Mother (no 56)

by Allan Fish

(USSR 1926 90m) DVD1

Aka. Mat

Don’t look under the floorboards

d  Vsevelod I.Pudovkin  w  N.Zarkhi, Vsevelod I.Pudovkin  novel  Maxim Gorky  ph  Anatoly Golovnya  ed  Vsevelod I.Pudovkin  m  Tikhon Krennikov  art  Serge Kozlovsky

Vera Baranovskaya (Niovna Vlasov), Nikolai Batalov (Pavel Vlasov), Anna Zemtsova (girl revolutionary), Alexander Chistyakov (Vlasov, the father), Ivan Koval-Samborsky (Vesovshchikov), Vsevelod I.Pudovkin (officer),

Once regarded as highly as his contemporaries Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, it’s perhaps surprising how the reputation of Vsevelod Pudovkin has dimmed.  Or rather not so much dimmed as been forgotten.  Following the success of his short classic Chess Fever in 1925, he would go on to make four excellent classics of the Soviet cinema.  The End of St Petersburg, Storm Over Asia (especially) and Deserter all have their admirers, but to me Mother remains his best film and his most complex.

            Set in 1905 at the time of the first attempted revolution in Tsarist Russia, the story follows the fortunes of a family associated with a factory in a provincial town.  Both father and son work at the factory, but could not have more different opinions.  The father is a brute of a man, happy to beat his wife and belittle his son, while receiving bribes to act as muscle against strike agitators by factory bosses.  His son, meanwhile, is a potential strike leader.  However, when a fight breaks out between the hired muscle and the angry workers, the father is killed by a misdirected bullet and the authorities come to arrest his son for his part in the disturbance.   Will his mother stand by her son and lie to the authorities, or will she come clean about his hiding firearms in the house?  Too naïve to see through their promises, she is tricked into giving him up and he is sent to prison.  But in the meantime his mother becomes involved in her own subversive acts and, upon her son’s release from prison, they both go to demonstrate, at the risk of injury or worse from the authorities and the Cossacks. 

            Nearly eighty years on Pudovkin is better remembered by many as the lead actor in Ozep’s The Living Corpse, or for his small roles in his friend Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible films.  The fact is that both Mother and he deserve to be better known.  He transforms Maxim Gorky’s classic tale into a true feast for the senses, ably mixing propaganda into the recipe without ever letting the human element be swamped.  Much credit must be due to his collaborators, and all do great work.  Regular collaborator Golovnya’s photography ideally captures the tone of the film from the very first shots, particularly in its outdoor shots of the town.  Applause, too, for Pudovkin’s uncredited editing chores, for this truly is a film to rival Eisenstein in that regard.  Yet it’s the actors that dominate, particularly the motherly central performance from Vera Baranovskaya; the image of her crying aloud as she cradles her stricken son in her arms in the street a wonderful cinematic version of the Pieta.  It’s a performance of rare stature from a forgotten great. 

As for Mother itself, it’s a film that has influenced many aspects of Russian cinema, with the family theme a possible influence on the current style of Alexander Sokurov (think of Mother and Son, for example).  Whether it’s up to the best of Eisenstein is open to doubt, but it’s a totally different sort of film.  A film whose wonderful insight and detail is a joy to behold on each acquaintance and whose best scenes will stay with you.  Like original author Gorky, Pudovkin loved the notion of identity and his characters are not only wonderfully brought to life, but also, as is more important, realistically so.  And if some might complain at the rather standard appearance of the Russian would-be-strikers – exemplified by the surly fellow who holds a bottle in the air and bashes his substantial fists on the table in an act of defiance – it would be rather a harsh criticism.  Praise Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, by all means, but there were other talents at the table in twenties Moscow.