Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  In the happy time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, we find him at ease amidst his team as he films the Ukraine’s streets, always leaning forward, ready for something sensational to happen. The camera pans across skinny, grinning worker-boys who bear a strange resemblance to Karmen himself. They are clutching shiny silver cylindrical items which might be mechanical parts, shell casings, or trophies. A Ukrainian engineer weeps for joy! He’s just been given a job in our Soviet Union. And Roman Karmen is here to film it. This film, “A Day in the New World,” employed not only Karmen but ninety-six other cameramen. I proudly inform you that it won the State Prize of our USSR.

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  No footage seems to be available of Comrade Karmen’s married life, not even a framed photograph of the young couple together. I do have a copy of that famous image of him posing in a line with five other war correspondents, all in uniform, some holding cigarettes, and behind them a plane whose tail boasts the white-bordered red star of our Soviet Air Force. The date was 1943. I am informed that Elena kept this picture with her throughout her life. Public-spirited Soviet woman that she was, she preferred to see her husband in the company of his peers.

  In the autumn of 1940, Elena discovered that she was pregnant. She continued to work at the Leningrad Conservatory as well as in Moscow. Karmen left Moscow to join her in Silver Grove, on the day that she was due to give birth: 22 June 1941.

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  Unlike the rest of us, when Karmen heard the news on the radio, he believed it instantly. He rushed back to the studio. We find him on a military train two days later, bound for the front in company with his favorite cameramen, Lytkin and Scheer. At Velikije Luki the train was halted by a German Fascist attack. His very first footage of the war, shot from a machine-gunner’s trench, recorded how our troops fell and died in the hopeless counterattack. (By field telephone in that ruined city he was informed that Elena had given birth to a daughter.) Following Akhmatova’s songs, we called ourselves a “family in grief.” Roman Karmen panned across a line of dead horses who lay against a brick wall . . .

  A Soviet cavalry division galloped crazily on white horses, with their sabers upraised against machine-gun fire. They all fell. Roman Karmen was there filming it.

  Lytkin shouted. A bullet had passed through his shoulder. Trying to comfort him, Karmen said: How precious this footage will be for all of us, these first images in the chronicle of our Great Patriotic War!

  And he aimed his lens at Lytkin, who grinned back as bravely as he could. There was no doctor.

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  Our nervously smiling Russian boys in the greatcoats they’d now wear winter and summer for half a decade, they were truly his heroes. His “News of the War” features for Sovkinozhurnal singled out ordinary people, compelled by emergency and coercion into laying down their lives, and transformed them into volunteers! Well, weren’t they? He heard through Elena that even Shostakovich had volunteered . . . He filmed our retreats and did his truehearted best to portray them as victories. (We see him wearied and pale, yet still cheerful as he stands in a forest clearing on our western front, resting one hand on his tripod, glancing at us engagingly while beside him a pair of soldiers offers an opened map to our gaze; Karmen touches a point on its blankness, all the while continuing to look with sweet earnestness at us.) Shostakovich made us hear corpse-sleds scraping across the ice of the Kirovsky Bridge, with whited-out smokestacks in the distance; Comrade R. L. Karmen showed us new T-34s creaking and rasping down the white streets, turrets open, guns straight ahead! He posed us in indomitable lines, holding our rifles. On the radio he heard that anguished lyric of Akhmatova’s—The Leningraders, my heart’s blood, march out even-ranked, living and dead; fame can’t distinguish them!—and at once he decided to make a feature on the women tram-drivers of Leningrad so that the whole world could love and admire them. What is truth? Plato says that the actor’s mask becomes his face. Our squeamishnesses differ as do our necessities. An act which one of us defines as the crowning proof of love another rejects with the words: If you love me, you won’t make me do this. And each lover’s conception of devotedness remains unassailable, at least to himself.

