Abstract
Although the paradigmatic figure of the Second World War partisan is that of underground urban insurgents, partisans struggle was more important in the rural areas of the USSR and Yugoslavia. These Soviet and Yugoslav combatants were soon mystified in the war’s aftermath, with partisans often shadowing the Red and Yugoslav Armies in popular memory. This memorialization was expressed in monuments, literature and, above all, cinema, with Yugoslavia configuring an idiosyncratic cinematic genre, Partizanski Films, about their real and imaginary deeds. Films dealing with resistance in the USSR provided a platform from which notions of heroism were challenged, offering outlets for unfinished mourning, as in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977) and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985).
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Notes
- 1.
Francs-Tireurs et Partisans or Partisan Irregular Free Shooters is a term adopted from the guerrilla operating during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71).
- 2.
See The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
- 3.
See Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 22.
- 4.
See Anderson , Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
- 5.
After the Italian invasion, Tito and Mihailovič tried but failed to establish some common ground to fight the alien invader, meeting in September and October of 1941 and splitting definitively on 1 November 1941.
- 6.
Simon Trew questions the degree of Četnik collaboration with Germans in Britain, Mihailović and the Chetniks, 1941–42 (London: Macmillan, 1998).
- 7.
Of a total population of around fifteen million people, between one and one and a half million people are estimated to have died, more than half of whom were civilians. On Yugoslav partisans, see Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1940–1945. Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
- 8.
More than 100,000 women joined Tito’s National Liberation Army (AVNOJ), with one in four dying, 40,000 wounded and 3000 becoming incapacitated, while 2000 served as officers and 91 were recognized as ‘people’s hero’. Tito repeatedly expressed his pride to have women serving.
- 9.
Rosenstone uses this label to refer to a 1980s documentary about the US members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who fought in the Spanish Civil War : ‘The Good Fight…[is] history as homage—homage to a certain kind of commitment and to a tradition of activism, one in which the filmmakers clearly situate themselves’. See Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 111.
- 10.
M. R. D Foot , Resistance: An Analysis of European Resistance to Nazism 1940–1945 (London: Methuen, 1976), p. 192.
- 11.
On this topic, see British Policy towards Wartime Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece, ed. by Phyllis Auty and Richard Clogg (London and New York: Macmillan, 1975).
- 12.
The actual budget was not made public but an estimate given by Variety gives the official figure as US$4.5 million but the actual expenses US$ 12.5 million. See Batančev , ‘A Cinematic Battle: Three Yugoslav War Films from the 1960s’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Central European University, 2012), p. 54, n. 96.
- 13.
See Nora , ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7–24.
- 14.
Batančev , ‘A Cinematic Battle’, p. 53.
- 15.
Some conscripts lamented having to play cameos of dead German or Italian soldiers, or even switched sides to ‘join the Partisans’, which provides a light source of humour in Turalic’s documentary.
- 16.
Batančev uses the specific numbers for a section of his chapter on this film, ‘10,000 soldiers, 75 armed vehicles, 22 airplanes’. See ‘A Cinematic Battle’, p. 52.
- 17.
Tito’s own words on this issue were as follows: ‘On Neretva in occupied Europe , we have fought one of the most famous and most humane battles—battle for saving the wounded. The fate of the revolution was at stake here and here the brotherhood and unity of our nations won’.
- 18.
Foot , Resistance, p. 193.
- 19.
See Hoare, Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941–1943 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 333.
- 20.
Miranda Jakiša analyses the symbiotic relationship of Partisan films with the land in these films. She argues that these ‘telluric’ or ‘earth-bound’ features are of paramount importance in the creation of the partisan’s ‘imagined community’. See ‘Down to Earth Partisans: Fashioning of YU-Space in Partisan Films’, Kino!, 10 (2010), 54–61.
- 21.
Batančev , ‘A Cinematic Battle’, p. 64.
- 22.
As Batančev observes: ‘Yugoslavism is visible…in Tito’s message to the viewers which reminds them that in the battle of Neretva “brotherhood and unity of all of our nations won”’. See ‘A Cinematic Battle’, p. 57.
- 23.
Hoare, ‘Whose is the Partisan Movement? Serbs, Croats and the Legacy of a Shared Resistance’, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 15.4 (2002), 24–5.
- 24.
A document with Tito’s written order not to be shown in cinema is displayed in Cinema Komunisto.
- 25.
Air support was provided by the Luftwaffe, as well as the Italian and Croatian Air Forces.
- 26.
Estimated overall casualties were close to 9000, made up of 6500 combatants plus 2500 civilians killed in reprisals, while Axis forces had around 583 killed and 400 wounded.
- 27.
Serbs claim that up to 700,000 were killed, while Yad Vashem lowers the figure to around 500,000 and the USHMM puts it at 320,000–340,000.
- 28.
Batančev , ‘A Cinematic Battle’, p. 56.
- 29.
Kuljić, Tito (Belgrade: Institut za politicke studije, 1998), p. 292.
- 30.
Gentile , Politics as Religion, trans. by George Staunton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
- 31.
See H83tr3d’s channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igT9BCbeHgQ). H83tr3d has a webpage dedicated to body counts (www.allouttabubblegum.com).
- 32.
Hoare, ‘Whose is the Partisan Movement?’, p. 40.
- 33.
On Soviet partisans, see Kenneth Slepyan, Stalin’s Guerrillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II (St Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Alexander Hill, The War behind the Eastern Front: The Soviet Partisan Movement in North-West Russia, 1941–1944 (London: Frank Cass, 2005) and Leonid D. Grenkevich, The Soviet Partisan Movement, 1941–1944: A Critical Historiographical Analysis (London: Frank Cass, 1999).
