Padenije dinastii Romanovych
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In the early 1920s, Esfir Shub, director and editor at the state film commission Goskino, Dziga Vertov's close friend and Sergey Eistenstein's mentor, began a long study of Russia's pre-revolutionary history. She searched for footage and found it in all remote corners of the Soviet Union, including unique images that had once been shot by the film crew of the czar himself. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty is a passionate, highly detailed and politically motivated compilation of footage with which Shub reconstructs the years 1912-1917, when the Russian czar and aristocracy made way for the Russian revolution and the arrival of Lenin. The documentary is the first part of a trilogy that later would be complemented by The Great Road (1927) and Lev Tolstoy and the Russia of Nicolai II (1928). The historical images are linked by intertitles that make Shub's loyalty to the new leaders abundantly clear, but nevertheless provide a fascinating overview of the balance of power in World War I. The film proves that the moving image can have tremendous power as a period document. Esfir Shub would proceed to make the first Russian documentary with sound in 1932. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)
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It is only characteristic that one of the members of the large family of documentary films was created for a purpose that does not align with the task that prevailing common sense imposed on it yesterday and today - to neutrally reflect reality and objectively retell history. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, the father of the montage documentary, inherited a clear socio-political motivation from its dual mother, Esfir Shub,and the October Revolution. The description of facts overlaps with a particular interpretation that denies universal objectivity and - let us add to it with folk wisdom - "criminally distorts reality." If this naïve opinion, which stubbornly denies that every interpretation is a crime committed against "reality," but with the caveat that interpretation can never be avoided and is a necessary addition to every event, every text, and in this case, archival material can be easily refuted, it is possible by pointing to this film. Since the montage documentary, which, with its structure, was most suitable for a documentary film about more recent history in general and has therefore become its most common prototype to this day (with minor modifications: intertitles replaced by voice-overs and supplemented with talking heads), it found its first portrait in a film with a clear ideological function. It is up to each modern viewer to understand that the ideological content of the documentary (ideological in the sense of worldview, ideas, etc.) can change, but that the ideological-interpretive function is and will remain irreducible. After all, in the indifferent face of Nicholas II Romanov, there will always only be what we or the time period want to see in it and what the montage composition, connecting it once with "bloodiness" and another time with "holiness," will embed into it.
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