  Whatever Karmen’s definitions might have been, they hardened when he saw the gallows at Volokolamsk. It is one thing to film violent death in China or Spain. It is quite another to record the invasion of one’s own homeland, and still another to witness the mass torture and murder of innocents, some of whom might be one’s friends. I have not been able to ascertain whether he saw the famous corpse of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya with his own eyes, but he was acquainted with the photojournalist Lidin—Karmen knew everybody!—and it was Lidin who made her death famous. Now his desire to serve humanity exploded into vehemence, and he understood with his whole heart, not merely intellectually, what Gorki had meant when he spoke of the love which created and sustained Lenin’s hatred for class enemies. The Germans must not be regarded as human anymore! Remembering those women and dead children by whom he’d been so moved at the Käthe Kollwitz exhibition so many years ago, he now vindictively delighted in their suffering. If only he could have killed every German man, woman and child . . . !

  In a single night he sketched out his own screenplay portrait of Alexei Surkov’s “Scout Pashkov,” who gets caught by the Fascists, tortured, shot and buried, then comes back to us and leads us behind the lines to blast them down! He bent over the field-desk. There’d be a nurse named Lyuba, whose long dark hair would resemble Elena’s; a Kazakh camel would pull the artillery wagon. His aspirations were as long as the thirty-seven-millimeter cannons of our Shturmoviks.

  Stalin ordered Comrade Voronov to rename his antitank artillery battalions into regiments, for the sake of morale and authority. Roman Karmen captioned his newsreels appropriately. The snowy feet of a corpse in Leningrad, what would Käthe Kollwitz have done with those? Roman Karmen knew what to do; he had neither doubt nor time for doubt.

  Even then there remained in his work something of the spatial constructions of Rodchenko, the pathos and occasional sentimentality of Kollwitz. Just as in Shostakovich’s view the science of pitch demands the notation of every scream between the two barbed wire zones, so for Roman Karmen objective cinematic work requires depiction of the strange angles which appear in starving faces.

  He was with Boris Makaseyev again, shooting “Defeat of the German Fascist Armies Near Moscow,” leaning on the panning lever as naturally as does a workman on his shovel. How he longed to see us deal the enemy a crushing blow! He caught a pale worker in a hard hat who was snarling with hate at the next oncoming Fascist salvo, and he filmed that man; he rescued him forever. Then he told another joke to Makaseyev, next to whom he always looked especially dapper and well turned out.

  An enemy shell screamed toward him. Laughing, he stood up and lit a cigarette. Makaseyev had to drag him down to safety there amidst the sandbagged bookstalls of Kuznetsky Most. His lens isolated a schoolgirl among schoolgirls in a half-dug antitank trench, saw her better than she saw herself, remembered her forever, and gave her back to us as an angel of victory.

  In 1944 he was in the Ukraine, whose Nazi Gauleiter had proposed killing every male over fifteen and keeping the females solely for breeding stock. As evidence of his presence I submit that jolly photo of the Kinogroup of the Second Ukrainian Front; a thatched hut is their backdrop; they’re all smiling, posing around a jeep, with R. L. Karmen at the wheel, and beside him (but standing, not sitting actually at his side), a hardfaced brunette whose uniform is buttoned up to the throat. And here’s his closeup of the dead German Fascist soldier who’s curled around a dictionary of Russian verbs, as if something between Aspektverhältnis and Zeichen will save him. Die vollendeten und die unvollendeten Formen der Verben . . .

  He was the first journalist to film an extermination camp: in this case, the facility of Majdanek. Save for 1,000 living corpses saved by the Red Army, no inmate escaped alive, he informed the world. His footage was admitted as evidence against the chief war criminals a
t Nuremberg, and I once heard him say that what he was most proud of in his career was his contribution to getting those men hanged. Link all points in any temporal order, advises Dziga Vertov, so I’ll now project for you the dark sequences of R. L. Karmen’s “Judgment of the Peoples” (1946), the Fascist war criminals whispering with their lawyers, surrounded by white-helmeted military policemen as they sit awaiting doom beneath the war-damaged columns; it is those white helmets, which from this angle and distance are almost the size of the faces, that we notice first and last; the Fascist faces are a dull, feeble mid-grey; the columns are darker; the recess of the open door within them is pitch-black. I was there; I saw Karmen and his assistant cameraman standing in the shadows, each of them touching the tripod as if it were something magic, Karmen leaning against a blackened pillar with his other hand as he gazed into the courtroom, waiting for the next sensation to happen. He later told me: Since everything in that court followed a strict consequential logic, the final version of my film expressed the same unyielding logic of life.

