Ezio Mauro presents his documentary on the Russian Revolution “Chronicles of the Revolution” (2017, 72’), video curator Francesco Fasiolo; directed by Sonny Anzellotti.
“They poisoned him with cyanide in cakes and in the wine. They shot at him several times. They beat him on the floor with a truncheon, in the terror of the legend about his diabolical holiness. Because Grigori Yefimovic Rasputin did not want to die”.
In order to reconstruct what John Reed calls The ten days that shook the world, Ezio Mauro has retrieved his past as a reporter (and as a careful curator of headings in the style of Hemingway and Gabriel Garcia Marquez), slamming the crime which heralds the twilight of blood of the Czars into our faces. In his narration, the Revolution – which “is not a gala dinner” as Mao and Sergio Leone teach us – confirms itself as an endless source of stories, as well as of Twentieth-century epic History which still captures us nowadays in a web of characters, coups-de-theatre, intrigues, flags in the wind, nocturnal ambushes, haughty Czarist generals, soviets made up of blue-collar workers, peasants and soldiers.
“If I had proposed myself as a pure historian – Mauro explains – wagging my upraised finger, among quotes and cross-references to notes, it would have been like offering readers something that didn’t belong to me”.
His “live” reportages from the Russia of 1917 are not offering themselves just in the guise of articles from “Repubblica” or of a book being released by Feltrinelli, but are seeking readers who also love cinema and the web.
The chapters of these Revolution chronicles are in fact rounded-off by a “newsreel” which leads us in the Revolution locations: the dead-end track at the station in Pskov ending the escape of former Czar Nicholas II, shot together with all his family; the Finland Station at St. Petersburg, where Lenin arrives from exile after crossing a warring Europe; The Red Square in Moscow, crammed with a crowd hailing General Kornilov, who swears to make an end to the bolsheviks; the Smolnyi, in St. Petersburg again, the Revolution cathedral from where Trotsky organised his coup-d’etat; the labourers’ district in Vyborg where the rebels started out from, and the Aurora battleship, the pride of the Czarist fleet, which trains its cannons onto the Winter Palace, marking the symbolic triumph of the Revolution in falling.
Live footage alternates with sometimes very rare archive footage, showing characters in action: triumphant bolsheviks: Lenin and Trotsky amongst the crowds; pale Czar Nicholas with his stiff generals; Kerensky, the unfortunate head of the temporary government. Flanking the men of action, intellectuals, artists and poets acquire faces - Mauro lets us into the apartments that belonged to Aleksandr Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Nabokov – who prepared a Revolution in the arts during evenings spent at the Stray Dog Club, and who would be progressively condemned to silence, to exile, to imprisonment, to death or to acquiescence to power, soon to be firmly grasped by Stalin.
Cronache della Rivoluzione (Chronicles of the Revolution) by Ezio Mauro is inaugurating the retrospective which the Business Cinema National Archive and the National Cinema Museum are dedicating to the October Revolution hundredth anniversary: The Revolution screen, curator Sergio Toffetti with Grazia Paganelli and Stefano Boni.