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sabotabbyHey it's been awhile since I've done a Cheatsheet of Freedom. Today's offering does not particularly lend itself well to the screenshot approach, because 90% of it is people sitting around talking. However, I got kind of obsessed with it in the last few weeks, and unless you grew up in the Soviet Union in the 70s or 80s, there's a good chance you haven't seen it.
Accordingly, I watched Seventeen Moments of Springso that you don't have to to encourage you to watch it too.
Some background: According to the friend who told me about it, and what I could figure out from the intertubes, this miniseries was a huge big deal. It used to air on Russian television for twelve days in a row every year, usually around Victory Day. In 2009, it was colourized, to much outcry. More crucial to our interests here on the intertubes, it is responsible for memetic mutation (warning: TVTropes link), with jokes about the main character serving as some sort of Communist proto-Chuck Norris joke thing. It is also responsible for Vladimir Putin.
The other bizarre thing for me about this show, raised as I was on Western capitalist pigdog TV, is that there's a certain mood whiplash in regard to tone and audience. I could not, for the life of me, figure out whether this show was supposed to be aimed at children or adults. There's a good argument to be made for both, especially in the episode that contains both an adorable sequence of bear cubs that think they're people, a fairly brutal (for 70s TV) suicide, and a scene where a small baby is tortured. It's slow-moving, grim, and tense, with, as I've said, long sequences of dialogue, but there's also a strange sort of storybook narration to explain events to the viewer, which, in Western TV, you wouldn't see outside of a show for very young children.
Oh, and it's very good. Despite the slow pace and some weird cinematography, I was completely engrossed.
So the thing about setting stories in WWII, or in any other historical era, is that unless you're Tarantino, the end is a foregone conclusion. The show's opening narration helpfully informs us that it's March, 1945, and fascism is doomed. None of the characters, or Nazi Germany, has realized this yet, though for anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention, everything is falling apart.
Meet the protagonist, Standartenfuhrer von Stirlitz, an operative in the SD. He spends most of the first episode playing with twigs in a forest and doing Nazish things, although, of course, he is not in fact a Nazi but a Soviet spy who has been undercover in Germany for 20 years, to the point where he's beginning to think of himself as a German. Apparently this guy is supposed to be the Russian James Bond, if James Bond's life sucked a great deal. (So, a John LeCarré hero, basically.)
So the main plot is that Stirlitz gets an encrypted message from Moscow Center telling him that they suspect that someone in the top Nazi brass has secretly opened negotiations with the Anglo-American Allies, behind Stalin's back. Their intent is to allow a German surrender that removes Hitler but leaves most of the power structure of Nazism intact in order to prevent Germany from going Communist. His instructions are to figure out which of the key figures (Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, or Bormann) is secretly negotiating with CIA chief Allan Dulles, expose said negotiations, and put an end to them.
This is complicated by the problem that right from the beginning, the Nazis are beginning to suspect that Stirlitz is up to something. He managed to bungle a number of key operations, preventing the Nazis from blowing up Krakow, and imprisoning a physicist who was on the verge of developing the atom bomb for Germany. (The latter subplot is really, really dark, incidentally. The physicist does not come off as bad guy at all. He's set up by jealous colleagues who claim that his father is Jewish, Stirlitz confirms it, and it appears that he's imprisoned and tortured to insanity.)
On the left is Schellenberg, Stirlitz's boss. On the right is Himmler. (Spoiler: Himmler is the one negotiating with the West.) Schellenberg's portrayal is certainly...interesting. The actor who plays him is ridiculously funny and charming. I think this is on purpose. He seems to not care particularly about Nazi ideology but, rather, really likes spy games and enjoys screwing over colleagues for the lulz.
I am slightly disappointed that his desk does not have automatic guns mounted in it. Because in real life, yes, yes it did.
