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Soviet Union [USSR] Cinema
A long tradition of classic and monumental films created by
film makers such as Sergei Eisenstein served the regime's intent of
portraying a strong socialist society
(see Soviet Union USSR - Society and Culture in the 1920s
, ch. 2). The party dictated the themes and issues that
Soviet film makers would depict.
In the late 1980s, the film industry underwent dramatic changes
as the CPSU allowed film makers to analyze social dilemmas and
propose remedies. From 1986 to 1988, three important developments
occurred within the film making leadership. First, film makers
banded together to remove conservative bureaucrats from the Union
of Cinematographers and to replace them with younger, bolder, and
more innovative directors. Second, these changes led to the
formation of the Disputes Committee within the union headed by an
important, more open-minded Pravda critic in order to
examine approximately sixty films that had been "withheld" without
any proper justification. Included in these prohibited films were
three directed by the new head of the Union of Cinematographers,
Elem Klimov. Third, the official state organ controlling cinema,
Goskino, was forced to yield to an ever-increasing number of union
demands for greater cinematic freedom. Previously, film makers who
wanted to produce films were required to please Goskino and the
censors. Box office success was unimportant. In the late 1980s,
film makers won the right to have their films judged on their
merits. As a result, success for film makers meant producing
money-making ventures. They no longer required the full
professional and financial support of Goskino.
The CPSU Central Committee also reduced the power and influence
of the Ministry of Culture's Main Repertory Administration (Glavnoe
repertuaknoe upravlenie--Glavrepertkom), the official film-release
control apparatus. By the end of 1986, many previously banned or
withheld films were showing in movie theaters. Yet as of 1988,
Glavrepertkom continued to wield substantial censorship influence,
with its reach extending to theaters, circuses, concerts,
phonograph records, and general musical productions.
One of the most adventuresome film makers was a seasoned film
professional, Iulii Raizman. Born in 1903, Raizman survived many
tribulations during the oppressive eras of Soviet film making. He
poignantly explored such themes as family trauma, societal
immorality, materialism and corruption, and economic deprivation.
His Private Life (1982) explores the ordeals of a factory
manager who, when forced into retirement, realizes that he has
sacrificed time with his family. A Time of Wishes (1984)
examines how women endure their inferior lot in society. Raizman
has gained such renown, particularly as head of Mosfilm studios in
Moscow, that he has been able to initiate the production of
progressive films and has supported efforts of younger, aspiring,
and creative film makers to voice their concerns through their
works.
The relaxation of controls over film making has also permitted
the release of numerous films that had been restricted for many
years. Four such prominent films released were Klimov's
Agoniia and Come and See, Aleksei German's My
Friend Ivan Lapshin, and Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance.
Known in the West as Rasputin, Klimov's Agoniia
presents a more balanced view of Tsar Nicholas II than that
historically taught in the school systems, and it also contains
religious overtones. The film maintains an unusual silence
regarding the Bolshevik Revolution. Klimov completed Agoniia
in 1975, but it was not released until 1985. In Come and
See, Klimov captures the horrors of war from a typical Soviet
perspective, that of destruction symbolized not only by the Nazi
genocide but also by the premonition of nuclear holocaust.
The other two films deal with some of the horrors of the Stalin
period. German's My Friend Ivan Lapshin, which required
three years for approval after it had been completed, contains an
investigation said to depict innocent people being persecuted
during Stalin's reign of terror. Abuladze's Repentance
created a stir throughout the Soviet Union as well as the outside
world. Written in 1982, produced in 1984, and approved for public
viewing in 1987, Repentance concentrates on the crimes of
the Stalin era and the evil involved in the arrests of innocent
people, some of whom were later executed. The dictator portrayed
supposedly is based on a number of evil men in recent history, the
most important of whom are Stalin and his secret police chief,
Lavrenty Beria. Echoes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini are
also evident in the dictator's appearance. Not only was the film
viewed as an overt attack on Stalinism but it also was intended to
shock Soviet citizens and raise their political consciousness to
prevent a recurrence of these horrors. Evtushenko has likened the
film to "the cultural event of Gorbachev's cultural thaw, just as
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich represented the spiritual acme of the Khrushchev
era." As Gorbachev stressed in a speech on the seventieth
anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in a 1987 Central Committee
plenum, such films are more openly watched in a society encouraged
to reassess itself and ensure that "no forgotten names and no blank
pages . . . of the years of industrialization and collectivization"
be left untouched.
Data as of May 1989
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