Before the Fall

Soviet Cinema in the Gorbachev Years

Anna Lawton

• Publisher: New Academia
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781122848503
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

An expanded edition of Kinoglasnost that examines the fascinating world of Soviet cinema during the yeas of glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s. In Before the Fall, Anna Lawton shows how the reforms that shook the foundations of the Bolshevik state and affected economic and social structures have been reflected in the film industry. A new added chapter provides a commentary on the dramatic changes that marked the beginning of democracy in Russia. Soviet cinema has always been closely connected with national political reality, challenging the conventions of bourgeois society and educating the people. In this pioneering study, Lawton discusses the restructuring of the main institutions governing the industry; the abolition of censorship; the emergence of independent production and distribution systems; the dismantling of the old bureaucratic structures and the implementation of new initiatives. She also surveys the films that remained unscreened for decades for political reasons, films of the new wave that look at the past to search out the truth, and those that record current social ills or conjure up a disquieting image of the future. "What makes Kinoglasnost pre-eminent among current studies of the subject is that sustained attention Lawton pays to changes in the formal organization of Soviet cinema and in the cinema industry." —Julian Graffy, Sight and Sound "The author constructs a complex, multilayered narrative of a steady and significant movement toward radical change in Soviet society, an account of the growing anxiety and the hope experienced by Russian filmmakers and the intelligentsia." —Ludmila Z. Pruner, Slavic and East European Journal

Part I

The Melting of the Ice

1

The Waning of the Brezhnev Era

The least stagnating art

The year 1976 was a middle point in the Brezhnev administration and marked the beginning of its decline. The Ninth Five-Year Plan (1971-1975) had produced rather disappointing results. Designed as the first plan to provide for a faster growth in the consumer sector, rather than in the producer, it projected a dramatic rise in the standard of living through a combination of scientific and technological innovations, greater managerial efficiency, and increased labor productivity.

Several factors intervened to thwart those optimistic goals. The automation of factories and industries depended to a great extent on the steady input of new technology and expertise from the West. However, there were already signs that détente would not last forever. Even more damaging to the process of modernization was internal opposition from conservative economists and Party ideologues. Unable to come to terms with revisions of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine, they defeated the Kosygin reforms of 1965, and subsequently fought against any deviations from pure Communist orthodoxy. They denounced such innovations as systems analysis, economic forecasting, and decentralized decision-making, and opposed the Plan’s assignment of priority to the consumer sector. A passive and corrupt managerial class was eager to defer to the conservative view in order to avoid responsibilities and unnecessary stress.

To worsen the situation, the country suffered two major crop failures, the first in 1972 and the second in 1975. Grain imports alone could not make up for the food shortages, and the standard of living which had been slowly improving in the early seventies took a turn for the worse. Even before the latest crop disaster the average family spent 40 to 50 percent of its income on food. After it, prices rose and the state had to intervene with massive subsidies in order to stifle public discontent. However, the revenues from energy exports temporarily compensated for the mismanagement of the nation’s economy. The negative results of two decades of government passivity became painfully obvious in the early 1980s and inflicted an unseen but mortal blow on the Party and state gerontocracy. But, for the time being, the old guard still held firmly to their key positions.

The XXV Congress of the CPSU, held in February 1976, did not offer any new perspectives. On that occasion Brezhnev criticized some failures in the economy, but found many achievements to praise and restated the same goals for the next Five-Year Plan, with an even more optimistic forecast. He stressed the need for an immediate restructuring of the economy and exhorted scientific and technical personnel at all levels to improve efficiency and quality. But the guidelines he issued did not translate into action.

Younger leaders of the new generation were needed to carry out the plan. They were slowly rising through the ranks and impatiently awaiting their day. Meanwhile, more of Brezhnev’s cronies were appointed to the Central Committee and the Politburo. The consequences were disastrous for the political, economic, and cultural life of the nation. As the ailing leadership clung stubbornly to their chairs and to each other, refusing to relinquish power and demanding order and stability, the granting of privileges to an extended family became a common practice and corruption was rampant. During his last years, a direct ratio can be observed between Brezhnev’s failing health and his accumulation of honors and titles. This was apparently an attempt to sustain the leader’s prestige which was rapidly fading, both nationally as well as internationally.3

After the honeymoon with the Nixon and Ford administrations which allowed the Soviet Union to improve modestly its standard of living and to rise to an international position of strength, Brezhnev clashed with Carter over Soviet policies in Afghanistan and Poland. Ratification of the SALT II treaty by the US Senate was suspended, the American athletes boycotted the Moscow Olympic Games, and the Soviet Union closed the doors to Jewish emigration. The era of détente came to an end and was replaced by a renewed Cold War syndrome that plunged to severely low temperatures with the incoming Reagan administration. The deterioration of international relations was paralleled by a domestic atmosphere of cultural reaction and rapid economic decline.