The prisoner doing yoga is another one of the main characters, Pastor Schlagg. Who is a Lutheran pastor but also Catholic somehow. I think the Soviets were a bit confused about religion. At the beginning of the series, he's been imprisoned for being a pacifist and an anti-fascist, but Stirlitz gets him out, ostensibly to spy first on the anti-fascist underground, then on the ceasefire negotiations.
Anyway, this leads to two other interesting quirks about this show. The first is that Schlagg, and by extension, all but the leadership of the "Catholic" church, comes off really well, which is surprising for a TV show made in the Soviet Union. He genuinely disagrees with both Communism and fascism, and accordingly his goals are somewhat orthogonal to Stirlitz's, but he's nevertheless portrayed as heroic, especially considering that he's not remotely a badass.
The other weird thing is that the portrayal of Nazi Germany. You can see in the photo above that the prison cells are more spacious and nicely decorated than one would expect. Later on, there are references to people being in concentration camps and then released. There's also a curious insistance on having evidence for detaining people, even if said evidence has to be manufactured. The point I'm making here is that this is not so much set in Nazi Germany as it's set in Soviet Russia. There are frequent references to Nazi atrocities, just so you don't forget, but they are curiously detached from the plot.
The second episode is where it really wins me over. Stirlitz is trying to figure out which of his four suspects are most likely to betray Hitler.
So, of course, he draws insulting caricatures of all of them.
And then contemplates his drawings.
This is Mueller, who is head of the Gestapo and the series' main antagonist. Like Schellenberg, he's oddly charming. (Also like Schellenberg, he appears to have a bit of a crush on Stirlitz. Which, so does everyone on the show, for reasons that are understandable.) He doesn't want to investigate Stirlitz at first, as Mueller considers him to be the only person in the SD who's not a talkative asshole.
Meanwhile, Stirlitz shoots someone for being a talkative asshole and dumps his body in a lake. It's not unjustified, but it's also not strictly speaking necessary and puts Stirlitz firmly into antihero territory. At this point, it's obvious to me that the main point of tension in this story is not whether he's going to be successful in his mission, but how much of his soul will remain by the end.
This doesn't have any bearing on the plot. I just thought I should mention that the show has a literal Pet the Dog moment (warning: TVTropes again), just in case you were disturbed by the main character shooting a dude in cold blood in the last episode.
Kathë, a.k.a. Katya! She is the most awesome of characters. Only two people in the entire country know Stirlitz's true identity, Kat and her husband, Erwin. Kat is a pianist, both literally (as in she plays the piano) and figuratively (she and her husband are radio operators who are sending coded messages to and from Moscow Center). She's also hugely pregnant. Stirlitz is worried because when women give birth, they apparently scream out in their native tongue, so he wants to evacuate her to neutral Sweden. Kat, in a moment that foreshadows her later badassery, is like, "hell NO I have a job to do. As if I'd scream even during labour."
(Obviously, this does not go well for anyone.)
This is Mrs. Stirlitz. In another scene that is heartbreaking but doesn't actually make much sense, she shows up in a bar that Stirlitz frequents, holding hands with another man. They stare at each other from across the bar, and this is the only contact they've been allowed in years. How she got into Germany is not explained, but the scene works because it's incredibly sad.
Anyway, the Americans drop a bomb on Kat and Erwin's house. Erwin is killed, Kat ends up in the hospital giving birth (and screaming in Russian), drawing the attention of the Gestapo. Stirlitz is now completely alone with no way to get messages back to Moscow.
So, he gets Professor Pleischner, the brother of a deceased member of the German underground, to go to Bern, Switzerland, on his behalf to smuggle messages out. Probably there was someone else in Berlin that he could have found who looked more like a nebbishly embodiment of all things despised by the Nazis, but he didn't have a lot of notice.
This also doesn't end well.
There are silly disguises because this is a show about spies.
One of the show's few flaws is that it fails to introduce Barbara, She-Wolf of the SS, until over halfway through the series. This historically inaccurate bit of fanservice is also an awesome character and required far more scenes than she got.
