Expose this foul slander of the Red Army
Mark Kermode’s Guardian review of the latest Soviet-bashing film, ‘Dear Comrades!’, is nothing if not tasteful. (Dear Comrades! review – dreams and disillusionment of a Communist party stalwart, Mark Kermode, Guardian 17 January 2021)
The film’s director, Andrei Konchalovsky, is praised for this “disturbingly handsome feature” which “presents its bleakly crisp black-and-white images in a retro 4×3 frame”, whilst the cinematographer, Andrey Naydenov, is congratulated on his achievement of “an utterly convincing air of mounting chaos, brilliantly captured on multiple cameras”. But all this obsession with aesthetic form is merely to sugar the pill of yet more bitter anti-communism. It is like complimenting Leni Riefenstal on her artful camera angles in “Triumph of the Will”. Continue reading “Art in the service of anti-communism? Anything goes.”