
(USSR 1977 10 min)
Director Anatoly Petrov Writer Sever Gansovsky
by Stephen Russell-Gebbett
A man, a soldier, lost his young son in the war. He blames the army, he blames war, he blames the world entire.
He brings a new weapon to be tested, a weapon that will change conflict forever. It is a tank that thinks, a tank that knows what the enemy is thinking. It can sense aggression and evade it. Best (or worst) of all, it can sense fear and annihilate it.
As soon as the idea of fear is introduced into the minds of the men, it detonates with apocalyptic force. The tank lays waste to them all, flattening….. One man escapes the onslaught and sprints after the tank striving desperately to remain within its ‘firing range’, frenziedly hurtling through the clouds of dust thrown up in its wake. With all his might he chases fear until at last he falls to his knees, exhausted.
Fear of war, fear of oppression dies when the spirit dies, as in Jiri Trnka’s The Hand. The effort of struggling here outweighs the reason for struggling. He gasps “I’m not afraid. I don’t care”. Only, tragically, that survival mechanism re-emerges and he realises that he could still be crushed under the caterpillar tracks. War wants you to give up, but once you do it cannot lay a finger on you.
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