Love in the Time of Revolution THE POLITICAL AND THE PERSONAL IN DOCTOR ZHIVAGO
‘The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it.’ This line is spoken by commander Pasha Antipov (Tom Courtenay) to Dr Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) after the latter, a poet, has been captured. This could be true; Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965) tells an epic tale of political across a country. a film that is very much about ‘the personal life’ – that is, how to live one’s own while struggling through war and revolution. In this case, the conflict in question is the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, and the abovementioned line – in reference to poetry and intimacy – is key to the film, if not its main preoccupation.
Doctor Zhivago belongs to a diverse subgenre of epics that set a love story against a historical backdrop of war, trauma or disruption. Other films in this category include They Died with Their Boots On (Raoul Walsh, 1941), Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) and, more recently, Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Works such as these present the personal lives of their characters on the same level as history, permitting both to exist at once.
Taking liberties with history
As Sharif has stated, was ‘one of the last epic movies produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [MGM]’. The studio had made some incredible successes in its time, including two 1939 Victor Fleming pictures, and (the latter through a distribution deal with Selznick International Pictures). But stood out; critic Judith Shatnoff noted in a 1966 review that, in its first six months of release, the film had ‘supposedly yielded the biggest box-office gross in MGM history – bigger than [William Wyler, 1959]’. Film scholar‘made [Lean] more money than all of his other films put together’.
