The Soviet Union played an important role in the life of French filmmaker Jean Lods (1903–74). In March 1928, Lods and Léon Moussinac founded the ciné-club Les Amis de Spartacus, its membership reaching 10,000, for the purpose of privately screening films banned by the censor, particularly Soviet masterpieces. Like several other French leftist intellectuals in the 1930s (André Gide, André Malraux, Romain Rolland, Louis Aragon, …), Lods travelled to the Soviet Union, staying there from 1934 to 1937. During this Soviet sojourn, he was charged with a study on film production in Ukraine. The French communist newspaper L’Humanité, in its 30 November 1934 issue, mentioned that Lods was in Odessa, working on a film based on Louis Aragon’s novel Les Cloches de Bâle (1934) with the support of Eisenstein, who himself was “preparing a film on Moscow.” Les Nouvelles littéraires (issue of 5 January 1935) described Eisenstein’s involvement in this project as that of an “artistic counselor.” Apparently, both the Aragon adaption as well as Eisenstein’s Moscow film were never realized, but on 2 August 1935 L’Humanité reported that Lods was finishing a film on Odessa.
With this documentary on the Ukraine capital, Lods continued his series of earlier city symphonies, such as Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes (1929) and Champs Élysées (1929), both made in collaboration with Boris Kaufman in Paris. His city symphony dedicated to Odessa (1935) was made in collaboration with writer Isaac Babel, who had published The Odessa Tales in 1926 and he would continue working on film scenarios throughout the later 1930s, for Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow (1937) and Mark Donskoy’s Gorky trilogy (1938–40) among others.
Odessa opens with impressive shots of the Black Sea—a rock in the waves and partly hidden by fog is reminiscent of Dovzhenko’s lyrical imagery of nature. Next, a montage of archaeological finds illustrates Odessa’s long history while aerial views of the sea, showing ships drawing curved lines in the water surface, situate the city and its harbor geographically. A map illustrates the orthogonal grid structure of the city. Lods explores Odessa’s main sights such as the colonnade near the Vorontsov palace and the theater but his camera also cherishes blossoms in trees and children on a playground. A striking high angle shot, with a rooftop statue on the foreground, shows a street and a traffic intersection with trams and cars, evoking the metropolitan imagery of the city symphonies by Ruttmann, Vertov, and others. After a series of exhilarating traveling shots of a car drive through the city, the film takes us back to the sea where it started.
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 230.
Mazuy, Rachel, Croire plutôt que voir? Voyages en Russie soviétique (1919–1939) (Odile Jacob, 2002), 40.
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