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11: The Film That Cost a Career: Eastern Corridor (1966)
- Rutgers University Press
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127 11 The Film That Cost a Career Eastern Corridor (1966) Wartime Belarus was a site of the most horrific, unprecedented violence. Not only soldiers were killed in military combat between the German and Soviet armies but also civilians, Jews, and partisans—or people loosely affiliated with them. Killing of Jews, and retaliation against the partisans, took genocidal proportions : the population of whole villages was burned alive. Entire communities were razed.1 A film by Valentin Vinogradov, Eastern Corridor (Vostochnyi Koridor), captures the all-encompassing horror of that war. Eastern Corridor is not just a phenomenal war film, remarkable for its honest depiction of the complex and contradictory reality of occupied Belarus. It is also the only 1960s Soviet film that makes the events of the Holocaust integral to the plot. In that, the film violates the Soviet rules of universalization and externalization of the Holocaust: in the film, Jews are portrayed as Jews (and not just as “peaceful Soviet citizens”), and the action is set locally, bringing in all the complexity of life under occupation. With its Holocaust scenes shot with unparalleled force and artistic vision, Eastern Corridor should have occupied a major place in the international Holocaust filmography. Instead, it was silenced upon its release, and became another cinematic phantom. This chapter is about Eastern Corridor, and its difficult production and reception history in the Soviet Union. It is also an attempt to save the film from the oblivion and return this remarkable tour de force to the cinematic history of the Holocaust. Eastern Corridor opens with the German order instructing the forces to “use any means, including those against women and children” in their fight with the local resistance. As the order is read in voiceover, the camera descends through the lines of barbed wire stretched across the top of the prison cell to reveal inmates, including several local underground fighters, and Professor Grommer, a deported German Jewish scientist, holding in his mind a secret to powerful weapons. Another inmate is let in—Ivan Lobach (brilliantly played by Regimantas Adomaitis). Disheveled, beaten up, he is wearing an undone Nazi uniform, and the camera pans slowly over the other inmates, who examine him with suspicion . Although all suspect each other of treason, Lobach is their prime suspect. They demand to know his story. The rest of the film is built as a series of flashbacks telling what happened to Lobach. The narrative is disjointed, jumping from past to present, from one 128 The Phantom Holocaust vantage point to another without warning. The film does not use a traditional establishing shot when introducing a scene in the film. A cut is often to a disorienting close up; there are no cues as to where we are or how much time has passed. Many scenes are shot through doorframes or windows, constantly framing and reframing the story. Dramatic, oblique angles and expressionistic lighting add to the unabashed subjectivity of the narrative, intensifying the technique of moving between different, often conflicting, points of view. The soundtrack reinforces the polyphonic subjectivity of the film: its main motif in a minor key (by a popular Soviet film composer Mikael Tariverdiev) haunts the film. But more often than not, the music is contrapuntal, offsetting rather than illustrating on-screen action. Woven into the music are natural and other sounds, adding to the complex narrative. Besides music, the film draws inferences from other art forms—painting, sculpture, dance, and literature.2 With the film’s elliptical narrative, considerable cognitive labor is required from the audience to piece it all together. By being asked to struggle with the narrative confusion, the atmosphere of the Belarus underground is conveyed to audiences on a visceral level. This narrative structure forces the viewer to rely on retrospective understanding (which makes the film clearer only on second viewing). Eastern Corridor is a very unusual film, to say the least: in addition to a complex narrative structure, it does not clearly designate its characters as positive or negative. Unlike other Soviet films dedicated to partisan warfare, Eastern Corridor is a film without a clear positive hero, as expected from a socialist-realist production of the time. Rather, Eastern Corridor establishes the atmosphere of almost mystical horror and distrust penetrating the war-torn town. The deeply humanistic message of the film is the absurdity, senseless cruelty, and corrupting influence of any violence, regardless of what side you are on. In that, Eastern Corridor belongs to a larger trend in Soviet war films...