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Generalissimo Stalin visits Berlin (1949)

submitted by Farhad2000

1 decade 7 years 2 months ago

From Mikheil Chiaureli's Padeniye Berlina / Fall of Berlin (1949)

Part of the Stalin Film genre, The Fall of Berlin is regarded as the ultimate glorification of the Soviet dictator on celluloid, pretty much deifying him as a benevolent peacemaker who likes to tend to his little garden, and glad-handing the country's award-winning workers when not single-handedly rescuing the nation from whatever trauma pops up on the horizon.

After Joseph Stalin's death, the film was buried by the Khruschev regime as part of the government's de-Stalinzation policy; all copies were either locked up or destroyed, and the movie remained a footnote in the minds of aging millions that flocked to the cinemas in 1950 and made Fall a major blockbuster during its original theatrical engagement.

Mikheil Chiaureli had long enjoyed the support of Stalin, and had already made a few films featuring the dictator as a supporting character. The end of WWII gave Stalin the perfect opportunity to tweak history and imprint a more favourable chronology of events - the biggie being Stalin's perfectly timed landing in Berlin soon after the seizure of the Reichstag, and the thousands of acolytes (plus a few token Brits and Americans, carrying their native flags, perfectly centered in key shots) who swarmed the tarmac and listened as the master peacemaker gave a lecture on good global policy. ("Let's keep peace for the future. Peace and happiness to all of you, my friends!" he declared to planet Earth in shots never interrupted by any editorial cross-cutting or inter-cutting.)

- From YouTube