The Myth of Stalin and the Death of Hitler: André Bazin and The Fall of Berlin’s Transnational Travels

Abstract

This essay explores aspects of the transnational and transhistorical impact of The Fall of Berlin (Padenie Berlina, Mikheil Chiaureli, 1949). Although the film is late Stalinist propaganda, and an outstanding manifestation of the Stalin personality cult, it cannot be reduced to those descriptors. It has had an ongoing impact upon viewers within different cultural contexts who do not necessarily subscribe to its politics. André Bazin’s seminal, frequently translated and reprinted essay ‘The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema’ (‘Le cinéma soviétique et le mythe de Staline’, 1950), is the most famous and frequently quoted piece of writing on Stalin personality cult films, but it is not the final word on them. It needs to be understood within the specific context of French film culture during the immediate postwar period. This essay therefore highlights the cultural specificity of ‘The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema’ by contrasting the debates within which Bazin’s essay was enmeshed with the equally culturally specific British reception of The Fall of Berlin in the early 1950s, exemplified by leading film critics and historians such as Dilys Powell, Fred Madjalany and Hugh Trevor-Roper.