The Last Bolshevik

Alexander Medvedkin was a Russian filmmaker whose career reads like a half-mad journey through the Marxist ideals and Stalinist nightmares of Soviet history. Chris Marker is a contemporary French filmmaker whose work routinely challenges our basic assumptions about movies. With his video documentary The Last Bolshevik, Marker uses Medvedkin’s life as a stunning example of the dangerous meeting point between artistic brilliance and ruthless political expediency.

Medvedkin was an old school communist, a true believer in the new social order promised by the 1917 revolution. This spirit of radical conviction is what led him to join the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and, in the 1920s, to direct educational and propaganda films. That same spirit resulted in his construction of a “film train” – a movie projection unit on rails – that traveled the immense length of the Soviet Union in order to document the creation of a new collective society.

But Medvedkin’s revolutionary idealism hadn’t prepared him for what he encountered during the journey. The collective farms weren’t producing crops, the new factories were shabby and unworkable, and the living conditions of the peasants were as miserable as ever. The footage shot by the film train crew didn’t match official claims about a budding utopia – but instead of using it to document reality, the project was abandoned.

Medvedkin couldn’t reconcile the contradictions between his politics and the realities around him. So, like many Soviet filmmakers, he made the facts fit the politics. In The Last Bolshevik, Marker tackles the visual distortion of history with a precision that manages to be both sympathetic and damning. The result is a chilling portrait of a filmmaker who had to learn to lie with his movies.