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  Some of his most suicidal footage was shot in 1943, when we smashed the enemy’s Operation Citadel. K. M. Simonov, who was one of his few frontline colleagues still alive at this period, reports seeing Karmen rise coolly out up from one of our deep antitank ditches, which had been camouflaged by grass, and a Tiger tank instantly fired a shell directly at him! Karmen ducked, then rose up again; upon viewing “Battle of the Oryöl,” we learned that he had continued shooting as he fell backwards into the trench, so that there’s a crazy, grainy lurch of sky, with the shell speeding across it all! The Tiger roared closer; Karmen filmed it head on; and when one of our hundred-and-twenty-two-millimeter howitzers took it out, Roman Karmen got that on film! After that, we regarded him with awe; at the same time, a few of us wondered if he might be unhappy, to use his life so recklessly. It was one thing to receive an order and charge into certain death, as our soldiers did, but Karmen was never given any such order.

  At the same time, we were well aware that his senses were acute and his abilities to interpret, organize and improvise were simply expert. He could tell from a great distance whether our Katyushas were loaded with M-13s or M-30s. When the German Fascists opened up with their eighty-eights, his prescience about where the shells would fall was astonishing. Once I asked for his secret, and he said: It’s all in the sound, Comrade Alexandrov! Of course, he went on, and his modestly joking grin strangely resembled a grimace, I don’t have the acoustical abilities of a Shostakovich . . .

  He was in the subterranean brick bunkers of Poznan; he filmed the crazy old men of the Volkssturm and the Germans hiding in haystacks as we came; finally he was in besieged Berlin itself, which, in V. I. Chuikov’s words, rained rivers of red-hot steel on us. He filmed the capture of the Reichstag.

  On Adolf-Hitler-Platz there was a scorched flat filled with books which our healthy-minded Red Army men were busy trampling on and tearing into bits. Karmen took a leather-bound volume from the shelf, opened it, and read aloud in an ironic tone of voice: One day he heard tell that in Burgundy there dwelt a maiden of ideal beauty, and from her, as it happened, he would gain both great joy and great sorrow.—What perverted bourgeois trash! Let me dispose of it, Roman Lazarevich!—And the healthy, tanned young cadre began ripping all the leaves out of that bad old book, laughing like a child at play. Karmen knelt down, rescued a torn page and read to himself: They improved the time with any number of entertainments, although, truth to tell, again and again he was stung by the love with which that princess had afflicted him, and which would eventually drag him to a sorry doom.—He felt very uncomfortable; he didn’t know why. All the same, this was more interesting than filming the mechanized food preparation procedures of our Giant State Farm.

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  Now for his best known accomplishment: When the battle of Stalingrad began in the summer of ’42, Roman Karmen, characteristically, longed to go there.—To see the defeated Paulus! he kept laughing. That’s every Russian soldier’s dream . . .

  Strange to say, although he shot the most crucial parts of Varlamov’s seven-reel documentary “Stalingrad,” this achievement receives no mention in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which pays tribute to his existence in volumes eleven, twelve and nineteen.—Run to the warehouse! shouted the staff officers, who were all his friends. And so he managed to be the person with the camera in the doorway when Field-Marshal Paulus surrendered (or, as I should say, when the surrender got officially reenacted). He had already distinguished himself by taking innumerable risks during the course of Stalingrad’s defense, and we did not overlook this. Every day he had a new joke on his lips: Did you hear what Rokossovsky said? We’ll let you be the first one to photograph Paulus if you’re the one who captures him! Grinning, he aimed his camera at oncoming tanks! He liked what Germans call the heisse Punke, the hot spots. (We see him from the side, wearing a Red Army uniform and beret, raising his Argus-eyed machine-pistol of a camera to his eye and aiming it upward into the distance in parallel with the long gun of the T-34 tank beside him; behind him stand the ruins of the Krasni Oktiabr’ Stalingrad Metallurgical Works.) Although the enemy advance (mated in the soundtrack to the Rat Theme of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony) appears mainly through the medium of captured German footage, much of the most daring footage in “Stalingrad” is Karmen’s: the soldier’s mouth gaping in a toothy shout as wide and round as his helmet, the dark-clad woman standing over snowy ruins, the blurred Red Army soldiers waving their bayonet-fixed guns, and then the enemy coming straight toward us, closer and closer, until the mouths of their gunbarrels take up the entire frame. Little wonder that a fellow traveler calls this film simple and heroic in the finest sense of the word.

