists a symbolic element. One of the important themes of the documentary is the lack of salt. Fast-paced scenes emphasize the alarming and potentially harmful nature of this fact. Animals look for salt and lick sweat, blood, and urine to satisfy this essential need. Men of the village go on an expedition to find this important resource, but die because of an avalanche. The desperation caused by the scarcity of the salt reaches its climax in the scene when a funeral and a birth happen on the same day. Instead of welcoming the new-born child into the world, the Svanetians are given to respecting their old traditions and superstitions, leaving the pregnant mother helpless to give birth in the fields. Her child dies, symbol that Svanetia is unable to look to the new things of the future, stuck in its hundred-year old traditions. Svanetia is now faced with an inevitable decision: move to the new, the modern, or stay in its old customs and traditions, oblivious at what happens outside. Religion is depicted in a very negative way, as preventing the villagers from progress. The salvation from all its worries is a new ideology that comes into action from the revolt of men and women tired of the old ways. The repeated explosions made to build the new road remind on of the explosion of force which was imminent with the October Revolution. Working for yourself and for the village seems the right thing to do and the documentary ends with a feeling that hope exists through modernization and embrace of communism.