The Horrors of Stalingrad
It is amazing how many films have been made on the Battle of Stalingrad, the horrible siege in which invading Nazis sent by an arrogant Hitler were caught in a noose after bombarding and brutalizing the city. Within roughly 5 months the battle was over, with more than a million soldiers and citizens dead, and the Third Reich receiving a smarting loss that signaled the end of the Third Reich.
Synapse Films recently remastered the stunning and deeply moving 2003 German documentary Stalingrad on Blu-ray, and I’ve paired that release with a 2-disc Soviet propaganda film I picked up on my last trip to Germany a few years ago.
Released by Icestorm, The Battle of Stalingrad (aka Stalingradskaya bitva / Die Stalingrader Schlacht) was a 1949 propaganda epic – 3 hours in bloated length – that presented the battle from a more executive level, with Joseph Stalin shored up as the mastermind who saved his namesake city.
The battle scenes are often quite extraordinary, Stalin as a benevolent, soft-spoken father figure is amusing (for a while), and Hitler resembles a live-action version of a caricature from a Warner Bros. propaganda cartoon (namely the rug-chewing counterpart in “The Ducktators”).
Battle is a weird artifact that was part of a series of ‘artistic documentaries’ proposed by Stalin, which included the monstrous The Fall of Berlin / Stalingradskaya bitva (1950), another epic that similarly had to be released in 2 parts to cinemas.
Synapse also released a new HD transfer of Leni Riefenstahl’s scary propaganda classic Triumph of the Will (1935), of which a few visual echoes exist within Battle.
I’ll have a review of the Riefenstahl film soon, but coming next is a set of comparative reviews of Twilight Time’s gorgeous Blu-ray edition of Sam Fuller’s House of Bamboo (1955). Like Broken Lance (1954), Fuller’s nutty film was inspired by a noir classic – in this case William Keighley’s The Street with No Name (1948).
Cheers,
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
Category: EDITOR'S BLOG
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