  It was to Roman Karmen that all the film cannisters got entrusted on that special flight of 2 February 1943. It was still dark when the Shturmovik took off; in the northern pocket, the starving Fascists of Eleventh Corps wouldn’t surrender until 1600 in the afternoon, but it was definitely over. Karmen couldn’t stop smiling! It was his intention to kiss and hopefully make love with Elena in the grey blush of a Moscow winter noon, but Elena wasn’t there. So he celebrated with his colleagues at Central Newsreel Studios, all of whom embraced him. (At the studio we see him posing with many reels of film, frowning abstractedly into the bouquet of film-frames he grips with both hands, while gleaming stacks of reels tower before him and behind him.) Why then was he omitted from the credits? Fifteen other cameramen got listed. Had the notorious vanity of Varlamov written Karmen out? In any case, no one ever heard Karmen complain. No doubt he knew he was luckier than his colleague V. Grossman, who was retained in the credits but whose commentary was deleted on account of its ideological deviation.

  Unlike Dziga Vertov, he does not appear in Wakeman’s World Film Directors. I’m pleased to report that the Great Soviet Encyclopedia entry on filmmaking does give him two respectful nods, one for his prizewinning “Tale of the Caspian Oil Field Workers,” made the year of Stalin’s death, and the other for “Flaming Continent” (1972), which (I haven’t seen it, so I’m relying on my colleague Pyotr Alexeev’s description) depicts the struggle with imperialism.

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  Elena accompanied him neither to the Caspian nor to the flaming continent. They were divorced by then. His famous photo of Paulus, rigid and pale at the surrender at Stalingrad, reminds me of Karmen himself on the day that Elena left him. It was probably all over (although who can measure that?) on the day that she informed him that his various projects and dreams—oh, if there only weren’t a war he’d take her to Siberia and shoot a film just about the colors of the ice; he’d find a rainbow in the ice for her; he wanted to ride with her in a bathysphere all the way to the bottom of the ocean, accompanied by luminescent fish; he wanted her at his side when he documented the forthcoming revolutions of Latin America (which wouldn’t take place for decades, but when they did he was truly going to be there); he tried to describe his longing to accompany her to the deserts of
Turkestan—and here I might mention that long ago, so long ago that it had been peacetime, the sleepwalker hadn’t even come to power, once upon a time when Roman Karmen was writing in his diary on that hot summer in the Kara-Kum Desert with Yerofeyev and Tissé, what gave him the most joy was imagining that someday he would return here with a woman who loved him! Oh, he was passionate; he was romantic! It was the first of his three desert trips. He’d returned in 1936 with his own car; in 1950 he would shoot “Soviet Turkestan.” Elena was silent, so he said that he also wanted to be with her on a secluded tropical beach, or if she didn’t like beaches they could float side by side down a wide warm river—a project which would be excellently realized in his lovely and politically reliable travelogue “Our Friend India” (1954)—all this he proposed on a summer afternoon, trying to bring them closer; first he’d asked what dreams she had and she didn’t answer, so he told her, yes, the moon and the North Pole and the South Sea; he’d love to bring her with him; he wished to be with her forever and ever—these fantasies struck her as either isolating—and after her relationship with Shostakovich she never wanted to be isolated again—or frightening. In a deep low croon which he meant to be reassuring, he tried to explain; she thought he was being defensive and said: I feel very uncomfortable. Your tone of voice is creepy . . .—He was hurt then; he didn’t want anyone to think that he was creepy. On the contrary: He was cheery, brave, wholesome! Oh, he was really hurt.

  Perhaps in compensation, after that he was always promising to bring her to Odessa, where he was born. Then they stopped talking about going places.