In the Soviet Union, they like movies, too–to the tune of some 4 billion tickets sold every year, according to official figures. Approximately 120 Soviet features are produced each year, and many more are imported from the eastern bloc countries and the west. Filmgoers read about their favorite stars in the monthly ”Soviet Screen” (which has a circulation of 2 million), or watch the Russian equivalent of ”At the Movies,” called ”Kino Panorama,”
on the state television network.
Chicagoans will get a glimpse of the Soviet cinema beginning Thursday, as a 14-program series opens at the Film Center of the Art Institute.
Soviet films haven`t always enjoyed a particularly high prestige abroad. Too often, they seem stiff, literary, and didactic–too narrowly focused on moral, economic, or ideological issues. In his recently published book
”Behind the Soviet Screen” (Ardis, $25), emigre Soviet film writer Val S. Golovskoy describes a system of production schizophrenically divided between crass commercialism and the propagation of official doctrine. The conflicting goals of Goskino–as the state film industry is called–go a long way toward explaining the dryness of much of the Soviet output.
On the one hand, movies are an important source of income for the Soviet government, returning huge profits (very little of which are returned to the film industry) on relatively small investments. Income from theatrical films is enough, alone, to support the entire state television system, and in order to continue that income, the directors of Goskino have come to concentrate on broadly popular, mass entertainments. The most popular genre in the Soviet Union is melodrama, as exemplified by the turgid but hugely successful 1980
”Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears” (a film that went on, somewhat mysteriously, to win the American Academy Award for best foreign language film). There is very little risk-taking on this level of production: These films must play just as well in Moscow as in the tiniest provincial villages. On the other hand, film has been considered the most powerful of the government`s propagandistic tools since the days of Lenin. Golovskoy describes an airtight system of controls–strict supervision by party and Goskino officials at each stage of writing, filming and editing; powerful review committees at every level from the local government to the Central Committee; and a vast apparatus known as ”Repertory Control” that literally hand checks every frame of every print of every film approved for release. Films accused of ”ideological errors” are re-cut, released only in certain sections of the country, or simply shelved. But it is not enough that films be free of dissident opinions: movies are also expected to focus debate on issues deemed of current interest–a 1980 directive offered ”agriculture” and ”the working class” as ripe subjects–and instill correct attitudes in the Soviet citizenry. There is little room for personal expression in a program like this.
But lately there have been some signs of change. This is the era, as proclaimed by Mikhail Gorbachev, of glasnost–”openness.” And as Gorbachev`s efforts to let some fresh air into previously closed sections of Soviet society have progressed, there have been some significant alterations in the structure of the film industry.
In a stormy meeting last May, the controversial film director Elem Klimov was elected first secretary of the Union of Film Workers, replacing the compliant functionary who had headed the powerful professional organization since its founding in 1965. Klimov himself had been a victim of censorship
(his ”Agonia”–released here in a cut version as ”Rasputin”–sat on the shelf for 10 years), and one of his first acts was to form a commission to review and press for the release of banned films. So far, the union has secured the release of Alexei German`s ”Trial on the Road” (banned for 13 years), Gleb Panfilov`s ”Theme” (8 years), and Tenghiz Abuladze`s comparatively recent ”Confession” (2 years), which treats the heretofore unbreachable subject of Stalin`s mass purges.
On December 28, the official Soviet news agency, Tass, reported the resignation of Filipp Yermash, head of Goskino since 1973. It was Yermash, an outspoken admirer of Hollywood methods, who was the architect of Goskino`s
”commercial” strategy; his dismissal has been interpreted as a shift in policy back to a cinema of quality.
”A Salute to the Soviet Republics” at the Art Institute is the first tangible sign of cinematic glasnost to reach these shores. The series, programmed by Jytte Jensen of New York`s Museum of Modern Art in close collaboration with Soviet officials, features work by several directors who have run into difficulties with the Soviet authorities, as well as a survey of films produced in the Soviet Union`s so-called ”ethnic republics”–such places as Armenia, Tadjikstan, Turkmenia, and Kazakhstan, which lie outside the dominant Russian culture. These ethnic films have, on the few occasions they have been shown outside of the USSR, traditionally been dubbed into Russian; here, they will be seen for the first time in their original languages.
