ON THE SEVEN SEAS

5/10

Auf allen Meeren : Austria/Switzerland/Germany 2001/2 : Johannes Holzhausen : 95 mins

A decent editor could make a fine hour-long documentary out of On the Seven Seas, an intriguing but sluggish-paced slice of current political history. “For many years,” we’re told, the aircraft carried Kiev “embodied the strength of the Soviet navy,” but now that there’s no such thing as a Soviet navy, nearly all of its former warships have been sold off. Some went to foreign powers, some to scrap, some to become floating theme-parks in the far east. The Kiev was the biggest of the lot, and Holzhausen traces her career, plus the subsequent lives of her crew and officers as they made the painful adjustment to a startling new world order. He pieces together interviews with the surviving sailors, evocative archive footage of the Kiev in action, and episodes from her final journey, down around Norway and Africa to her eventual resting-place – though he tantalisingly withholds the Kiev’s fate until the very last seconds.

Apart from one surprisingly funny interlude in which the Kiev is boarded by nervy Norwegian coastguards, the tone is very stiff-upper-lip: the prevailing mood is one of dignified neutrality. Holzhausen doesn’t impose a particular viewpoint, instead building the former crewmen’s statements into an oral-history record. Seven Seas is like a more sombre cousin of the Norwegian fishermens’-choir documentary Cool and Crazy: both films convey the strong sense of shared history that binds together communities under siege from both the elements and from the sharp winds of economic change. Both films, however, also indulge in some ill-advised ‘staged’ sections – Seas starts on a clumsy note, as an old man asks his grandson if he wants to hear a story about a great ship. Holzhausen then apparently forgets all about this framing device, as we never see the man and boy again.

This intro is one of numerous sections that cries out for the editor’s scissors – there are several songs in the film (one of the ex-crewmen has become an evangelical Christian), and while these aren’t without interest, that doesn’t mean we need to hear them all in their entirety. Decisions like these are what make Seven Seas feel quite often like hard work. But the effort pays dividends: this is a fascinating, unique story, carved from the flinty rockface of our times.