| Popis: |
The article studies one of the most important milestones in documentary and chronicle film during World War II — a documentary about the Crimean (Yalta) Conference of the leaders of the three powers, allies in the Anti-Hitler coalition, held in February 1945. Sergei Gerasimov, a well-known director and winner of the Stalin Prize, was appointed director of the shooting of this film. Together with Gerasimov, a large team of documentary filmmakers, including director Ilya Kopalin and cameramen I. Belyakov, V. Dobronitsky, A. Krichevsky, N. Petrosov, A. Khavchin and R. Khalushakov, went to Crimea to film the conference. Gerasimov perceived his work on this film as an important stage in his professional career and, at the same time, he sought to keep out of harm’s way the Soviet documentary makers, who, according to the party leaders, did not capture events on the fronts convincingly and promptly enough. The author compares the film with various official documents of the conference, using wide-ranging historical research. He seeks to reveal how the inclusion of certain episodes in the final cut reflected the historical and political trends shortly before the Cold War. A lavish reception for the delegations in combination with the gorgeous Crimean palace, originally intended to be a tsar’s residence— this was supposed to produce (and did produce) the effect of a “royal reception” and made it clear that in its foreign policy actions, the Stalinist state was the full-fledged successor to the buried Russian Empire. Understandably, Gerasimov’s official, ideologically regulated film did not reflect all this explicitly. However, the film showed the super objective and the outcome of the Yalta Conference quite adequately: in Yalta, the triumvirate of the allied powers, in which the USSR played the leading role, signed a death sentence to Hitler’s Germany and outlined the post-war world order. |
