Slave of Love dramatizes the end of a pre-Soviet film star, Olga Voznesenskaya (inspired by the great Vera Kholodnaya). A corrupt and decadent bourgeois structure is maintained upon her "slavery"-she is an icon who pacifies with fantasy the real struggle of the masses. But her role is ambivalently one of love, a desire to give the public a genuine escape from their lives, and she wholly accepts their adoration. She learns, however, of another path film may take, that of Vertov and pravda. It is film's uncanny tendency to witness, to see clearly life's ambiguities without yielding to pleasure or suffering; Mikhalkov reminds us of the ironic, enlivening power of watching that infuses even the making of a film with excitement, or that may rally a collective gaze toward revolt. Olga's lover is killed for his documentary filmmaking, and it is through witnessing his death that Olga is finally enslaved-to this memory, and to a faith in an unknown future. -Ryan DeRosa