Abstract
Julian Graffy’s Chapaev packs a wealth of information and insight into its lively study of the hugely popular 1934 film about Soviet Civil War hero Ivan Vasilevich Chapaev (1887–1919) directed by Georgii and Sergei Vasilev, the self-styled ‘Vasilev Brothers’. Commissioned for I. B. Tauris’s useful series of ‘companions’ to major Soviet films, Graffy’s study offers an exemplary synthesis of film analysis and cultural history. The story of Chapaev the film, as Graffy ably demonstrates, is also a case study in Soviet mythmaking.
Graffy locates the first stage in the construction of the Chapaev legend in the complicated relationship between Chapaev and Dmitrii Furmanov, the political commissar who served briefly with Chapaev and whose 1923 novel Chapaev inspired the film, although, as Graffy quickly establishes, the narrative arc and thematic emphases of the film differ dramatically from those of Furmanov’s novel. The novel itself offers a radical revision of Furmanov’s own troubled relationship with Chapaev, whose charisma, as Furmanov’s letters and diaries reveal, was both an inspiration to the commissar and a threat to his marriage.
The next stage in the evolution of the Chapaev myth spans the decade between 1924, when Furmanov was commissioned to write the first screen treatment of his own novel, and 1934, when the finished film was officially released on the seventeenth anniversary of the October Revolution. In the interim, as Graffy notes, the Vasilev Brothers managed to discard all but four scenes of the original script. The 53 new scenes they composed placed the film’s focus squarely on Chapaev (in marked contrast to Furmanov’s novel, which centred on the relationship between commander and commissar), but they also introduced several major new characters and plotlines. Graffy links these changes persuasively to broader cultural shifts, chief among them a revision of Civil War narrative tropes and attempts to reconceptualize what it meant to be a Soviet hero. Graffy’s account of the ways in which the Vasilev Brothers softened Chapaev’s character, as well as of the many possible endings that they contemplated for the film, indicate the extent to which the legend of Chapaev – like Soviet notions of heroism – was in flux during this period.
Another transition in which the film was caught up was the shift from silent to sound cinema. Graffy’s careful discussion of the film’s distinctive use of folk songs (with lyrics presented in both Russian and in English) complements his account of the Vasilevs’ uphill battle to win approval to shoot the film with sound. I regret that the brevity of the KINOfiles format did not allow Graffy to explore how the film was changed when it was reformatted in silent form for later release in village cinemas that lacked sound projection equipment.
The longest section of the book, as mandated by the KINOfiles format, offers a scene-by-scene discussion of the film. Here again, Graffy’s analysis is exemplary as it integrates a nuanced discussion of visual detail and narrative structure with concise explanations of relevant historical contexts, cultural references and critical arguments. Gesture, dialogue, costume, props, landscape: all are noted, explicated and contextualized in prose that is both clear and elegant.
The final section of the book chronicles what Graffy aptly labels the film’s ‘extraordinary afterlife’, from its first private screening for Stalin, who would view it another 26 times over the next 12 months; through Chapaev’s cinematic resurrection from the dead to inspire Soviet troops in the 1941 short feature Chapaev is with us; and into the irreverent anecdotes, revisionist histories and popular culture of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With a range of reference that is both impressive and wildly entertaining, Graffy charts the many ways in which the film Chapaev became even more ‘legendary’ than its nominal protagonist.
Graffy’s Chapaev is destined to become the essential first stop for all students of the film, but it is also a book to which specialists will turn – and return – both as an invaluable reference and as one of the most perceptive analyses, in any language, of this landmark film.