The general political trend of the period was reflected in the administrative structure of the cinema industry as well as in film production and distribution. From the time cinema was nationalized, in 1919, by a Lenin decree, film production and distribution had been regulated by a government institution, the State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino),4 which gradually gained complete control over the film industry. In the seventies, Goskino suffered from the widespread national epidemic of bureaucratic growth. Its inflated cadres, securely entrenched behind their desks, ran the film industry as a state chancery. They dealt with the artistic sector as they would with an unfortunate nuisance. The newly appointed head of Goskino, Filipp Ermash (1972-1986), came from the Central Committee’s Department of Culture and enjoyed high connections in the Politburo as a relative of Andrei Kirilenko, one of Brezhnev’s closest personal and political associates.

Brezhnev’s foreign and domestic policies had brought about a measure of material comfort, especially perceptible toward the middle of the decade. Mounting corruption in the higher echelons and an increasing preoccupation with material goods trickled down to the middle and working classes.5 The current atmosphere favored the breeding of a consumer mentality. The public taste in entertainment turned “bourgeois.” Goskino was quick to exploit this conjuncture. Under Ermash’s leadership, the Soviet film industry moved decidedly in the direction of commercial films which met the public demand and increased profits for the Soviet government. The educational function of cinema, however, could not be neglected. Conveniently, the commercial genres were labeled “popular.” Unlike the “elite” films that indulge in aestheticism, popular films were supposed to sustain orthodox ideology and socialist values. This combination found its most successful expression in the film that crowned the decade, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1980), and which was hailed in equal measure by Party ideologues, Soviet audiences, and, ironically, the Hollywood Oscar prize givers. But most of the time commercial considerations worked against not only artistic endeavors but also ideology. Toward the end of his tenure, Ermash was despised by the film artists and disapproved of by the ideologues.

Cinema in the Soviet Union had been for decades the main filler of leisure time. As television became available to a larger number of the population, movie theater attendance registered a sharp decline. While in the late sixties ticket sales were close to 5 billion a year, in 1977 they had dropped to 4.2 billion, with a per capita sale of 16.4,6 still sizable figures when compared to those in any Western country. Very revealing of the public taste is the breakdown of the attendance figures per film, which show that a mere 15 percent of all Soviet feature films released in a given year (the yearly output was approximately 150 films) account for 80 percent of all ticket sales. A comparison of the already mentioned Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, which drew 75 million viewers over the first twelve months of its circulation, to Andrei Tarkovsky’s philosophical parable Stalker, which was seen by a mere 3 million over the same period, shows where the people’s preferences lay. True, Stalker did not enjoy the support of Goskino and had a very limited circulation. Nevertheless, there are indications that it would not have fared well in any case. Research conducted at the All-Union State Institute of Cinema (VGIK) ranked some common film features in the order they appealed to the masses:

1. contemporary theme

2. Russian production (as opposed to other republics)

3. adaptation of a popular book

4. fast tempo

5. continuity (no flashbacks)

6. simplicity

7. spectacular (special effects, crowd scenes, and costumes)

8. active and attractive leading characters

9. appealing title7

By adding sex and violence and substituting “American” for “Russian” in point #2 this list could be used to characterize most of US box office successes of the past decades. In fact, Ermash was known to be a secret admirer of the Hollywood motion picture industry.

Thus, Goskino promoted the production of films that suited the public taste. In order to do so it needed the cooperation of the film workers. This meant the Filmmakers Union, which supposedly represented the interests of the workers in the field. However, the Union supported its members only nominally. In effect, throughout the seventies and up to 1986, the Union was burdened by a very conservative and passive leadership, which did not stand up for creative freedom and decentralized decision-making.

