World War Two: 1941 & the Man of Steel
Filming history documentaries is rarely glamorous… so travelling on the overnight train from Moscow to Warsaw is the kind of one-off experience you treasure.
I was jolted awake as one of the boxes of filming equipment, which I was sharing my cabin with, crashed to the floor. I teased the curtain open and began watching the seemingly endless woods and frozen rivers roll past in the pastel dawn. It was a magical scene. I remember thinking this is why I never want to stop going out and directing films.
As a child, my ‘must-see’ television was anything presented by Michael Wood or James Burke. Michael Wood’s raw enthusiasm ‘In Search of the Dark Ages’ or James Burke’s brilliant connections in ‘The Day the Universe Changed’ didn’t help me pass exams but it did make history ‘click’ for me. They gave me a sense of the grand sweep of human time and left me wanting to find out more.
When I went to university the best lecturers had a similar knack of knitting history together and making you feel cleverer than you were. One of them was David Reynolds, whose lectures were structured like a gripping story, often with a thought-provoking twist at the end. David also had a wealth of anecdotes about the foibles of the 20th Century’s ‘great men’. You emerged from his lectures feeling like a privileged eavesdropper at a leader’s dinner party.
Twenty years, later, David and I are on that train from Moscow, making ‘World War Two: 1941 & the Man of Steel’, our ninth hour of television for the BBC.
As in other films we’ve made together, David and I worked at conveying both the big picture and telling detail. This account of Stalin’s war was never for us just a chronology; it was an analysis of how the West was lured into alliance with Stalin, an account of the Russian people’s suffering, partly through Vasily Grossman’s vivid war reporting and a meditation on the nature of evil.
We’d timed our filming trip to avoid the muddy ‘Rasputitsa’ thaw period, which halted Hitler’s marauding army for crucial weeks during 1941 and 1942.
We needn’t have worried. It was unseasonably cold and snow rolled in. It proved a great stroke of luck – we could shoot Moscow rail yards under a white shroud, track drifts blowing across the great battlefield at Borodino and film the soldiers of the 5th Motorized Rifle Brigade, a celebrated outfit in the ‘Great Patriotic War’, as they drilled and trained in a blizzard.
I remember the minus 10 temperatures and wind chill as being utterly miserable to work in. But, deep down, we also knew we were privileged to be there at a moment that could bring alive something of the truly wretched conditions German and Soviet soldiers endured in battle – something vivid that might connect with young viewers today, just as I connected with Michael Wood and James Burke thirty years ago, and leave them – hopefully - wanting to know more.
Photo: Filming 5th Motorized Rifle Brigade drill
- World War Two: 1941 and the Man of Steel (Russell Barnes for Barnes Hassid Productions) is nominated for Best Historical Documentary at Grierson 2012: The British Documentary Awards
