The Last Bolshevik

Chris Marker, the acclaimed director of “Sunless” is one of the cinema’s most compelling documentary film-makers. This engrossing film is firstly a tribute to Alexander Medvedkin, a Soviet film-maker and revolutionary, who eventually to fell victim to Stalin’s infamous purges. “The Last Bolshevik”, framed around six imaginary letters to Medvedkin by Marker, is also a mediation on the history of Soviet communism and a critical examination of revolutionary aesthetics. Marker was a central figure in the French New Wave and was involved in rehabilitating Medvedkin’s career in the late-1960s. It is then also a personal self-appraisal of the artist’s own politics and aesthetics, an appraisal which aims to investigate what drew artists to the radicalism of Soviet Bolshevism and the consequences for “radical art” now that Communism has been discredited. The film not only explores Medvedkin’s work but also the cinema of Eisenstein and Dziga-Vertov. A documentary that assumes intelligence and philosophical eruditness from its audience is rare indeed. This melancholy farewell to the dream of “creating utopia” is a wonderful film.