- 34.
See Statiev , ’The Soviet Union’, in Hitler’s Europe Ablaze, Occupation, Resistance and Rebellion During World War Two, ed. by Philip Cooke and Ben H. Shephard (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013), pp. 188–212.
- 35.
Ponomarenko had been general of the Red Army before becoming First Secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus (1938–47).
- 36.
Youngblood , Russian War Films: on The Cinema Front, 1914–2005 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, c.2007), p. 7.
- 37.
The film’s title was originally rendered into English as No Greater Love.
- 38.
Youngblood , Russian War Films, pp. 62, 69.
- 39.
Kenneth R. M. Short. Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II (London: Taylor & Francis, 1983), p. 116.
- 40.
Riley, Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film. KINO—Russian Film-makers’ Companions (Book 3) (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), p. 52. The film’s popularity is demonstrated by the fact that it ‘was third at the box office in 1944’. Youngblood , Russian War Films, p. 67.
- 41.
According to Youngblood , of the seventy major wartime films featuring men as protagonists from 1944, ‘only two focused on the partisans, rather than the Red Army …[W]ith the Red Army on the offensive after Stalingrad , the formulas for war films changed. Heroines could be killed (Zoya, The Rainbow ); Red Army soldiers, sailors and pilots could displace the partisans as heroes (Two Warriors, Moscow Skies, Malakhov Hill); [and] directors could imagine taking the war to the enemy in Germany (Person No. 217)’. See , Russian War Films, p. 78.
- 42.
Youngblood , ‘Post-Stalinist Cinema and the Myth of World War II: Tarkovskii’s “Ivan’s Childhood”’ (1962) and Klimov’s “Come and See ” (1985)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 14.4 (1994),413–19 (p. 41).
- 43.
Sartre , ‘Discussion on the Criticism of Ivan’s Childhood’, (Letter to Alicata, editor of L’Unita ’). The French Letters, no 1009, trans. by Madan Gopal Singh, Nostalghia, 1963 (https://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Sartre.html).
- 44.
Tarkovsky , Sculpting in Time: Tarkovsky The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses his Art, trans. by Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).
- 45.
See Iordanova’s essay for the film’s release by Criterion, ‘Ivan’s Childhood: Dream Come True’, The Criterion Collection (https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/589-ivan-s-childhood-dream-come-true).
- 46.
GDF is a member of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange that works in close collaboration with Reporters Without Borders, Amnesty International, International PEN and other organizations. Besides the two directors mentioned, it was organized by Yegor Yakovlev, Vladimir Molchanov, Igor Golembiovsky and Mark Rozovsky.
- 47.
The film was shot near Ruskeala, the actual setting of the story.
- 48.
Bykov , The Ordeal , trans. by Gordon Clough (London, Sydney and Toronto: The Bodley Head, 1972).
- 49.
The film ‘drew 28.9 million viewers, ranking sixth at the box office in 1986’. See Youngblood , Russian War Films, p. 197.
- 50.
The notorious 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS , also known as the SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger, enlisted convicted criminals in its ranks, including Oskar Dirlewanger himself. They became famous for murdering and raping civilians behind the Eastern Front throughout the war, and operated in Poland, Belarus and Slovakia.
- 51.
Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2011), pp. 250–51.
- 52.
These years were marked by the decline of the long-lasting leadership of Leonidas Brézhnev (1964–82), who was followed by Yuri Andropov (1982–84), Konstantin Chernenko (1984–85) and Gorbachev (1985–91).
- 53.
Youngblood , ‘A War Remembered: Soviet Films of the Great Patriotic War’, The American Historical Review, 106, no.3 (2001), 839–56 (p. 855).
- 54.
Come and See was co-produced by Mosfilm and Belarusfilm.
- 55.
On the relationship of post-war cinema with neorealism, see Sect. 2.1 of Chap. 2.
- 56.
Twenty-first century Belarus offers a unique example of continuity from the Soviet version of the Great Patriotic War . See Alexandra Goujon, ‘Memorial Narratives of WWII Partisans and Genocide in Belarus’, East European Politics and Societies, 24.1 (2012), 6–25.
- 57.
The first Soviet film featuring Jews as main characters was Alexander Askoldov’s The Commissar (Komissar, 1967), made in 1967 but censored until 1988. The film is an adaptation of Vasily Grossman’s short story ‘In the Town of Berchichev’ (‘V gorode Berdicheve’), set in the predominantly Jewish Ukrainian village of Grossman’s birth during the Russian Civil War (1918–22).
- 58.
The translation is sometimes rendered as ‘Great Fatherland War’.
- 59.
As Goujon observes, ‘With few exceptions, the Soviet era emphasized the heroics of the resistance to fascism rather than the actual crimes and abominations committed by the Nazis’. See ‘Memorial Narratives of WWII’, p. 7. Lukashenko has ruled Belarus continuously from 1994.
- 60.
This battalion was formed in Kiev in 1942 and headed by Sturmbannführer Erich Kerner.
- 61.
Benjamin’s famous expression in his V Thesis is: ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’. See Walter Benjamin. On the Concept of History, Gesammelten Schriften I:2. (Frankfurt: Verlag, 1974) (http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ThesesonHistory.html).
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Camino, M. (2018). The Partisan (1943–74). In: Memories of Resistance and the Holocaust on Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49969-1_3
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