Soviet Union

Yes, if you’re keeping score at home that makes three weeks running that Pick of the Week has settled on a foreign film from a snowy northern country (with a fourth, I suspect, on the way next week). I’m not exactly doing it on purpose, but it may well have something to do with the amazing winter those of us in the eastern two-thirds of the country are enduring. Actually, compared to the frozen slush of the Northeastern megalopolis in February, the desolate beauty, perpetual sunlight and endless seafood buffet of an Arctic Ocean summer look like Barbados.

Officially, we learn very little about Pasha (Grigory Dobrygin) and Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis), the entire crew of this remote island station. They’re spending the Arctic summer monitoring instruments and sending the numbers back to some central authority, but we’re never quite sure what they’re reporting and why, we don’t know where they came from, and we don’t learn much about their lives back in civilization. There might be 20 years or so between them, and Pasha, a sleepy-eyed, earring-clad, Brad Pitt-looking hipster type, is familiar with all kinds of new technology that the grizzled Sergei views with disdain. It’s Pasha’s first and probably only summer on the island, while Sergei’s been coming there for years, and feels intimately connected with a tough-guy history that goes back to 1935.

Popogrebsky builds the psychological tension slowly but inexorably, delivering spectacular time-lapse shots of the changing landscape in this barren but beautiful place (the cinematography is by Pavel Kostomarov) and an entire litany of subtly disorienting sounds: The nearly constant background crackle of radio static; the sloshing of the sea, the hammering of wind and the cries of birds; the ubiquitous house-metal dance music from Pasha’s headphones. The film is often so spectacular, so hypnotic, that you just want to swim in its sensual wonders — but it’s propelling a narrative too. Eventually we notice, without anyone mentioning it, that while Pasha and Sergei sleep and cook walrus meat and report incomprehensible data and play video games (OK, only Pasha does that), the sun never, ever goes down. The landscape goes from morning to noon to afternoon to early evening and then starts all over again. You know, it might be enough to make you a little crazy.

Sergei and Pasha have settled into a tense but reasonably stable dynamic — the former as borderline-abusive dad, the latter as recalcitrant teenager — and life at the station is a strange combination of barren and idyllic. The principal threats seem to be boredom and loneliness, although it’s true that each man must carry a shotgun every time he leaves the station. (A geophysicist at a nearby base was eaten by a polar bear 30 years earlier.) Then Sergei decides to skip a few shifts to go catch them a barrelful of fresh Arctic trout, and while he’s away Pasha receives an emergency radio message delivering terrible news.

Like almost every other thriller in the genre’s history, “How I Ended This Summer” turns on one character doing something that’s both logically implausible and self-destructive. Why doesn’t Pasha give Sergei the bad news directly, as soon as he gets back to camp with his load of fish? To answer that question fairly, you really have to see the film. I mean, of course it doesn’t make sense — but being trapped on an Arctic island with a hot-tempered, violent loner who’s just learned something that might shatter a normal man’s personality, well, that doesn’t make sense either.

Anyway, the important part is that it’s Pasha’s moral decision, or maybe his cowardly inability to make one, that pushes “How I Ended This Summer” into the realm of quasi-Hitchcock intrigue. Pasha constructs a teetering edifice of lies and deception in order to keep the truth from Sergei, and when he can manage that no longer he heads out on his own into the Arctic fog, trying to wend his way between a murderous Sergei and the hungry bears, between a fatal mistake and acts of criminal madness. This isn’t quite a horror movie, nor does it have some astonishing plot switchback near the end, but nonetheless there are elements of, say, “The Shining” or “Shutter Island” here, in that Pasha has to recognize who his principal enemy is if he hopes to survive.

As I suggested earlier, I think you could successfully interpret “How I Ended This Summer” as a fable about generational conflict in Russia, with Pasha representing the complacent, entitled post-Soviet new technology crowd, and Sergei standing for an old-school, Communist-era ethos of macho struggle and sacrifice. Each has a fatefully blinkered vision of each other and their shared circumstances, and their struggle with each other and themselves carries the weight of a moral or religious conundrum, as if they were in a Tolstoy story instead of an Arctic thriller. By the end of this spectacular, unsparing, surprisingly hopeful film, Popogrebsky argues that if these men from different eras and different worldviews can find some way to communicate, they may yet get off that damned island.

