Screening: The Mother
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
This event is free and open to all, register here on Eventbrite
The Mother, based on Gorky’s 1906 novel, represents the doomed 1905 revolution. But its goal is mass political re-education in the wake of the 1917 revolution, which brought Lenin and the Bolsheviks to power. Revolutions need to establish their legitimacy. That is what The Mother seeks to do. Ironically, considering the early USSR’s attempt to liberate women from motherhood, the film draws on sanctified images of motherhood and sacrifice to deny the legitimacy of the patriarchal Tsarist regime, and to confer it on the revolutionaries. The mother starts by seeking to protect her revolutionary son at any price. She ends by adopting his cause, and by dying with him, killed by Tsarist troops. The crucial moment comes when she goes from grieving over his corpse to seizing the revolutionary banner. In this sacrificial drama, what counts as loyalty and what counts as treason are redefined.
This screening is part of a season of films on Treason & Betrayal, organised by the BISR Guilt Group and The Birkbeck Institute for Moving Image (BIMI).
It is an unhappy country that has frequent recourse to the law of treason. The last person to be prosecuted for High Treason under British law was William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, in 1945. Born in the USA to an Irish-American father and an Anglo-Irish mother, he had taken German citizenship in 1940. He possibly owed allegiance to Ireland, to Germany or to the USA as much as to Britain. However, he had neglected to cancel his British passport before broadcasting for the Nazis. That sealed his fate. Political loyalties might look so self-evident as to admit of no debate. But one loyalty often has to be set against another. Joyce probably reckoned his loyalty to fascism trumped all others. In democracies in which governments are confronted by a loyal opposition, it is not always easy to identify the core loyalty that unites all citizens. If political divisions become bitter and intractable, accusations of treachery can start to fly, even if no one is impeached or arraigned for treason. Treason and betrayal are often woven into elaborately fanciful fictions in spy films. However, the films we are watching relate closely to reality. That is partly because they represent historical events. The Mother, Vsevelod Pudovkin’s Soviet propaganda film of 1926, represents the failed 1905 revolution, while the British film The Next of Kin (1942) purports to show how Nazi agents were gleaning military secrets from seemingly innocuous conversations, and sending them to the Berlin. As the slogan of the time had it, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. The film dramatizes the slogan. Arguably, these two films do not merely represent reality, but, as works of propaganda, they seek to intervene in it: in the Soviet case, to uphold the legitimacy and even the historical necessity of the Soviet regime, and in the British film to inculcate a new understanding of what loyalty and betrayal mean in practice. Their intervention in reality occasionally leads them away from realism towards ritual, symbolism, and ideologies of gender. Our season on Treason and Betrayal will continue in the summer term with screenings of Dennis Potter’s television play Traitor (1971), starring John Le Mesurier as a defector reminiscent of Kim Philby (courtesy of the BFI Archive), and Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece about the French resistance, of which he was a member, L’Armée des Ombres (1969).
Contact name:
James Brown