Obyknovennyy fashizm (1965)

Romm asks how Hitlerian fascism could have come about. In sixteen chapters, Romm seeks answers to the question of what leads people to embrace fascism and even become murderers. From the outset, the film suggests Romm’s distinctive approach to the subject of fascism, beginning with a loose sequence of children’s drawings: a cheerful tomcat, a hungry tomcat, a cunning tomcat, a sad lion, and a bear. These are followed by footage of parents and their children, and of students in Warsaw, Moscow, and Berlin. The thought expressed by these images is: “Everyone sees the world a little differently, but everyone is human.” The idyllic scene is abruptly interrupted by a gunshot, and a photograph appears showing a Wehrmacht soldier shooting a woman who is holding her child in her arms. The camera cuts back to a child looking solemnly into the camera; the child symbolically represents the question of what can make a person so cruel. This question runs throughout the film, which attempts to find an answer through various images, including mass rallies and speeches by the Nazis and fascists. Excerpts from Nazi propaganda films are also shown, often accompanied by ironic commentary from the director. At the end of the film, the “capitalist profiteers of war” and the fascists of the time are shown: fascist movements in the United States, South America, and Europe. The final sequence shows children, in whose hands the future of humanity lies.