I'm having a difficult time coming to grips with Arsenal. The film follows a coherent narrative: a WWI soldier, Timosh, returns from the front to his hometown in Ukraine and sides with the Bolshevik workers in his former factory against a nationalistic anti-Soviet uprising. However, the story lacks narrative logic in a way that bugged me – a train carrying demobilized soldiers stops, the train is threatened by nationalist soldiers, the train starts again, the train has faulty brakes, the train crashes – scenes occur without any particular regard to the preceding context or the overall storyline. Add to this a dash of avant-garde styling – images of people apparently frozen in place, strange camera angles – and the effect is quite disorienting. Thematically and ideologically, though, the film is successful. Arsenal is remarkably even handed with regards to the conflict between the nationalists and the Bolsheviks. In one scene, a Ukrainian soldier laments "three hundred years of Russian oppression," to which a Russian soldier quite reasonably asks, "What did I do?" A frustrated peasant attacks his gaunt horse, to which the intertitles respond, "You're hitting the wrong one, Ivan." Ukrainian aggression against the Soviets is depicted as misguided, rather than malicious. All people, not just Ukrainians or Russians, are shown mourning and starving at the hands of the Germans and the negligent Tsar at the beginning of the film. Timosh's decision to side with the communists over the nationalists is not divisive; in the end he identifies himself as "a Ukrainian worker" to a nationalist squad, whose bullets he miraculously survives. Communism is universal, and the Bolsheviks do not deserve to be the target of nationalistic ire stirred by the Imperial era. The metaphor is obvious, but is refreshingly unintrusive for a revolutionary film. Arsenal is not easy to watch, but has more complexity to it than one might expect from a work of state-sanctioned cinema.
Review of Arsenal