Kat and her newborn son have been imprisoned by the Gestapo, which means incredibly surreal dinner parties where she drinks wine and eats the Saddest of All Birthday Cakes while Barbara goes on about the virtues of free love and Helmut, a shell-shocked soldier, does the dishes and looks after the baby. Helmut is also awesome, incidentally.
There is some context for the following sequence, but not nearly as much as you'd expect. For about ten minutes, we are treated to a montage of adorable bear cubs that think they're people:
Then Pleischner, tailed by Gestapo thugs in Switzerland, remembers that he has a special cigarette with a cyanide pill in it:
Like I said, this particular subplot doesn't end very well.
At this point, we're at episode 8, over halfway through the series. You should really try to watch it, and I don't want to spoil it for you. Besides, the last few picspam offerings are much more hilarious without context.
Watching the show sans subtitles is particularly surreal. In the following sequence, Schellenberg and Stirlitz are trying to look like they're having a good time but are actually plotting against Mueller. If you can't understand the dialogue, it comes off slightly differently:
I'm just saying.
In case you were worried about liking the Nazi characters a little too much, there is a scene where one of them tortures a baby to get Kat to talk. She doesn't.
Eventually, Stirlitz does get caught and imprisoned. He spends his time making animals out of toothpicks:
Being a complete badass, he gets out of this situation by—talking. And recommending that Mueller take up yoga for his health. When he's finished talking, Mueller not only believes him, but wants to recruit him in a plot against Bormann. One gets the sense that if Stirlitz had just kept talking for about five more minutes, Mueller would be ready to defect to the USSR.
Mueller keeps insisting that he's actually just a nice old man, and he doesn't understand why everyone is so afraid of him.
Here is why everyone is so afraid of him:
Kat, after escaping from the Gestapo, manages to not draw attention to herself despite the fact that she could not look more like a Russian spy if she tried:
Because Stirlitz is supposedly the Russian James Bond, comparisons are in order. He gets absolutely no gadgets, though he does have a pretty sweet car. In terms of Bond girls, well, there's this one:
In case you were wondering what happens at the end.
This show is great and you should watch it if you can. I'm fairly certain that I missed much of what was going on because of various quirks of translation and cultural differences in cinematic convention, but I nevertheless greatly enjoyed it. If someone could definitively answer whether it's supposed to be a children's show, though, I would really like to know.
And, yes, some of the Stirlitz joke-meme things were translated into English. (Warning...oh you know.) They tend to be something like this:
"On May Day, Stirlitz put on his Red Army cap, grabbed a red banner and marched up and down the corridors of the Reich Security Office singing the Internationale and other revolutionary songs. Never before had Stirlitz been so close to failure."
Accordingly, I watched Seventeen Moments of Spring
Some background: According to the friend who told me about it, and what I could figure out from the intertubes, this miniseries was a huge big deal. It used to air on Russian television for twelve days in a row every year, usually around Victory Day. In 2009, it was colourized, to much outcry. More crucial to our interests here on the intertubes, it is responsible for memetic mutation (warning: TVTropes link), with jokes about the main character serving as some sort of Communist proto-Chuck Norris joke thing. It is also responsible for Vladimir Putin.
The other bizarre thing for me about this show, raised as I was on Western capitalist pigdog TV, is that there's a certain mood whiplash in regard to tone and audience. I could not, for the life of me, figure out whether this show was supposed to be aimed at children or adults. There's a good argument to be made for both, especially in the episode that contains both an adorable sequence of bear cubs that think they're people, a fairly brutal (for 70s TV) suicide, and a scene where a small baby is tortured. It's slow-moving, grim, and tense, with, as I've said, long sequences of dialogue, but there's also a strange sort of storybook narration to explain events to the viewer, which, in Western TV, you wouldn't see outside of a show for very young children.
Oh, and it's very good. Despite the slow pace and some weird cinematography, I was completely engrossed.