Lack of support from the Union was reflected in the studios where the actual creative process took place. Of all the studios of the 15 republics, Mosfilm was, and still is, by far the largest and most prestigious, followed by Lenfilm (in Leningrad), and at a considerable distance, the Georgian, Ukrainian, Armenian, and Kirghizian studios. The production of the Baltic republics was negligible.8 In the seventies, both the head of Mosfilm, Nikolay Sizov, and his deputy in charge of screenwriting, Leonid Nekhoroshev, were well regarded by the filmmakers as rather sensitive intellectuals, authors of several books. They were also well connected politically. Sizov had been a Party functionary and was currently a member of the Moscow City Council and a deputy chairman of Goskino. Nekhoroshev was a graduate of the Social Science Academy of the Central Committee. Both were seasoned politicians not devoid of intellectual sophistication. Mosfilm therefore managed to satisfy the requirements of Goskino while giving elbow room to the most creative directors. In fact, besides the bulk of commercial films, known as “grayish” films from an aesthetic as well as a political point of view, Mosfilm produced a good number of stimulating pictures. However, the best pictures were not always released, and if they were, only in a few prints.

The tendency toward the mass genres enlarged the traditional repertoire with a considerable number of melodramas, comedies, detective stories, science-fiction films, and musicals. Because of their poor quality, however, the majority of these films were not well attended. The audiences demanded light genres, but they had reached an average level of sophistication (at least in the major urban areas) and would not put up with facile plots and sloppy techniques. Often, but not always, the films that rose above mediocrity were also the most successful with the public.

Slice-of-life genres, historical dramas, literary classics

One trend revived from the repertoire of the late twenties/early thirties became predominant: the bytovoy film. The term can be approximately translated as “slice-of-life” film. These are stories about contemporary society, individual lives and relations, current problems, and human values. The bytovoy film could be anything from comedy to “problematic melodrama.”9

The preoccupation with economic growth and reforms was reflected in a long series of films concerned with factory problems — the “production movies.” The prototype of the trend, many times imitated but hardly ever matched, was The Bonus (1975), by Sergei Mikaelian.10 It marked a new approach to the worker and the work place. This film does not follow the traditional socialist realist model where enthusiastic shock-brigades overcome the challenges of saboteurs, fight against all odds with superhuman strength and moral stamina, overfulfill the plan, and are decorated as heroes of socialist labor. In The Bonus there are no farfetched dramatic situations, no heroics. Most of the action unfolds in one room during a meeting of a construction enterprise’s Party committee. The only dramatic device that gives the screenplay the tension necessary to sustain the action is the conflict which arises between workers and management when a construction team refuses to accept its yearly bonus.

The situation is odd in a society accustomed to accepting benefits from above. What is the workers’ motivation? The screenwriter, Alexander Gelman, has a solid reputation in the theater as a writer of psychological plays with popular appeal. In The Bonus the reasons behind the workers’ behavior turn out to be complex and engaging in their apparent simplicity. The construction team refuses the bonus because they feel cheated. The workers think that bad management and poor work organization were responsible for low productivity and personal financial losses which were not adequately compensated by the bonus. However, the workers’ motivations are not totally materialistic. The token bonus becomes a symbol of the hypocrisy and concealment which surround the country’s problems, hinder economic growth, and thwart the possibility of healthy social development. The film does not provide a solution to the problem, but it raises the viewer’s awareness of a life based on complacency and devoid of spiritual values. It also suggests that it is the people’s responsibility to denounce the current situation both in their own interest and in the interest of the nation.

The confrontation takes place between the brigade leader, Potapov, and three executives of the construction enterprise, while the Party representatives preside over the meeting. It is clear from the outset who is the villain and who is the hero. The attribution of roles, however, was bound to generate uneasiness. This perhaps explains why the film’s authors, although breaking important ground in this direction, stopped short of carrying the denunciation of management to the very top. The main villains are the senior engineer, a weak, servile man with an unctuous smile, and the assistant director, a ruthless careerist whose main pleasure in life is to carry out the director’s orders. However, the director himself is not devoid of redeeming qualities. A pragmatist versed in the art of compromise, he comes to the meeting with the self-assurance of an experienced negotiator convinced of an easy victory. But Potapov’s tough stance and unshakable convictions make it difficult for the director to score with his usual ease. Actually, the values of youth, which had been dulled by the requirements of a managerial career, are reawakened, and allow him to make a moral choice.

On the other side, fighting for truth and justice, stands the brigade leader Potapov. No knight in a white armor, he is a stocky middle-aged man, slightly overweight, with a round, good-natured face and a bald pate. The role was performed, brilliantly, by Evgeny Leonov, better known to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I The Melting of the Ice
• Part II Spring Waters and Mud
• Part III Post-Soviet Cinema
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index