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.
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.
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.