Сыны отечества (1969)

A rare work for Latin America and of true singularity, not so much because of the theme but because of the formal narrative composition that is of an amateur rusticity, but also of a rich texture since it begins first with the poetry of Gafur Gulyam, and then with the Passacaglia from Shostakovich's Violin Concerto #1 but in the flashback to the Extermination Camp it is to Soviet Jew Nehama Lifshitz performing Der Rebbe Elimelech; The German Johan Kultscher organizes a pictorial exhibition in the capital of Uzbekistan of some canvases found in Spielhausen, a secret Nazi factory; and here the curious dialectic begins: -Elena Salimova identifies her husband Iskander as one of the degraded victims in the easel motif, but on an extra-literary level, these oil paintings unobjectionably wink at the insufferable pessimism of Bruno Schulz's work, and in some cases to Egon Shiele himself; However, Kultscher alleges that the artist responded to the name of Mark Goeltz, because he is the one he has in the prisoner registry at that time, and in no way could it be the missing Uzbek. After noticing Professor Elena's distress, Kultscher invites her to visit another character from that time, the Nazi Hilda Haynes; Sullen and defensive, she narrates the events in the form of anecdotes from the Spielhausen of that time to the distraught woman, not without remembering the nefarious Louis Stumpf and his role as commander of the Spielhausen alongside Fontalwek, as well as the drawing that Mark made of her. Goeltz pretending to be Salimova.The despicable account of the events in Spielhausen cannot be less condemnable than ignominious. Upon the arrival of Haufsturmführer Otto Fontalwek, a high-ranking Nazi, to the Extermination Camp, the drawings and paintings made with all kinds of organic material from the site begin to anger the Germans. It is evident that the distressing figures in the paintings, executed with fine mastery, but obviously anonymously, function as protesting lampoons. Fontalwek orders that they cancel pork and meat in the diet of the Muslim bloc where the paintings have appeared, and forces them to forcibly pray for hours - Allah Akbar - using a degrading sound with reel tapes at about 33 or less revolutions per minute (sound of squirrels) in the rain and without stopping, under penalty of being shot if someone gets tired. Above, I spoke of cinematic rusticity: it can be compared to the scene of the artist, frozen with fear, pleading with his mother, an epiphany of the old woman, while the fog covers the entire surreal plane and the camera tracking shots are bumpy, interspersing flashes of the image of the crucified prisoner and the barbed wires with the other companions bent over from hunger and cold. One day, one of the guards tried to get in the way of Haynes, who was a photographer for the Third Reich at that place, and it turned out that Iskander and the other prisoners beat up the Nazi until Fontalwek arrived and executed the one who hit first. I also said that the narrative structure was peculiar, until the third stage of the film, with 25 minutes left, when Mula arrives with Professor Elena Salimova, Iskander's determined insistence on the Hamburg artist, Mark Goeltz, to join the underground movement in Spielhausen, repeating that they needed an artist and refusing until they convinced him to exchange identities. "Do not burn the roots, do not break the trunk. The tree of life of the mighty savage war. You are the eternal mother of all humanity. You are the guarantee of endless earthly life. But so that my homeland of Osiyan was happy, I wanted the stain of black pain not to burn in your heart."