Couple of questions
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earthman34 — 12 years ago(October 12, 2013 10:01 PM)
Let's see if I can clarify this, as there seems to be a lot of confusion about what is going on in this film. At the beginning of the film the two boys are digging in the remains of a battlefield looking for rifles. In order to join the partisans, you needed to bring your own weapon, partly because they were short of weapons, and partly to prove you had the nerve in the first place, as obtaining a military rifle in German-occupied Byelorussia would be risky, to say the least. The two men who come to take Florya away are partisans, disguised as Germans. They are not taking him away against his will, he wants to go, eagerly. His mother is not thrilled about the idea. Her husband is already missing. Florya is a little naive at this point, he, like many, simply cannot comprehend the magnitude of the brutality about to be unleashed on them. Byelorussia, like much of the eastern Soviet Union, was overrun rather quickly, and many areas hardly saw any Germans as they rushed east. It wasn't until the Einsatzgruppen came later that they learned the hard way that the Germans were not there as liberators (that being the belief of many opposed to the Stalin regime. That also explains the many collaborators and auxiliaries who worked willingly with the Nazis). The unit that destroys the village is not the German army but a Waffen SS Einsatzgruppe with a bunch of auxiliary collaborators who might have been Byelorussians or Ukrainians. Sadly the SS never had too much trouble finding people to do their dirty work. This is why the survivors of the battle with the partisans who were captured at the end of the film where begging for mercy and screaming that the weren't Germans and they were forced to do what they did. There may even have been some truth to it. Everybody feared the SS units, even German allies. Even the German army tended to avoid them. The Waffen SS was not under the command of the German army and did not take orders from them.
The movie flows as sort of a surreal stream-of-consciousness sequence of events, without any background or attempt to explain what was going on (mainly because it was made for a Russian audience who would have been familiar with the history, at least at the time). Because of that, and because the history of WW II in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is pretty hazy to most American audiences, it can be hard for some people to follow what's happening.
It is definitely one of the best war movies ever made, and a hard one to forget. We see a lot of war movies that, while filled with violence, are fundamentally heroic, patriotic, or morally uplifting in their focusthis film shows war's senseless (to it's victims) brutality and insanity. The politics are really secondary. I'd imagine a Native American who was at the Wounded Knee Massacre, or a Vietnamese person who was at My Lai, would have no problem understanding what this film is about, while the ordinary person might well be perplexed.
The co-writer of the screenplay actually fought as a partisan when he was a teenager, and some of the events in the film were gleaned from interviews with survivors of the war at the time. The incident where the people were herded into the church and then given the offer to climb out and leave their children behind really happened, and the man who told about it actually climbed out and left his wife and children behind.
Most of the shooting the in film was done with live ammunition, which is why it looks so "real", real ammo behaves differently than blanks.
Oh, and the animal on the shoulder of the German unit commander was a Red Slender Loris. -
GuyOnTheLeft — 10 years ago(November 06, 2015 07:36 PM)
You know your stuff!
Can you explain why there was a German woman who seemed like an aristocrat or something? Was that part realistic? Hard to believe that would happen.
My top 250:
http://www.flickchart.com/Charts.aspx?user=SlackerInc&perpage=250 -
yaroslavrudenko — 12 years ago(November 07, 2013 01:41 PM)