I thought about posting this on Memorial Day weekend but the fact that White Tiger is a Russian (post-Soviet, 2012) movie made me reconsider.
IMDB.com summarizes it thus:
Great Patriotic War, early 1940s. After barely surviving a battle with a mysterious, ghostly-white Tiger tank, Red Army Sergeant Ivan Naydenov becomes obsessed with its destruction.Which is true as far as it goes, but this is not just a duello movie of two single-focused, even near-fanatic tank crews gunning for one another. It's not a land-borne version of The Enemy Below. White Tiger is a penetrating inquiry into war and the human condition. The German tank and the Russian protagonist are archetypes not just of soldiers anywhere, but of fallen humanity itself.
Fortunately, you can watch the whole movie, subtitled in English, right here. It seems its copyright does not extend to the United States.
At the very end is a monologue by Adolf Hitler, speaking to an unidentified man couched in shadows. Despite the identity of the speaker - and the screenplay's words in his mouth are reflective of what Hitler said and thought - the monologue is quite thought provoking, coming as it does following the last view of the Russian tank we see, and why and how we see it.
This is a very serious, compelling work of cinema. I hope you will agree.
Update Dec. 27, 2019: David Goldman posted a fairly savage review of the just-out World War 1 movie, 1917, calling it, "the worst war movie ever." The fault is not in its technical excellence of recreating the trenches and filth of the war, but in the fact that it does not tell a story.
... the audience views the sequence of events from the perspective of a small dog dragged along on a leash behind them. ...In reply, I posted, "If you have never seen the Russian war film, "White Tiger," I cannot recommend it strongly enough," with a link here. There followed a collegial exchange:
The camera trails the actors in what Mendes imagines to be “real time” through trenches, battlefields, ruined cities, and assorted disasters. Technically this poses great challenges, but the aesthetic outcome is a canine perspective on human events.
Time is represented as an indifferent sequence of moments, which means practically that every moment commands equal attention. In this nightmarish world there can be no drama, that is, no climax. On the contrary, every occurrence of importance to the thin narrative necessarily becomes an anti-climax.
The Putin Agenda is determined to reconcile with the problematic and unusable past.Pearce writes that Tiger and some other films "are fictional yet presented as fact."
However, much controversy surrounds its motives and policies concerning an already
problematic period that divides the population and ruling elites alike. There are concerns that ignoring the traumatic episodes of the past will be detrimental to Russia’s development and bring great instability to the present.
Not having read through the dissertation, I will not argue otherwise except to note that I doubt Tiger's Russian audience really swallowed that the white Tiger tank was historically genuine or that the movie's Russian hero could literally mind-meld with destroyed T-34s. That the movie does serve such a purpose in Russia as Pearce describes, though, I do not dispute.
That said, Pearce could have cast a wider net. While his dissertation is certainly not a lengthy movie review, some other candidates that might have illustrated his point better are:
- Tanks for Stalin, 2018
- 1940. A prototype of a new cutting edge tank is being taken on a secret mission to Moscow, to Comrade Stalin. Soon the cross-country run turns into a ruthless race.
- Battery Number One, 2018
- The film takes place in August 1944 when Soviet troops are moving through eastern Poland. Under orders to ensure safe passage for the army over a bridge near an abandoned monastery, Lieutenant Egorov and his battalion discover a makeshift orphanage for deaf-mute children hiding in the monastery with their teacher Eve, and are faced with the dilemma of compromising the refugees or executing their orders blindly.
- The Dawns Here Are Quiet, 2015, a four-part TV series
And for good measure, a leap back to World War 1 with 2015's Battalion.
- Based on the eponymous book by Boris Vasilyev, the film is set in Karelia (North-West of Russia, near Finland) in 1941 during WWII. In a beautiful and quiet wilderness far from the front-line there is an anti-aircraft artillery point, where corporal Vaskov is stationed with a group of many young women in training. One of the women while sneaking from camp to visit her young son sees two German paratroopers. Vaskov takes five of the women to stop the two paratroopers, but finds sixteen paratroopers instead, leaving the small group of patriots to engage the enemy in an unequal fight.
There is an historical nugget in each of these, though perhaps in a way that a McDonald's chicken nugget represents a whole chicken. Though most take place during the USSR era, the character emphasis is on Russians rather than the multiple ethnicities and nationalities that comprised the Soviet empire. These are, as Pearce observes, movies about Russia and Russians at their finest.February 1917 revolution has affected mode of life in Russia and changed the course of Great War. Monarch has abdicated. In trenches, were the confrontation with Germans lasts for several years, Bolsheviks are very active with their propaganda. They call for making peace with enemy. Russian officers can actually do nothing without approval of so-called Soldiers Committees. The army is just near the stage of complete degradation. By order of Russian Provisional Government, attempting to strengthen the spirit, the female Death Battalion is established. In charge of the Battalion - Cavalier of St. George Maria Bochkareva. Death Battalion give the lead of courage, fortitude and composure, stiffen the spirit of soldiers and prove, that each of the female hero is worthy of the Warrior Title.
Battalion is based on real events nearing the end of Russia's fighting the Kaiser's army, when Russia really did send battalions of female soldiers into battle, where, as the movie suggests somewhat ambiguously, they were slaughtered. (It seems that infantry women cannot successfully fight hand to hand with infantry men after all, which I sort of covered in my post, "The Infantry Woman Shortage."
Thanks to David Goldman for his comments and suggestion!
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