Come, meet me between silent cinema and sound, and between the Soviets and the Americans, at Mikhail Romm's The Thirteen (1936), a crypto-remake, set in the Afghani desert of the 30s, of John Ford’s The Lost Patrol. A squad traveling home runs out of water and is holed up on a deserted Afghani camp and kept under siege by a roving band of locals, and Romm surprises by having next to no interest in tension (how little water, how few bullets, how many men left) or individuation of the squad to elicit laughter or sympathy (a Soviet trait?). The poetry is formed in the zeroing in of every poetic-material-compositional detail when it is introduced into the film world: the cascading rivers of sand (Teshigahara stole wholesale for Woman in the Dunes), deep space of the desert siege (one tremendous shot: in foreground a Soviet machinegun nest, in focus deep...
- 2/7/2011
- MUBI
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