“How I Ended This Summer” is now playing at Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York. It opens Feb. 11 at Cinema Village in New York and Feb. 25 at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas in San Francisco, with other cities and DVD release to follow.

I’m not being willful or contrarian or anything — it’s just true. Of course Eisenstein was a fervent supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, who hoped his story about a fabled 1905 uprising by sailors in the Tsarist navy would inspire the oppressed of the earth to throw off their chains and hoist the red flag (hand-tinted in this version, as at the Moscow premiere). But that context was a lot less important than he assumed at the time, and “Potemkin’s” immense cultural impact has almost nothing to do with its purported politics. (The young Joseph Goebbels, whose ideology ran in a different direction, praised the film extravagantly.)

Like other Marxist thinkers and artists of his time, Eisenstein believed that political revolution demanded a revolutionary aesthetics and a revolutionary cinema. He thought his radical innovations in camerawork, composition and (most of all) the quick-cut editing he called “montage” were part of a global shift in mass consciousness, and he was right about that part. Presumably he never imagined that his aesthetic revolution would conquer the world, divorced from the ideology that had inspired it, while the Soviet experiment in social reinvention would become a cruel and miserable failure.

According to film historian Bruce Bennett, “Battleship Potemkin” was personally imported to the United States by silent star Douglas Fairbanks and screened privately for film-industry luminaries on both coasts during the summer and fall of 1926, beginning with a bedsheet projection at Gloria Swanson’s house in New York. “Nobody went Bolshevik,” quipped a columnist for Photoplay magazine at the time, “but a lot of people left with some revolutionary ideas of filmmaking.” It’s safe to say this was one of those collisions that changed the course of cultural history. Has there been a year since the late ’20s when Hollywood didn’t produce multiple imitations of “Battleship Potemkin”?

I’m not so much talking about the most obvious kinds of film-school homage or quotation or rip-off, although the terrifying massacre staged by Eisenstein on the seafront steps of Odessa has been repurposed any number of times, from Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables” to George Lucas’ “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” to “Naked Gun 33 1/3.” It’s more that “Potemkin” pioneered what became a staple Hollywood genre, the heavily fictionalized, inspirational retelling of historical events, built around easily recognizable archetypes of good and evil. Even more than that, Eisenstein’s montage technique, which builds both tension and momentum through the rapid counterpoint of different images, different camera angles and different points of view, became the model for all future action and suspense cinema.

Any rerelease of an influential classic always raises at least two questions: Can we still see, through the scrim of history, what originally made the movie seem important? And is it still capable of engaging or entertaining us on its own terms? “Battleship Potemkin” may face some of the same problems with viewers as, say, “Citizen Kane” or Godard’s “Breathless” or Bergman’s “Persona,” in that what was once revolutionary about it now seems part of our universal vocabulary. I expected this newly restored version of Eisenstein’s 1925 Russian cut (never seen outside the Soviet Union), the result of almost 20 years of work by film scholars Enno Patalas and Anna Bohn, to be visually impressive, and it certainly is. But I was startled to find myself spellbound by it from beginning to end.

With Eisenstein’s 146 text intertitles — which he conceived as musical or percussive elements — carefully restored and a newly recorded version of composer Edmund Meisel’s score, “Potemkin” no longer seems like a faded relic of Soviet agitprop but becomes a gripping anti-authoritarian melodrama. There’s not much acting or characterization in the modern sense; beefy Bolshevik sailor Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov) strikes heroic poses, while villainous officer Giliarovsky (Grigori Aleksandrov) snickers through his mustache. (Arguably Hollywood’s principal improvement on Eisenstein’s model was the addition of the star system.)

But the brilliantly mounted early scene in which the ship’s commander orders the mutinous sailors — who have refused to eat borscht made with maggot-infested meat — to be covered in canvas and then shot had me on the edge of my seat. A crazy-haired Orthodox priest, emerging from the shadows like a crucifix-carrying ogre, calls out for the rebels to accept God’s punishment, and some of the condemned men drop to their knees in terror, shrouded by the immense sheet of sailcloth. Exuding the smug, self-satisfied sadism of power, Giliarovsky orders the ship’s guards to raise their weapons and prepare to shoot: “Fire into the canvas.” And then, at the last possible moment, Vakulinchuk steps forward to strike a blow for proletarian consciousness: “Brothers! Who are you shooting at?”

