I caught this one before it expired on "the silent stream" section of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto website, where they temporarily revive past screenings from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Mark it down as one of the classics of Soviet montage and the late silent era. This version, by the way, is the 92-minutes restoration with the original score; reportedly, there's a longer cut that was discovered in Germany in the 1980s, but which co-director Leonid Trauberg disavowed as extra footage that they'd intentionally discarded and not censored material. Regardless, as it is, "The New Babylon" is a spectacular synthesis of Impressionistic images, rapid and rhythmic editing and a score by renowned composer Dmitri Shostakovich, his first for a film, to match the operetta within the film and the operatic presentation of the Paris Commune.
The opening sequence in itself is masterful. With the aid of special portrait lenses, the focus of images is extremely narrow--mostly, only a character in the foreground per shot is seen clearly--while the background is blurred as if each frame were an Impressionist painting--none of which remain on the screen for long. Counts of the film's average shot length (ASL) range from five seconds, according to Barry Salt, to as quick as 3.7 seconds, as claimed by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. Seeing several shots pass by in a fraction of a second at its fastest pace, I wasn't about to bring out my own clicker. Suffice to say that the shot succession here is closer to that of a modern action flick than to the contemporary early talkies in Hollywood, which seem to be guaranteed an ASL of more than 10 seconds and upwards of more than 20 seconds. Eventually, the camera will sometimes spin as if in a drunken stupor until hardly anything can be made out. Other imagery, such as when the rich attack the poor in the street, is also obfuscated visually and by quick cutting. Also undercutting what one might otherwise consider an appreciation of French Impressionist paintings is that the footage is of bourgeois debauchery, a grotesque depiction of the sort of leisurely activities one might find in a Manet, Monet, Renoir, or Surat.
Nor is the entirety of the picture photographed in quite the same way; indeed, there are a few striking deep-focus compositions. One features the French flag in the foreground, as a soldier on horseback occupies the distant horizon. The montage, too, slows down at least long enough to establish a relationship between a woman who joins the Commune and a French soldier who winds up being involved in its demise, including sometimes their relatively-long forlorn looks, the plot of which does rather well to ground the grander narrative and hold the spectator's attention with the traditional, character-based identification that's more important to other movies, but rather at odds with this film's socialist and non-individualistic politics. Set during the Franco-Prussian War, the Prussian soldiers, too, only occupy silhouettes in the background of the frame; the center of this picture is occupied by France's own class conflict. It should also be noted that the lighting, including some chiaroscuro effects throughout, is finely done.
While later we see those of the middle or upper classes lounging outside, watching the Commune being defeated by the soldiers as if it were street theatre, in the opening sequence it's an apparent operetta being performed on stage while they eat and drink and generally revel, or, for the more sober, conduct business. If these arts and entertainments are defined as bourgeois, then one might very well wonder what is supposed to be made of film, such as this one. That's where the guns that the proletariat fight for come in. Cinema as mechanical, rapid-fire, revolutionary polemic for mass production and mass appeal. The crosscutting between a new operetta being practiced and the working-class women feeding the soldiers before a struggle over weaponry ensues is an especially stark contrast. Furthermore, there's the piano player on the Commune's side of the barricade and, perhaps anachronistically, "La Marseillaise" being sung as the workers' battle cry, to go along with the rest of Shostakovich's score that's always fighting in unison with the class struggle of the imagery. Sure, it's Soviet propaganda, but it's also great art.
