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 at 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.
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…