The Last Letter (2002) by Frederick Wiseman + What Vasily Grossman and Life & Fate mean today

Show Notes:

This week, Cameron dives into Frederick Wiseman’s 2002 film “The Last Letter,” a dramatization of one chapter of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate: the final letter Anna Semionova writes her son, Viktor Shtrum, from a Jewish ghetto.

We’ll get into how Wiseman adapts this troubling, poignant chapter into film, why I think this chapter is the best encapsulation of Grossman’s ideas in Life and Fate, and some thoughts on why he remains so provocative today. 

Quick note: At one point in this episode I misspeak and say that the Vlasovite Russian Liberation Army was entirely Russian, which was not the case. It was primarily made of of Russian former Red Army soldiers, but did include Soviet defectors of other ethnicities more broadly.

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

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