So the thing about setting stories in WWII, or in any other historical era, is that unless you're Tarantino, the end is a foregone conclusion. The show's opening narration helpfully informs us that it's March, 1945, and fascism is doomed. None of the characters, or Nazi Germany, has realized this yet, though for anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention, everything is falling apart.
Meet the protagonist, Standartenfuhrer von Stirlitz, an operative in the SD. He spends most of the first episode playing with twigs in a forest and doing Nazish things, although, of course, he is not in fact a Nazi but a Soviet spy who has been undercover in Germany for 20 years, to the point where he's beginning to think of himself as a German. Apparently this guy is supposed to be the Russian James Bond, if James Bond's life sucked a great deal. (So, a John LeCarré hero, basically.)
So the main plot is that Stirlitz gets an encrypted message from Moscow Center telling him that they suspect that someone in the top Nazi brass has secretly opened negotiations with the Anglo-American Allies, behind Stalin's back. Their intent is to allow a German surrender that removes Hitler but leaves most of the power structure of Nazism intact in order to prevent Germany from going Communist. His instructions are to figure out which of the key figures (Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, or Bormann) is secretly negotiating with CIA chief Allan Dulles, expose said negotiations, and put an end to them.
This is complicated by the problem that right from the beginning, the Nazis are beginning to suspect that Stirlitz is up to something. He managed to bungle a number of key operations, preventing the Nazis from blowing up Krakow, and imprisoning a physicist who was on the verge of developing the atom bomb for Germany. (The latter subplot is really, really dark, incidentally. The physicist does not come off as bad guy at all. He's set up by jealous colleagues who claim that his father is Jewish, Stirlitz confirms it, and it appears that he's imprisoned and tortured to insanity.)
On the left is Schellenberg, Stirlitz's boss. On the right is Himmler. (Spoiler: Himmler is the one negotiating with the West.) Schellenberg's portrayal is certainly...interesting. The actor who plays him is ridiculously funny and charming. I think this is on purpose. He seems to not care particularly about Nazi ideology but, rather, really likes spy games and enjoys screwing over colleagues for the lulz.
I am slightly disappointed that his desk does not have automatic guns mounted in it. Because in real life, yes, yes it did.
The prisoner doing yoga is another one of the main characters, Pastor Schlagg. Who is a Lutheran pastor but also Catholic somehow. I think the Soviets were a bit confused about religion. At the beginning of the series, he's been imprisoned for being a pacifist and an anti-fascist, but Stirlitz gets him out, ostensibly to spy first on the anti-fascist underground, then on the ceasefire negotiations.
Anyway, this leads to two other interesting quirks about this show. The first is that Schlagg, and by extension, all but the leadership of the "Catholic" church, comes off really well, which is surprising for a TV show made in the Soviet Union. He genuinely disagrees with both Communism and fascism, and accordingly his goals are somewhat orthogonal to Stirlitz's, but he's nevertheless portrayed as heroic, especially considering that he's not remotely a badass.
The other weird thing is that the portrayal of Nazi Germany. You can see in the photo above that the prison cells are more spacious and nicely decorated than one would expect. Later on, there are references to people being in concentration camps and then released. There's also a curious insistance on having evidence for detaining people, even if said evidence has to be manufactured. The point I'm making here is that this is not so much set in Nazi Germany as it's set in Soviet Russia. There are frequent references to Nazi atrocities, just so you don't forget, but they are curiously detached from the plot.
The second episode is where it really wins me over. Stirlitz is trying to figure out which of his four suspects are most likely to betray Hitler.
So, of course, he draws insulting caricatures of all of them.
And then contemplates his drawings.
This is Mueller, who is head of the Gestapo and the series' main antagonist. Like Schellenberg, he's oddly charming. (Also like Schellenberg, he appears to have a bit of a crush on Stirlitz. Which, so does everyone on the show, for reasons that are understandable.) He doesn't want to investigate Stirlitz at first, as Mueller considers him to be the only person in the SD who's not a talkative asshole.