After an opening session on Thursday of recent Soviet animation, the series begins its feature section on Friday with, fittingly, Klimov`s 1982
”Farewell,” a powerful, highly stylized film that–as a reflection of the kind of filmmaking Klimov can be expected to support–does indeed promise a new era in the Soviet cinema.
”Farewell” was written and prepared by Klimov`s wife, the filmmaker Larissa Shepitko, who died shortly after filming had begun. Set in a tiny island village scheduled to be flooded into oblivion when a new hydroelectric dam opens, the film presents a familiar conflict between traditional values and the demands of industrial progress; what makes the film surprising is both its point of view–the peasants are depicted as victims of a remote, unfeeling authority–and the lyrical intensity with which the drama is expressed. Wildly passionate, the film practically swoons on the screen, lost in delirious imagery and ever-mounting climaxes.
There are three main characters: a grandmother, whose connection to her small patch of land has an almost pagan force (at one point, she is seen incanting a prayer to the sun), her thoroughly modernized grandson, and, caught between, her middle-aged son, Pinegin, a village leader charged with supervising the island`s evacuation. His duties include the leveling of all the island`s existing structures, and the film is punctuated by images of ancient wooden houses bursting into angry yellow flame. Near the end, the grandmother prepares for the burning of her own home by cleaning it meticulously from top to bottom, an elaborate ritual gesture that contributes to the film`s pressing sense of apocalyptic spirituality.
If the stylization of ”Farewell” pushes the Soviet aesthetic of
”socialist realism” to its absolute limit, the unbridled abstraction of
”The Legend of Suram Fortress” (Friday and Jan. 18) leaves it in smouldering ruins. The film represents the rehabilitation of director Sergei Paradjanov, who, after making two highly regarded films in the `60s, was imprisoned in the `70s on charges of ”homosexualism.” ”Suram Fortress”
takes the form of a demented historical pageant, recounting an ancient legend (of a prince`s son sealed in the walls of a fortress to ensure its strength) through a series of static but ravishing tableaux. The film`s radicalism is not in its subject but in its style, a total rejection of 20th- Century standards in favor of a medieval sense of flattened space and elaborate symbolism.
An example of the Soviet ethnic cinema, Melis Abzalov`s Uzbekistani comedy ”The Revolt of the Daughters-in-Law” (Jan. 30 and Feb. 1) has little cinematic interest but stands as an intriguing symptom of changing ideological pressures. Mama (played as a solid block of humorless resolve by stage actress Tursana Djafarova) rules as an absolute middle-eastern matriarch over her household of seven sons, their wives, and twenty children. But the newest daughter-in-law, a dusky 20-year-old beauty, has some more up-to-date ideas:
Donning her white leotard, she leads her suffering sisters in a hip-grinding variation on the Jane Fonda Workout, a display that Mama, inevitably, finds
”brazen.” Through the dialogue, Mama is linked to the Soviet bureaucracy
(her nickname is ”The Central Planning Committee”), and the film seems to be taking the side of youth in pleading for more individual rights. But Abzalov is reluctant to relinquish Mama completely, and he gleefully depicts the chaos that results when Mama goes on strike, leaving the young women to their own selfish fractiousness.
For the last decade or so, many of the most interesting Soviet films have come from the western republic of Georgia–a bit of extra freedom seems to reign there, perhaps because the film industry came under the personal protection of Georgian party chief Eduard Shevardnadze, who is now Gorbachev`s foreign minister. ”Blue Mountains,” directed by Eldar Shengelaya, is one of the real pleasures of the Film Center series, a droll anti-bureaucratic satire that also displays a fine formal intelligence.
”Blue Mountains” is the title of a manuscript a young writer has submitted to a publishing house. As the twelve original copies of the manuscript slowly disappear, unread, into the bowels of the sprawling organization, and the seasons shift through fall, winter, spring, and summer, Shengelaya depicts a society slowly collapsing under the weight of its own inertia–a collapse that becomes literal as a small crack in an office ceiling spreads, unchecked, until it brings down the entire building. The film is structured as a symphony of running gags, as the dozens of characters repeat the same lines, the same gestures, and the same habitual actions each time they`re encountered; the comedy, and much of the satiric point, comes from the absolute inflexibility of the characters` behavior, all of whom have mastered the fine art of remaining frenetically busy while accomplishing nothing at all.
For information on showtimes and the other films in the series, call the Film Center at 443-3737.
