Two Captains II

Sergei Debizhev formed part of a group of experimental film-makers who all collaborated on Dva Kapitana II. The group itself desribes this playful, bizarre and mysterious film as an improvisation with historical adventures and an example of its Socialist art. In Dva Kapitana II, the history of the Soviet Union is rewritten as if it was an adventure by Jules Verne. Debizhev based it on the book by Benjamin Kaverin. The latter was forced to adapt his adventure novel to the socialist-realist view of literature. Debizhev has taken this forced adaptation to extremes. He discovered in the novel, between the lines, what he described as ‘perverse microbes spreading the adventure virus’. By jauntily following the line of Kaverin’s novel, the film zigzags from Moscow to Saint Petersburg and from Las Palmas to Manchuria and Spitsbergen. A crucial role in the adventure is reserved for the warship Aurora, the famous ship thanks to Eisenstein that fired the opening shot of the Revolution. With the aid of a parody on Propagandistic narration, fragments from old newsreels and Soviet and Hollywood films and his own reconstructions, Debizhev made a kind of surrealist and comic variation on the historicalrevolution film.