Vsevolod Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg - Sample Russian film analysis essay

Pudovkin's 1927 film The End of St. Petersburg, chronicled the story of a naïve Russian farmworker who journeys to St. Petersburg and is ultimately transformed by political revolution. This example film critique paper examines how Pudovkin uses montage and parallel editing for symbolic effect. As this sample foreign film analysis explains, "The End of St. Petersburg remains a testament to Pudovkin's directorial brilliance, exemplifying both his technical prowess and his ability to transform reality on film."

Probing Pudovkin: Symbolism and Montage in The End of St. Petersburg

In 1927, Russian filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin completed production on The End of St. Petersburg, his second in a trilogy of films centering on revolution in the Motherland. The End of St. Petersburg tells the story of a politically naïve peasant farmer who, enter-ing St. Petersburg in search of work, finds himself caught up in and ultimately transformed by the rebellion of the proletariat. While perhaps less influential in the world of cinema than its pre-decessor, Mother (1926), The End of St. Petersburg remains a testament to Pu-dovkin's directorial brilliance, exemplifying both his technical prowess and his ability to trans-form reality on film. Of particular import to the realization of his unique vision is his inventive use of montage and parallel editing for symbolic effect. Manifesting in several instances throughout the film, such symbolic imagery lends The End of St. Petersburg the intellec-tual depth characteristic of Pudovkin's greatest films.

Perhaps the most pervasive symbolism in the work of Pudovkin appears in his use of images of nature, often carefully sequenced to reflect the narrative structure of the film. The End of St. Petersburg opens, as Amy Sargeant notes in Vsevolod Pudovkin: Classic Films of the Soviet Avant-Garde, with "a calm, stratified picture of a sunrise; the day breaks and the blades of a windmill slice vertically, chopping regularly through the sky; winds blow left to right across the plains and the tide passes over the estuary" (Sargeant, 95). Here Pudovkin establishes a state of calm, his cuts slow and rhythmic, emphasizing a world that is, for the time being, at peace. Almost immediately, however, the violence of childbirth breaks through the calm, and as the central peasant character departs for St. Petersburg, clouds mar the once clear skies, symbolic of a peace disrupted and foreshadowing of things to come. Pudovkin employs the recurrence of cloud imagery throughout the film to suggest the gathering of a storm. This is echoed in St. Pe-tersburg, where dense black clouds of smoke rise in and from the factories, surrounding the workers and obscuring the sky-moving quickly, as if carried by a heavy wind. Water, too, re-flects the coming storm-the peaceful waters of the estuary in the opening scene give way in St. Petersburg to the dark ripples of the Baltic Sea. Pudovkin's montage of this imagery is carefully placed throughout the film so as to mirror the rising tensions in his central narrative. Thus, when the storm finally breaks, the metaphorical collides with the physical-as the battle rages, so does the storm. Turbulent waves crash against the shore, and dark clouds fill the sky; at the front, sol-diers crash through pools of water as the rain pours down, and billows of smoke obscure the landscape. In St. Petersburg, too, the tempest rages as the Bolsheviks storm the Winter Palace. As the action and the film wind to a close, the smoke clears, the sky lightens, and we are left with the aftermath. In this manner, Pudovkin punctuates his narrative with symbolic effect-the storm passes.

Similarly, Pudovkin's depiction of the elite is heavily characterized by his use of metaphoric imagery, much of which aims towards the dehumanization of the bourgeoisie. As the central peasant character and his mother enter St. Petersburg for the first time, they are dwarfed by towering monuments, cold statues of the czars on horseback, which, shot from low angles, give one the sense of being trampled underfoot. Juxtaposed with an image a policeman, haughty and aloof and also on horseback, the statues are equated with authority, gazing down from on high with a stony, inhuman glare. Likewise, the peasant and his mother are "overshadowed by the sta-tue of an apostle of St. Isaac's cathedral, seeming even more insignificant and insect-like" (Sar-geant, 99). Here, Pudovkin establishes an opposition, setting the poor, working class against the monumental might of the elite, who, in a later scene, are filmed in opulent garb from the neck down-a faceless bureaucracy. Pudovkin returns to these statues several times during the film, though perhaps most significantly during one of the final sequences, the storming of the Winter Palace. At the end of this sequence, the camera shows a statue destroyed by a blast from the bat-tleship Aurora and toppled from its lofty perch-an image that echoes the toppling of the bour-geoisie, which is further emphasized by Pudovkin's immediate cut to an intertitle: "St. Petersburg was no more."

Perhaps the most powerfully symbolic sequence in The End of St. Petersburg comes at the film's climax. Through parallel editing, Pudovkin ties together two seemingly unrelated scenes in a manner that enhances their combined visual significance substantially. In one, Russian soldiers at the front charge up a hill to their deaths at the hands of German machine guns. At the same time, an army of bourgeoisie men in black suits rush up a staircase to the stock exchange in quest of munitions company stock. As A. R. Duckworth notes in The Motley View, this "parallel montage technique . . . imbues the action of buying stock, and capitalism, with the violence and murder of the battlefield scene." He further observes that "as the battlefield fills up with wounded and lifeless bodies, both Russian and German, the scene cuts to the stock exchange market rate rising along with several bourgeoisie shaking violently-as if they were themselves manning the machine guns." Through this parallel editing, Pudovkin manages to draw out the contrast between the two scenes by emphasizing their similarities. What would ordinarily be a mundane scene at the stock exchange is electrified, infused with a notion of barbarism and wanton cruelty. The bourgeoisie, though far from the battle, become the enemy, and the conflict at the heart of the narrative, the struggle between the elite and the working class, comes to the fore. The audience is thus made aware of the "brutality of the capitalist system which makes profit in murder and the destruction of a nation's own people."

Pudovkin's use of montage in this manner-to ascribe meaning to that with little-is as essential to this film as it is to his others. Writing on Pudovkin's films and film theory, Peter Dart observes that "when the single shots were edited they would depict the total phenomenon and if the montage process had been correctly thought out, the edited shots would form a new relationship which would reveal the theme" (Dart, 90). Such is the case in The End of St. Petersburg-a masterwork is forged through the amalgamation of vastly disparate elements and in the juxtaposition of myriad images that together form a coherent whole. A simple narrative is thus, under Pudovkin's guiding hand, transformed into a visionary opus full of insight and depth.

Works Cited