A film about communism to commemorate the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact on February 25, 1991.

“Alexandre Ivanovitch Medvedkine est le seul cinéaste russe né en 1900. (…) Son énergie, son courage, ses illusions, ses désillusions, ses compromissions, ses bagarres avec les bureaucrates, ses illuminations prophétiques, ses aveuglements, volontaires ou non, son humour indestructible et la lumière déchirante que l’effondrement de l’URSS jette rétrospectivement sur toute sa vie, ce sont ceux de toute une génération, et c’est le portrait de cette génération que j’entends tracer à travers le portrait d’un ami.”

– press kit (via)

A film essay using the life and work of filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin to tell the story of communism. Medvedkin traveled the Soviet Union with his Kinopoezd or Cinetrain (also Agit-train), a moving film production train with the sole purpose to create Agitprop while documenting the Five Year Plan.

“Mr. Everyman explains how to look like a Japanese and thus impress those wild and not very civilized people. Mrs. Everyman replies that for savages, they look remarkably civilized. Meanwhile, Mr. Everyman, seeing more people looking even more Japanese, is reassured. Mrs. Everyman sees soldiers parading in European uniform. She smiles ironically. But now a number of typical Japanese walk into the house. Her irony disappears. And Mr. Everyman is not ashamed to admit… he is mystified.”

– narrator

Commissioned by the #PanAfrican literary magazine Présence Africaine to make a short film about African art, Chris Marker and his collaborator Alain Resnais – the latter still emboldened by his Van Gogh (1948) – were struck that unlike the Dutch painter's work, this #art was not on display in the Louvre or a similar cultural temple, but in the ethnological Musée de l'Homme.

“An object dies when the living glance trained upon it disappears. And when we disappear, our objects will be confined to the place where we send black things: to the museum.”

– narrator

These works of “Negro” art that embody such a deep cultural and artistic significance for the creators and the people they are part of, were, within the boundaries of Western civilisation, merely things. The editing (Alain Resnais), photography (Ghislain Cloquet) and dialogue (Chris Marker) bring life to these works. Through these voices they speak to the viewer, escaping the institutes' walls.

 

This voice was enough for the CNC to censor Les statues meurent aussi; only the first third of the film, the segment that's not blatantly #AntiColonial, was to be watched. And to this day, the documentary still has not seen a restored, digital release.