Enemy at the Gates

[cookie]

Has anyone seen this movie? Wow! can the Brits do a reproduction of Stalingrad c 1942... The other movie the Germans did was good but this one for scenery - unsurpassed.

The scenes where the young Russians are being thrown into the frontlines to be shot picking up the rifles from the dead just like in WWI. And then the Communists shooting them when they retreated.

Could someone tell me why Russia has been able to survive as a world power having lost so many men in wars in the 20c?

They say it is a sad sight in the backcountry villages which are full of old women to this day.

 

[dr greg]

What I thought when I saw it back then

WHOSE TRUTH IS IT ANYWAY?
Fact and Fiction in Film
In the case of:
ENEMY AT THE GATES
(Saving Private Ivan?)

There is a trend in big-budget films made with US money in Europe. It involves the depiction of various socio-cultural and language groups by what it is supposed we would perceive to be their English equivalents. The examples of this are increasing; the most recent being Chocolat, set, (and filmed) in a French village, where grizzled peasants converse in some ba***rd form of cockney, and the petit-bourgeoisie of the village have various varieties of plums in their mouths, and make no attempt at any indication of where the action took place, apart from addressing each other as “M’sewer”.
Now we have all winced at awful accents affected by American actors mangling every vowel as they try to portray stereotypes, but the assumption that we suspend all disbelief in cultural matters is a worrying development. This film is a good example: a film about Russia, and arguably the most crucial battle in their history, and no Russian actors in it. Not even a bit-part. Instead we have a procession of whey-faced pommy pin-up boys and the odd gnarled character actor for gravitas. We must assume that the entire Russian acting community have absolutely no grasp of the most basic English, or good marketing demands pretty and recognisable faces, or else the US market won’t bother with a war movie that isn’t about them.
Which is what this film touches on: the fact that it was the Red Army that broke the back of the Wehrmacht, and the titanic struggle that took place in Stalingrad was the pivotal clash of the war.
I read the story on which this film was based many years ago, and have reasonable familiarity with its setting. The symbolic nature of the battle, and its scale and ferocity are something we can only imagine. It was the first time that two armies of such numbers (nearly half a million each) had fought in an urban setting.
The Germans had conquered plenty of cities in their sweep through Byelorussia and the Ukraine by the tactics of encirclement. Stalingrad was a different proposition.
The blitzkrieg tactics of Heinz Guderian had been adopted with brutal efficiency, and, given a big enough canvas on the steppe, were highly effective.
The collapse of the Red Army before this onslaught had brought the country to its knees, and although Moscow had been saved by the onset of the previous winter, the main thrust of the Germans was towards the Caucasus and the oil fields around Baku. If they took the Black Sea fields they would have had enough reserves to push on into Iran, which was the long term goal of Hitler in that theatre; control of the oil in the Middle East, and therefore the world.
The name Stalin meant ‘Man of Steel” and it was an industrial town on the Volga that he chose to name after himself. It was the home of the massive Krasny Oktobr factory, and therefore docks and infrastructure. The Germans saw it as the best place to take a modern army across the river for the southward thrust. This did not take into account the mythic status of the Volga in Russian culture; it is seen as something akin the to blood of the people, and has a deep resonance in the Russian soul. It was down this river that the tribe who called themselves the Rus came in their longboats from Scandinavia to settle the land in the first millennium C.E.
Being named after him, the dictator of all the Russias saw it as a matter of personal pride that the city not fall. No expense in men or material was to be spared in holding the city, and the tenacity of the defence meant that the battle degenerated into street fighting in the ruins of the town centre. The superior armament of the German Army now made no difference, and the conflict devolved into localised actions such as hand-to-hand combat for individual houses. In this environment the sniper became a critical factor in the struggle: crack shots from both sides concealed themselves in the rubble and picked off the unwary and the foolish in a game of cat-and-mouse.
The film tells the story of the struggle between the two best shots on either side as a condensation of the greater struggle. Much has been made of the inclusion of a love interest in the screenplay, and I found it unnecessarily intrusive, even allowing for the considerable charms of Rachel Weisz. But this raises the question of whether there is any responsibility to tell the real story, and who cares if they do or not. In an era when the teaching of history is not compulsory in our school system beyond a certain level, I would argue that half-baked historical perceptions and concomitant ignorance are formed by people viewing films of a historical nature as fact. The controversy over Oliver Stone’s JFK was an excellent case in point: it was presented as a story, but was viewed as an expose by many people (according to surveys), and was really Stone’s version of what MAY have happened, convincing though it was.
In Enemy at the Gates we follow the elevation of Vassily Zaitsev to national hero as he kills large numbers of German officers with the shooting skills he learned as a peasant boy in the Ural Mountains, his relationship with the political officer who reports his deeds, and the dispatching of a German expert marksman to duel with him for the honour of the Wehrmacht. The final showdown is triggered by the nasty German hanging a little boy who has been a spy for the Russians and climaxes when the bad guy gets his just deserts. Most of it unfortunately fictional, not just from the filmmaker’s point of view, but history’s as well.

