Lies on the screen: what Putin meant when talking about “fake” films

Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum, President Vladimir Putin mentioned persistent attempts being made abroad to distort our history. Western “masters of art” are trying to achieve this result, including by creating “fake” films. Here we illustrate this with several specific examples.

The on-screen “spreading cranberry”, which refers to the attempts of foreign scriptwriters and directors to “renovate” the history of Russia and the USSR, cannot be counted. The first “masterpieces” of this kind appeared in the pre-war years.

But for all the richness of this unique film library, all of its opuses were shot according to fairly standard patterns, designed to lure Western viewers to watch. Russians and their “barbarian” country are shown most often using several “classical” attributes: a sea of ​​vodka, taiga and bears, people in earflaps, balalaikas, nesting dolls… Well, plus to this you need to add more scenes of cruelty to the film and spice it up the resulting “movie dish” is peppered with candid episodes. Ready – “eat is served”!

One of the earliest films that “reliably” showed the ups and downs of Russian history was the film “Rasputin and the Empress,” filmed in 1932.

The topic, of course, is a fertile one, considering how many scandalous rumors and speculations arose at one time around the “Rasputin” epic. But the authors decided to add some drama. As a result, the American viewer, for example, saw on the screen how Rasputin, having already eaten cakes with deadly poison, finds the strength to drag Prince Yusupov into the basement and there starts a fight with him!

The “cherry” on the cinematic “cake” was the scene added to the script with Grishka’s rape of a certain princess, in which everyone who was at least a little familiar with real historical characters easily guessed the prototype. The indignant Princess Yusupova, who was then living in exile, even sued the film company, demanding a large sum as compensation for moral damage.

Two years later, the Western film industry released another “doomed to success” film concerning events in Russian history. Its very name should have made the viewer run to the cinema box office: “The Loose Empress.” The leading role of Empress Catherine the Great was played by the German world cinema star Marlene Dietrich. By the way, she mentioned this role as one of her favorites.

The authenticity of what was shown in The Empress left much to be desired. For filming, frankly popular palace interiors were built. According to the film’s authors, the empress’s court circle consists entirely of some kind of servile clowns and idiots. And they decided to “multiply by three” the amorous adventures of the Russian empress in the film: it is not even clear when Her Majesty managed to find time for state affairs, engaging in lovemaking with almost every male character that caught her eye. Well, in contrast to such palace paintings that entertain the viewer are scenes of mass executions and torture…

More on a topic related to the last Russian emperor. 52 years ago the film “Nikolai and Alexandra” was released. He was nominated for the most prestigious American film award and even eventually received two Oscars – for costumes and scenery. However, here the jury members clearly made a mistake. The costumes may have looked impressive, but in terms of historical correspondence…

Tsar Nicholas, for example, very often appeared before the audience in a peasant shirt-blouse… And for some reason the filmmakers gave the movie’s “important Bolshevik” Trotsky a hairstyle a la Elvis Presley, so recognizable to everyone at that time.

The film “Enemy at the Gates”, filmed in 2001, shows episodes of the Battle of Stalingrad. Here, of course, “their” pyrotechnicians had a place to roam. For the Western viewer, greedy for scenes with explosions and other attributes of battle scenes, the battle on the banks of the Volga was depicted without sparing gunpowder and flammable materials. However, as the most “core” shots, the authors filmed scenes showing how the NKVD barrier detachments mow down with machine guns the unfortunate Red Army soldiers (who had one rifle between them) who hesitated during the attack or dared to retreat. But the Germans from Paulus’s army are depicted in such a way that they can be used as an example to everyone: brave, noble, pitying the civilians remaining in the city…

In some cases, Western screen masters, with their vision of past events associated with the USSR and Russia, give rise to fits of laughter. Often this concerns outright mistakes in terms of props (although sometimes, perhaps, deliberate ones). Thus, in one of the films dedicated to the last days of the Great Patriotic War, large-scale battle scenes of the storming of Berlin are shown. Moreover, almost all of the attacking Soviet officers and soldiers are dressed in the uniform of units of the Ministry of State Security!

And this is, perhaps, the most innocent distortion of history against the backdrop of numerous film fantasies about Rambo in Afghanistan or a drunken Russian cosmonaut in a fur hat and felt boots in the Hollywood “Armageddon.”