Lifecycle & Stalingrad

This article first appeared in the Age, January 10, 2004

'He's a mad bastard,' says Claudia Karvan, before Samuel Johnson sets off on his 33 day Unicycle ride from Sydney to Melbourne to raise money for Canteen. She could be right - it has never been done before, and he had to give sperm to be frozen before he set off because of the potential damage to his bits.

Johnson's sister, Constance, got cancer when he was 11. As a kid with no mother (she'd died when he was one) and a father always at hospital, he had a pretty rough time. It was Canteen, an organization for young people living with cancer - either as patients or family members - that pulled him through. Until I watched Lifecycle: One man, One wheel and 1000 km, (Channel 10, tonight, 7.30pm) the show which documents this ride, I was suffering Samuel Johnson fatigue. My sympathy for his character, Evan, from The Secret Life of Us, has worn thin, and then there are all those ad voice overs.

However in the first few minutes of Lifecycle, Constance - now a healthy woman in her twenties - says that the ride was an obscure way of Johnson saying 'I always cared for you'. I watched her tears and pride in his batty (and successful) attempt at fundraising. It struck me then how madly heroic, and yes, moving, his journey is.

If Lifecycle shows us the best of humanity, the three part series, Stalingrad, which begins on SBS tonight (8.30pm) , shows us the worst of it. 27 Million Russians died during World War II and the Eastern Front saw fighting on a scale of unimaginable terror and brutality. The bloodiest and most savage battles took place at Stalingrad between August 1942 and January 1943.

Russian archives were opened for the first time to make Stalingad. The filmmakers were given access to numerous - and remarkable - letters from the front. The series features previously unseen archival film, including private 8-mm footage, filmed by German soldiers inside the Kessell (the name given to the egg-shaped line of defence thirty miles wide and twenty miles deep). There are brutally honest eyewitness accounts of survivors on both sides. The stories of German wives and mothers at home are also told, as these women come to understand that the senseless deaths of more than 170,000 German soldiers had been spin-doctored into acts of heroism.

Despite such remarkable sources, I have seen better documentaries on wartime Russia. SBS screened a fabulous documentary, Stalin and the Betrayal of Leningrad in October last year, which felt richer and more engaging than this. Of course to tell a story of slaughter, by weapons, weather, and man, is inevitably a depressing job. To be reminded again of the amount of destruction caused by the insatiable egos of Stalin and Hitler is never pleasurable. But for anyone interested in Twentieth Century History, and War History in particular, the period this series documents is a crucial one and Stalingrad is well worth watching.

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