The Heir To Genghis Khan (1928)

Can I interest you in a Marxist condemnation of British imperialism? This silent film sees Pudovkin reaching out, decades ahead of Mao, to “the periphery”, to the potential for revolution in Asian peasants rather than the factory workers of the cities. This wasn’t the main line to take, but it was still something Lenin had talked about, so it wasn’t a deviant heresy. The opening scenes have the striking naturalism of an ethnographic documentary, then it turns into an action film, then shifts again to gorgeously cold portraiture of Westerners, richly dripping with satirical contempt of imperial power's facades.

While the opening scenes alone feel like a truer use of cinema than the huge preponderance of what's been released in the last few years, with the solemn shots of the desert, the weathered faces of the Tibetan peasants and the instant intimacy and realism of their lives, we don’t have to wait long to find out we’re watching some proper left-wing shit, with an amazing early plot twist where the praying Buddhist monk turns out to be a greedy cheat. As jolting now, after decades more of our own pro-religion propaganda, as it must have been then, or even more so as we have completely capitulated to our expectation that a film won't do anything other than ladle reverence on a holy man character, this turns out to be only the prelude to giving full reign to Pudovkin’s wonderfully bracing disdain for Buddhism, a rousing reminder of how a real atheist culture should regard religion, and a gratifying unmasking of how hollow is Western power’s charade of respect for local customs. The ceremonial dance later in the film is again something we would just naturally expect to ooh over with the usual exoticism and it feels like such a salutary chastisement to see this communist movie bulldoze through all that and say “we’re atheists and this is preposterous bullshit.” The interwoven mockery of ruling-class narcissism is just the icing on the medovik. 

The hero, Baer, goes on a bit of a picaresque, accidentally kicking off a race-riot at a bazaar before, like Luke bumbling into the Rebel Alliance, he meets some Soviet partisans fighting a guerrilla war against British colonialism of Mongolia (I don’t think we ever actually did this, but it doesn’t really matter, fuck us anyway). Guerrilla war against colonialism is a fine topic for a film whatever decade it’s from, and how relieved we are that its continued relevance means we can enjoy them without feeling they’re historically obsolete.

The second half of the film is a satire the like of which may not exist outside Russian cinema, a relentless disembowelment of the cynicism of the ruling class. It turns on the execution of Baer, a mesmerising sequence in itself. From a film today, we might not take the rather on-the-nose detail of the executioner trying to avoid getting his boots muddy, but in context here it plays as bitter judgement. (A bit rich from Soviet Russia, perhaps, but park that, too.) If I’ve understood the plot correctly, it’s all a sarcastic farce anyway and the mythical lineage they ascribe to Baer actually belongs to another character.

Given that this is probably the most anti-British thing ever made until The Patriot (which is not quite as good a film), it says a lot about England that it was quite sanguinely released over here as Storm Over Asia, a title which itself involves a bit of imperialist hand-waving, since it is technically only a storm over Tibet. It’s a shame we can’t now know what it was like to see this as part of the intended audience, a Soviet audience in the late 20s (and of course, it would be just as fascinating to know what English audiences made of it) and yet that distance, probably deceptively, melts away when you watch it and the context seems self-evident. The sheer force of the subject matter, the clarity of the critique, dwarfs contemporary cinema. It's really a lesson in the advantages of Soviet technique over standard Western liberal approaches.

Take the lead performance - pretty much what we would expect from a silent film, but one obvious objection is to ask how woke this portrayal of Mongols would be considered today. True, he is the hero, the saviour, but the role specifically calls on him to act like a noble savage, the barbarian warrior with a heart of gold compared to the sophisticated whites. It didn’t actually have to be that way. The film could have shown him being just as articulate and expressive as the whites. Even Soviet films, by some way the most progressive in the world at that time, didn’t think it through to the next step. It doesn’t say “of course they’re not just a bunch of barbarians”, it says, “these barbarians will kick your ass and that’s cool and they should be with the Reds.” In other words - come over to our thing, Asian comrades, we’re not coming over to yours. That didn't really work out, but that doesn’t bear on the film.

Two points, m'lud, can be offered in mitigation of these representations. First there is the unsparing, purely demonic portrayal of the Westerners, which never provokes the slightest reason for us to doubt its accuracy as a study of their intentions and attitudes. The second thing about the objection that Baer, and indeed all the characters, are too broad and stereotypical is that the objection itself comes from the paradigm that Soviet aesthetic theory opposes. The Soviet viewpoint reversed what we in the miserably risible West are taught – they believed that the use of types is politically superior to the bourgeois investment in crafting specific characters and that the common Western criticism “these are types, not characters” to indicate aesthetic failure in a film is comically oblivious to the ideological grip of bourgeois individualism. What matters is not the fate of one character, which merely propagates the myth of individualism, but the use of types to represent schematically the forces at play in history, so that one figure can be taken as representative and the true power structures and conflicts in the world can be portrayed without obfuscation.

This holds true for a number of formal choices in the film, which are all built around trying to find methods to express visually the concepts of revolutionary communism. The abrupt ending is rather metaphorical, where another thirty minutes of literalism might have served better than two minutes of symbolism, but it’s always a kick to see the exploratory adventurousness of the nascent (and usually Russian) cinematic past compared to the ossified Western conventions which have since passed beyond the point of being questioned. This undimmed Russian avant-gardism also shows up in the almost subliminal split-second shots, positioned throughout the film, of a sabre held aloft  – Pudovkin finding a purely cinematic way to represent the compressed, double-layered Marxist vision of history, where the inevitable future, destiny, is deeply embedded in each past event, so that each step towards revolution in the present moment of the plot is objectively punctuated by the film itself with where history is headed, the flash-forward transformed from a story-telling device to a political one. It's all quite dazzling. 

Great films are easy to define – they’re the ones that ruin the rest for us. Watching modern American films immediately subsequent to this makes most of them look trivial, garish, clumsy and/or ludicrous. Yes, The Heir To Genghis Khan wants for subtlety – it is a Soviet propaganda film. But for its two hours, I was transfixed.