Meanwhile, Stirlitz shoots someone for being a talkative asshole and dumps his body in a lake. It's not unjustified, but it's also not strictly speaking necessary and puts Stirlitz firmly into antihero territory. At this point, it's obvious to me that the main point of tension in this story is not whether he's going to be successful in his mission, but how much of his soul will remain by the end.
This doesn't have any bearing on the plot. I just thought I should mention that the show has a literal Pet the Dog moment (warning: TVTropes again), just in case you were disturbed by the main character shooting a dude in cold blood in the last episode.
Kathë, a.k.a. Katya! She is the most awesome of characters. Only two people in the entire country know Stirlitz's true identity, Kat and her husband, Erwin. Kat is a pianist, both literally (as in she plays the piano) and figuratively (she and her husband are radio operators who are sending coded messages to and from Moscow Center). She's also hugely pregnant. Stirlitz is worried because when women give birth, they apparently scream out in their native tongue, so he wants to evacuate her to neutral Sweden. Kat, in a moment that foreshadows her later badassery, is like, "hell NO I have a job to do. As if I'd scream even during labour."
(Obviously, this does not go well for anyone.)
This is Mrs. Stirlitz. In another scene that is heartbreaking but doesn't actually make much sense, she shows up in a bar that Stirlitz frequents, holding hands with another man. They stare at each other from across the bar, and this is the only contact they've been allowed in years. How she got into Germany is not explained, but the scene works because it's incredibly sad.
Anyway, the Americans drop a bomb on Kat and Erwin's house. Erwin is killed, Kat ends up in the hospital giving birth (and screaming in Russian), drawing the attention of the Gestapo. Stirlitz is now completely alone with no way to get messages back to Moscow.
So, he gets Professor Pleischner, the brother of a deceased member of the German underground, to go to Bern, Switzerland, on his behalf to smuggle messages out. Probably there was someone else in Berlin that he could have found who looked more like a nebbishly embodiment of all things despised by the Nazis, but he didn't have a lot of notice.
This also doesn't end well.
There are silly disguises because this is a show about spies.
One of the show's few flaws is that it fails to introduce Barbara, She-Wolf of the SS, until over halfway through the series. This historically inaccurate bit of fanservice is also an awesome character and required far more scenes than she got.
Kat and her newborn son have been imprisoned by the Gestapo, which means incredibly surreal dinner parties where she drinks wine and eats the Saddest of All Birthday Cakes while Barbara goes on about the virtues of free love and Helmut, a shell-shocked soldier, does the dishes and looks after the baby. Helmut is also awesome, incidentally.
There is some context for the following sequence, but not nearly as much as you'd expect. For about ten minutes, we are treated to a montage of adorable bear cubs that think they're people:
Then Pleischner, tailed by Gestapo thugs in Switzerland, remembers that he has a special cigarette with a cyanide pill in it:
Like I said, this particular subplot doesn't end very well.
At this point, we're at episode 8, over halfway through the series. You should really try to watch it, and I don't want to spoil it for you. Besides, the last few picspam offerings are much more hilarious without context.
Watching the show sans subtitles is particularly surreal. In the following sequence, Schellenberg and Stirlitz are trying to look like they're having a good time but are actually plotting against Mueller. If you can't understand the dialogue, it comes off slightly differently:
I'm just saying.
In case you were worried about liking the Nazi characters a little too much, there is a scene where one of them tortures a baby to get Kat to talk. She doesn't.
Eventually, Stirlitz does get caught and imprisoned. He spends his time making animals out of toothpicks:
Being a complete badass, he gets out of this situation by—talking. And recommending that Mueller take up yoga for his health. When he's finished talking, Mueller not only believes him, but wants to recruit him in a plot against Bormann. One gets the sense that if Stirlitz had just kept talking for about five more minutes, Mueller would be ready to defect to the USSR.
Mueller keeps insisting that he's actually just a nice old man, and he doesn't understand why everyone is so afraid of him.