*Indeed, the whole story of the sniper duel is fiction. There is absolutely no trace in
the German military archives or SS records of SS officer Heinz Thorwald.
Also there is absolutely no report of the duel in the Red Army files which concentrated
on sniper activities (the daily reports of the Political Department of Stalingrad Front to Moscow)
This great story can be classified as Soviet propaganda.

Beevor, Antony . Stalingrad, The fateful siege : 1942 - 1943. (Ref: Shooter.com/snipers)

Therefore what we have is a real life historical figure whose sharpshooting exploits are accepted as historical reality, but the famous duel, and his subsequent heroic status, are fictions dreamt up as morale boosters by the Red Army propaganda unit at the time. There were other snipers on the Stalingrad front who shot a lot more Germans, but were not immortalised as Zaitsev was. The Political officer responsible for these stories was Danilov, and in the film he is portrayed as using the story for his own advancement, which rings true, but it didn’t work too well, as he was killed by another sniper while out observing Zaitsev at work, (or so the story goes). It is worth noting that Zaitsev told the story of the duel himself in interviews, but of course one did what one was told in Stalin’s time, and it would have done his social status as a national hero irreparable harm to have denied any of his actions. The story had acquired its own momentum, and as a metaphor for the greater struggle may have been seen by him, and definitely others, as best left the way it was told; facts notwithstanding.
We now must ask whose truth is the film obligated to tell? The entire microcosm of human drama they are using to tell the greater story is revealed to be a concoction, therefore any liberties taken with the “facts” are of no actual consequence except as a variation on an original fiction.

