What about Karmen? He said little about their time together, perhaps because, as a certain classical slaveholder once wrote, nothing is more painful than days of joy recollected in days of misery. So we’d better limit ourselves to external evidence, by which I don’t mean official photographs: We see him smiling mirthlessly and boyishly beside the American bourgeois-romantic writer E. Hemingway, both of them wearing the dark Basque fighter’s caps. He clutches his camera in his lap. Hemingway looks bored.—This I will say: Roman Karmen always meant well, and his films praised and elevated us in all sincerity; his anger on our behalf was a loving, constructive anger, like Lenin’s; he raged against the Fascist murderers; he hated ignorance, exploitation, poverty; his heart was good. The most wonderful aspect of the Revolution was that we felt impelled to do things which were really beyond us—take the Revolution itself!—and every so often we succeeded. Shostakovich’s experiments, and Rodchenko’s, Vertov’s, Tsiolkovsky’s, were all of a piece. We were dreamers together, within the grand red dream of Comrade Stalin. And Karmen went beyond himself! Is it cruel to call him a mediocrity? I don’t think so. A man without legs is a legless man, and it’s never unfair to say what’s simply true: He’s not to be blamed for lacking legs. And is it Karmen’s fault that he’s not listed more prominently in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia?
Now to Spain: There’s a certain sequence in his newsreels, a shockingly powerful sequence which shows an old lady in black with her child, who’s also wearing black, held in against her lap like something out of K. Kollwitz; the child looks sideways, the old lady looks straight at us with a scared expession; then a boy gazes at us from farther away; nearer, a young woman sits sideways on a blanket, gazing inscrutably at us; they are all sitting on the ground; and in the foreground lies a figure on its side, facing away from us, outstretching its white hands at these others; there is a bundle beneath its head, and at first we cannot tell whether it is living or dead. (In another print of the same film, our Kollwitz mother and child aren’t black at all. We can see more detail. Everything’s lighter and greyer.) These people are refugees; the Fascist bombers are coming. And here Karmen has somehow found the ability to do artistic justice both to his subjects and to his heart. Why now? Perhaps because he is in love.
It is at precisely this juncture in his career that we discover Karmen gradually moving from shots of groups to shots of individuals. Again I wonder why; the same answer comes to mind: The feelings he had for Elena were such that he finally understood with all his soul that one of us can represent us all just as well as the all contains the one. No doubt it was their passion, which rapidly flowered into marriage, which distracted him from filming the departure of Madrid’s gold reserves for Moscow, or our just and necessary liquidation of the Trotskyite Andrés Nin while he sat in his Spanish prison.
Another sequence from “The Events in Spain”: a long line of helmeted soldiers with crossed bandoliers, some with binoculars, munitions at their feet; they gaze rigidly ahead. Suddenly the camera zooms in on a woman with long dark hair.
He was in Spain for eleven months. Within days of his return to Moscow, he flew to the Arctic in search of Levanevsky’s plane, that relic of the failed Polar flight to America. He then spent a year in the Arctic, on what the Germans call Rudolf-Insel. That same year he took the responsible step and joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
By that time we trusted him sufficiently to give him the resources to direct his own films: “The Sedov Men” in 1940 and “In China” a year later. “The Sedov Men” was his respite; the stranded crewmen lined nicely up for him against their ship’s patchwork of black-and-white frozen steel; but he could feel the evil rising up everywhere, even out there in the Polar Sea. He could hardly sleep; he had to get to China! Long after it’s all over, K. Slavin will define Karmen’s credo thus: I must always be there, whenever fighting breaks out.
And so I see him lurking with two Chinese insurgents in a cleft in a boulder, the soldier ahead sighting in, ready to snipe at the Japanese Fascists while Karmen very carefully begins to upraise the movie camera over the man’s shoulder, careful not to let the sun glint on the lens. (Touching Elena was far more difficult than this.) Through eleven provinces, and I’ve already cited that figure of twenty-five thousand kilometers, he recorded for all time the fraternal heroism of the Chinese workers, peasants and fighters.
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.
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.
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.
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.