Synopsis
Α documentary about the building of blast furnaces by Komsomol, the Communist Union of Youth, as part of Stalin’s first five-year plan for the Soviet Union. The film is set in Magnitogorsk in the Ural Mountains, where an industrial city of over 200,000 people was built in just a few years, and the Kubas Basin in Siberia. This film, shot entirely in praise of Soviet workers, shows us the construction of a blast furnace in an almost desert-like region. Influenced by the Russian filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin, Ivens tells the story by following a non-actor who re-enacts the scenes.
A word from Tënk
In 1932, Joris Ivens spent several months travelling around the Soviet Union, filming the construction of blast furnaces in the new steel town of Magnitogorsk, in the Urals, where the youth organisation Komsomol played a major role. In the USSR of 1932, obtaining permission to make a film was an arduous process. Ivens succeeded, but in return he turned a blind eye to a terrible reality. Along with the enthusiastic workers and young Komsomol members who had volunteered in Magnitogorsk to build a new world, Ivens pretended not to see the thirty-five thousand political prisoners – mostly kulaks who had resisted the forced collectivisation of their land in Stalinist kolkhozes – who were forced to do the heaviest work in slave-like conditions. Formally, Ivens constructed a magnificent industrial symphony, with music by Hanns Eisler and songs written by Serge Tretiakov: a masterpiece of Stalinist propaganda cinema, which paradoxically was censored in the USSR… a sad irony of history?
Federico Rossin
Cinema historian, independent programmer