The representation is as much the reality as anything else, considering that the story as told when first invented was believed as literal truth by millions of Russians desperately in need of heroes in their darkest hour, and served as an inspiration to the fighting men hanging on by the skin of their teeth on a few hundred yards of the west bank of the Volga. Did the lie serve a greater purpose than the truth in these circumstances, and does revisionism require a dismissal of the effects that the story had at the time?
The filmmakers obviously felt that the old adage about not letting the facts get in the way of a good yarn applied in this case. They can’t be blamed for doing what they wanted with the story, which doesn’t mean that it went in a direction that satisfied the critics and audiences, who generally felt that a focus on the relationship between the protagonists and the myth-maker would have provided quite enough drama in the hands of a skilled auteur, and the love interest was an unnecessary distraction. It is worth noting that Zaitsev apparently did meet his future wife at the front, although such things were not uncommon in the Red Army as women were in the front line, and suffered heavily in combat. The Communists had no qualms about equality of the sexes at times of crisis, and the fact that Hitler abhorred the idea of women doing anything outside the home, and prevented their physical involvement in the war effort is no doubt grounds for a feminist reading of those opposing viewpoints in some other forum.
Whose truth matters?
The victor’s is generally accepted as what is read by posterity, unless one takes a revisionist approach subject to one’s particular ideology, and accepts that post-modern theory allows for no absolutes.
Therefore; who cares?
All facts can be subject to readings conforming to the relevant point of view acquiring the sobriquet of truth in that perception of reality.
This film does attempt to show the “reality” of the conflict in its large scale battle scenes, the crossing of the Volga under German fire is harrowing stuff, and nothing is spared in the depiction of the practise that Stalin instituted of sending NKVD units to sit behind advancing Soviet units and shoot anyone who retreated. This was grim stuff, but is a widely accepted fact as the orders actually exist on record, and it was reported openly as an indication of the determination of the leadership.
Thousands were executed out of hand behind the lines, and we can only imagine the desperation of the men caught between the guns in front and behind, often with no weapon of their own. Troops were sent into battle with one rifle between every two or three men and you had to wait till someone was killed to get your hands on one. This is depicted right at the start of the film and again is not an indictment of the methods or the ideology, but more a reflection of the desperate nature of the struggle.
The scale of the film is spectacular, and lots of attention is paid to such details as the actions of Kruschev who later went on to lead the country and reverse some of the excesses of Stalinism.
I return to the point of historical accuracy because I personally wonder what is the point of telling a story that is purportedly true, if the writers have no intention of sticking to even the agreed facts such as they may be. I do not propose that drama be saddled with the strictures of documentary, but surely there must be some obligation to the perceived catalogue of events. Why not have World War Two won by the French after dropping atom bombs on India? Patently absurd, but why? A fact bent is a fact gone, and where does the line between fact and fiction lie? Wherever the writer feels he can put it would seem to be the answer, and actual events just the canvas on which smaller dramas may be played.
In conclusion: unless you are a historical nut or general pedant, no one knows or cares if what they are watching really occurred, or if those personages actually existed or did what is shown. The recent massive success of Gladiator would bear this out.
As the old Hollywood saying goes: Perhaps it didn’t really happen this way, but here’s how it should have!

 

[carebear]

Has anyone seen this movie? Wow! can the Brits do a reproduction of Stalingrad c 1942... The other movie the Germans did was good but this one for scenery - unsurpassed.

The scenes where the young Russians are being thrown into the frontlines to be shot picking up the rifles from the dead just like in WWI. And then the Communists shooting them when they retreated.

Could someone tell me why Russia has been able to survive as a world power having lost so many men in wars in the 20c?

They say it is a sad sight in the backcountry villages which are full of old women to this day.

Remember the USSR wasn't "Russia", it was the reconstructed Russian empire. When you can draw your conscript troops not from the educated economic and political centers where, in theory, resistance might arise, but can instead spend the lives of illiterate peasant subjects it gets easier to spend lives like water. See Red China, North Korea et al.

Furthermore, you don't get a populace rising in horror at its leader's actions when you have followed communist doctrine and brutally purged the educated and successful classes of resisters and those that remain hold to that totalitarian doctrine as a religion and/or are coopted into the governing structure.

Couple those purges of any hint of independent thought with absolute control of the flow of information, conscious indoctrination of the young and the creation of a culture of fear and betrayal there will be little chance of discontent from any quarter.

Aside from the horrible effects of totalitarian rule, the Russians under Stalin added a long time cultural hatred and fear of the Germans and a deep and abiding sense that the Motherland must be defended.

Stalinism took the good parts of the Russian character, the weaknesses of a empire of subjugated peasant races and twisted them into a war machine.

That was useful insofar as Nazism, itself totalitarian socialism, needed stopping and we were not willing to spend the lives necessary but ultimately Stalin's aim was not "defense of Russia" but rather domination of the world under Communist rule.

 

[Twitch]

Cookie, yeah I saw this one recently again from Netflix. Interesting dramatization and plausible script from a take on actual events.

 

[dhermann1]

If you want to see an appallingly realistic portrayal of the Russina front, see "Come and See" (1985). The Germans completely annihilated hundreds of Byelorussian villages and towns in 1942 -43, murdering as many as a million people. Be warned, the violence in this movie is like nothing I've ever seen in a film.