5,664 views

6:58

Watch
- Search Videos
  
  Advanced search »
- Submit a New Video
Discuss
About
- Try clicking on the various channels to see videos posted to that channel - if you're into music you can click the Music channel to get more music sifts - go on and explore! Use the "hotness" when you have opened the channel link to get videos that have gotten a lot of votes, or use "newness" to have a look at the new sifts.
  When browsing sifts you like, have a look at the Related Posts list to see other related videos, click the tags under the video title to see more sifts tagged with the same tags or have a look at other sifts from the same user in the More Posts By list. If the sifted video is in a play list, have a look at the play list to see other interesting videos the Sift users have linked together.
  Enter the Sift Lounge to chat with online sifters about anything and everything, or read interesting posts in the Sift Talk forum.
  The Top New Videos list is always full of interesting, current videos. It is always recommended that you have a look through the Top New Videos, but also have a look at these:
  - Upcoming Unsifted Videos - active video submissions that neither are published to the front page nor archived to the submitter's personal queue
- Have you seen a really funny, surprising, scary, interesting, cute or in any other way extra good quality video?
  Post and share it here - VideoSift is the best video aggregator on the Web, where we share, discuss, promote, and interact with the best videos out there on the web. Post it here, and share it with the large community of video-interested users. And - you are guaranteed to find more very good videos here already!
  Mind you, we only share videos you discover that someone else has made; if you "self link," by posting a video you have made, have posted or have interests in, you risk the ban hammer - read the posting guidelines before posting. The sift is NOT for promoting your own videos - it is for sharing videos others have made.
  Submit a Video Now »
Login

Generalissimo Stalin visits Berlin (1949)

submitted by Farhad2000

1 decade 7 years 8 months 2 weeks 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