Here is why everyone is so afraid of him:
Kat, after escaping from the Gestapo, manages to not draw attention to herself despite the fact that she could not look more like a Russian spy if she tried:
Because Stirlitz is supposedly the Russian James Bond, comparisons are in order. He gets absolutely no gadgets, though he does have a pretty sweet car. In terms of Bond girls, well, there's this one:
In case you were wondering what happens at the end.
This show is great and you should watch it if you can. I'm fairly certain that I missed much of what was going on because of various quirks of translation and cultural differences in cinematic convention, but I nevertheless greatly enjoyed it. If someone could definitively answer whether it's supposed to be a children's show, though, I would really like to know.
And, yes, some of the Stirlitz joke-meme things were translated into English. (Warning...oh you know.) They tend to be something like this:
"On May Day, Stirlitz put on his Red Army cap, grabbed a red banner and marched up and down the corridors of the Reich Security Office singing the Internationale and other revolutionary songs. Never before had Stirlitz been so close to failure."
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 03:47 pm (UTC)The production values very much confused me. It looks beautiful, and then there are the sudden zooms and decidedly non-noir voiceovers. Though it was the 70s, so, yeah.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 04:06 pm (UTC)My first attempt to torrent this one netted a particularly weird Polish translation that dubbed over the original voice tracks. I guess it was done on the cheap, because it was just the one voice for all of the characters. It was completely distracting and unwatchable, even by dubbing standards.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 11:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 03:59 pm (UTC)* hence not entirely sure what to make of your remark that it has some kid-show-like features. but i believe many 60s-70s russian movies do. i read that when 'ballad of a soldier' got a prize in cannes in 1960 europeans were saying, "what is this thing of childlike innocence?" Same with tarkovsky's 'ivan's childhood' (1962) - "dreams? who does dreams these days?" and more generally, everything i watch from that era makes most other movies seem full of mannerisms. it definitely has its charm.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-19 02:17 am (UTC)This is Mrs. Stirlitz.
Oddly wearing a hairstyle that was popular in the west 10-20 years before this was filmed. Oh, it is a Soviet production isn't it? ;)
there are references to people being in concentration camps and then released. There's also a curious insistance on having evidence for detaining people, even if said evidence has to be manufactured. The point I'm making here is that this is not so much set in Nazi Germany as it's set in Soviet Russia.
I wonder if was out of genuine ignorance of how the Nazis operated or if the producers were making a subtle jab at the soviet system by making the bad guys operate through Soviet methods? I want to believe the latter, but I'm doubtful.
In case you were wondering what happens at the end.
Russian soldiers rob a statue? j/k
no subject
Date: 2011-09-19 10:43 am (UTC)It's supposed to be the 40s. So...I got nothing.
I wonder if was out of genuine ignorance of how the Nazis operated or if the producers were making a subtle jab at the soviet system by making the bad guys operate through Soviet methods? I want to believe the latter, but I'm doubtful.
Word of internet says it's the latter, and it was definitely intentional. Then they inserted archival footage of Soviet military victories to appease the censors.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 11:55 pm (UTC)The bears in Seventeen Moments don't talk. They just swing on swings and play on the seesaw for approximately half the episode. I imagine this is because they got some sweet footage of the bears and didn't want to cut any of it out. (In fairness, the fact that it's happening when you know the guy is being tailed and is about to get caught makes the extended zoo footage pretty tense and surreal.)
no subject
Date: 2013-07-22 02:26 pm (UTC)(Ihave to disagree with you about Klaus - I think the talkative little bastard deserves everything he got, Stirlitz keeps giving him more rope and Klaus just winds it tighter and tighter round his own neck. I'd have happily forgiven stirlitz even with the dog. You're right about Kate, though - she couldn't look more like a Russian spy if she tried. I laughed so hard at that pic).
no subject
Date: 2013-07-22 02:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-22 02:35 pm (UTC)Oh, Klaus deserved it. I'm just kind of amused that it happened.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-22 02:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-22 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-22 05:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-22 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-22 06:37 pm (UTC)