A week or two ago I ran across a full length movie on YouTube called the Magical Voyage of Sinbad. To make a long (and likely boring) story shorter, it was so strange that I did a bit of research on where this movie came from and when it was made. The movie was made in the USSR in 1953 under the original name of Sadko.
This movie wasn’t originally about Sinbad, and the fact that it seemed to me to be based far too much on Baltic myths and legends, as well as being cast with only blue eyed, flaxen haired, bearded Scandinavians struck me with a sense of cognitive dissonance while watching it. This movie seemed to take on the character of what many modern mashups have become, that is, it was a Russian movie based upon a theatrical presentation of some old Baltic myths and legends (it has a Rimsky Korsakov score!), then there is another layer of USSR propaganda wherein ‘Sinbad’ tries to foment a workers revolution against the local property owners (who are presented as Asian looking and craven in their actions…hmmm). The next layer is the re-cut version form American International films which added an English soundtrack, and smothered the whole movie with Sinbad references.
The net result is a sort of slow motion train wreck…it is so strange, in so many levels that you can’t take your eyes from the screen. There are plenty of movies out there that are so transcendentally lousy that they draw you to them. This movie isn’t one of them, it is too strange to be merely bad, and may serve to be a worthwhile tool to better understand post modernism as well as revisionism in almost any cultural endeavor.
Sadko
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046264
Садко
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadko_(film)