Eisenstein’s mournful, haunting shots of the Odessa waterfront after Vakulinchuk’s death, which is the only section where the film engages a contemplative mode, lead us into the Odessa Steps sequence. I felt as if I were seeing that for the first time. Freed from all the imitation and parody, it’s both a breathtaking technical exercise and a wrenching glimpse of human suffering set against the cruelty of history. The mother with her dying toddler, the old woman shot in the face, the runaway baby carriage — Eisenstein could never have believed that the revolutionary regime he supported would itself commit crimes like these, and worse.

But the tragic historical irony surrounding “Battleship Potemkin” does almost nothing to undercut its power, and like all good political art it cannot be contained by politics. Eisenstein used all the tools at his disposal, inventing new ones as he went along, to engage our passions and emotions first and foremost. He was an artist and a showman more than he realized, and perhaps more than he wanted to be. The young David O. Selznick, who would make “Gone With the Wind” 13 years later, urged his MGM colleagues to study “Battleship Potemkin” as “a group of artists might study a Rubens or a Raphael.” And anybody who thinks that either Eisenstein or Selznick would be horrified by contemporary Hollywood is kidding themselves. If 3-D had been feasible in 1925, I guarantee that baby carriage would be whizzing off the screen right at your head.

The new 35mm restoration of “Battleship Potemkin” opens Jan. 14 at Film Forum in New York, with other cities to follow. This version is also available on DVD and Blu-ray from Kino International.

Composed in roughly equal parts of interviews, dryly amusing re-creations of real events and an extraordinary amount of archival footage, “Disco and Atomic War” portrays an unlikely front in the Cold War, little noticed at the time. Or at least little noticed in the West; Kilmi presents evidence that the KGB was well aware that the pop-culture frontier between Finland and Estonia was gnawing a crucial hole in the Iron Curtain. There were other places in the Eastern bloc where citizens sometimes encountered Western media, of course. But listening to West German radio on the east side of the Wall was a dangerous and clandestine affair, whereas Finnish television poured into homes in Soviet-occupied Estonia virtually unrestricted.

As the film documents, there was a thriving industry in adapters and antennae that allowed Soviet-made TVs in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to pull in the signals from Helsinki, 50 miles north across the Gulf of Finland. No doubt it helped that Estonia was a cultural backwater (from the Russian point of view) and at best a reluctant component of the Evil Empire. Furthermore, Finnish and Estonian are closely related languages understood by pretty much no one else. (Which didn’t stop Finnish broadcasters from running faux-Soviet comedy sketches with stodgy announcers speaking mock-Estonian gobbledygook.)

Even if it didn’t have a significant historical wow factor, “Disco and Atomic War” would stand as a wonderful work of Baltic deadpan humor, in the long and honorable tradition of small countries and minority cultures making fun of themselves so the outside world won’t have to. But Kilmi builds a pretty persuasive case that when Estonians started to watch episodes of “Dallas” and commercials for Helsinki supermarkets — where you could buy actual steak — a fateful Rubicon was crossed, and there was pretty much nothing the Soviets could do about it. Samizdat videotapes of Finnish broadcasts, dubbed or subtitled into Russian, circulated throughout the Soviet Union; collective farms wrote letters to Moscow announcing that they had met their soybean quota for socialism and now they wanted to know who had shot J.R.

Now, just to be clear, the Soviet Union’s collapse was social and institutional and economic. It was a long time coming, and it wasn’t caused by a Finnish-dubbed David Hasselhoff any more than it was by Ronald Reagan. “Disco and Atomic War” is a droll Estonian fable disguised as a history lesson, and vice versa. It’s an ingenious and masterful film, so funny and so heartbreaking it may leave you giggling and crying by turns, and it reminds us that pop culture, even at its most venal and idiotic — perhaps especially then — is the gooey, delicious sauce that comes on top of Freedom fries.

“Disco and Atomic War” is now playing at Cinema Village in New York, and opens Nov. 26 at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow.