The postwar years, until Stalin’s death in 1953, were a cultural wasteland. Film production nearly ground to a halt; only nine films were made in 1950. The wave of denunciations and arrests known as the anti-cosmopolitan campaign roiled the cultural intelligentsia, particularly those who were Jewish such as Vertov, Trauberg, and Eisen-stein. Eisenstein’s precarious health was aggravated by the extreme tensions of the time and the disfavor that greeted the second part of Ivan the Terrible. He became the most famous casualty among filmmakers, dying of a heart attack in 1948 at the age of only fifty. Cold War conspiracy melodramas
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Movie still of a battle scene from Sergei Eisenstein’s classic Alexander Nevsky (1938).© BETTMANN/CORBIS dominated movie theaters (not unlike McCarthy era films in the United States a few years later), along with ever more extravagant panegyrics to Stalin. Georgian director Mikhail Chiaureli’s first ode to Stalin, The Vow (1946), was followed by The Fall of Berlin (1949), which Richard Taylor has aptly dubbed “the apotheosis of Stalin’s cult of Stalin.”
By the mid-1950s, filmmakers were confident that the Thaw-as Khrushchev’s relaxation of censorship was known-would last long enough for them to express long-dormant creativity. The move from public and political toward the private and personal became a hallmark of the period. Thaw pictures were appreciated not only at home, but also abroad, where they received numerous prizes at international film festivals. There was now a human face to the Soviet colossus. The greatest movies of the period rewrote the history of World War II, the Great Patriotic War. Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1958, signaling that Soviet cinema was once again on the world stage after nearly thirty years. Cranes is the story of a woman who betrays her lover, a soldier who is killed at the front, to marry his cousin, a craven opportunist. There is no upbeat ending, no neat resolution. The same can be said of Sergei Bon-darchuk’s The Fate of a Man and Grigory Chukhrai’s The Ballad of a Soldier (both 1959). In the former, a POW returns home to find his entire family dead; in the latter, a very young soldier’s last leave home to help his mother is movingly recorded.
A film that is often considered the last important movie of the Thaw also launched the career of the greatest film artist to emerge in postwar Soviet cinema. This was Ivan’s Childhood (1962, known in the United States as My Name Is Ivan), a stunMOTION PICTURES ning antiwar film that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The director was Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986). By the time Tarkovsky began work on Andrei Rublev in the mid- 1960s, Khrushchev had been ousted, and Leonid Brezhnev’s era of stagnation had begun. Cultural icon-oclasm was no longer tolerated, and Tarkovsky’s dystopian epic about medieval Russia’s greatest painter was not released in the USSR until 1971, although it won the International Film Critics’ prize at Cannes in 1969. Tarkovsky toiled defiantly in the 1970s to produce three more Soviet films, Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1980). He emigrated to Europe in 1984 and died of cancer two years later.
Filmmaking under Brezhnev was generally unremarkable, although two films, Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (1966) and Vladimir Menshov’s Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1979) each won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. The most interesting movies (such as Alexander Askoldov’s The Commissar, 1967) were shelved, not to be released until the late 1980s as part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glas-nost. Among the exceptions to the mundane fare were Larisa Shepitko’s tale of World War II collaboration, The Ascent (1976), and Lana Gogoberidze’s Several Interviews on Personal Questions (1979), which sensitively explored the drab, difficult lives of Soviet women.
The best-known director to have started his career during the Brezhnev era is Nikita Mikhalkov (b. 1945). Son of Sergei Mikhalkov, a Stalinist writer of children’s stories, the younger Mikhalkov first made a name for himself as an actor. Mik-halkov achieved his greatest successes in the 1970s and 1980s with his “heritage” films, elegiac recreations of Russian life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often adapted from literary classics, among them An Unfinished Piece for Player Piano (1977), Oblomov (1979), and Dark Eyes (1983).
RUSSIAN CINEMA IN TRANSITION, 1985-2000
When Gorbachev announced the advent of pere-stroika and glasnost in 1986, the Union of Cine-matographers stood at the ready. After a sweeping purge of the union’s aging and conservative bureaucracy, the maverick director Elem Klimov (b. 1933) took the helm. Although Klimov had made a number of movies under Brezhnev, he did not emerge as a major director until 1985, with the release of his stunning antiwar film Come and See. Under Klimov’s direction, the union began releasing the banned movies of the preceding twenty years, in effect rewriting the history of late Soviet cinema.
The film that most captured the public’s imagination in that tumultuous period was Georgian, not Russian. Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance (1984, released nationally in 1986) is a surrealistic black comedy-drama that follows the misdeeds of the Ab-uladze family, provided a scathing commentary on Stalinism. Although a difficult film designed to provoke rather than entertain, Repentance packed movie theaters and sparked a national debate about the legacy of the past and the complicity of the survivors.
Television also became a major venue for filmmakers. Gorbachev’s cultural policies encouraged publicistic documentaries that exposed either the evils of Stalin and his henchmen or the decay and degradation of contemporary Soviet life. Fiction films such as Little Vera (Vasily Pichul, 1988), In-tergirl (Pyotr Todorovsky, 1989), and Taxi Blues (Pavel Lungin, 1990) followed suit by telling seamy tales about the Soviet underclass.
The movie industry began to fragment even before the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Union of Cinematographers decentralized in mid-1990, and Goskino and Sovexportfilm, which provided central oversight over film production and distribution, had completely lost control by the end of 1990. The early 1990s saw the collapse of native film production in all the post-Soviet states. Centralization and censorship had long been the bane of the industry, but filmmakers had no idea how to raise money for their projects-and were even more baffled by being expected to turn a profit. Market demands became known as “commercial censorship.” Filmmakers also had to contend for the first time with competition from Hollywood, as second-rate American films flooded the market.
The Russian cinema industry began to rebound in the late 1990s. It now resembled other European cinemas quite closely, meaning that national production was carefully circumscribed, focusing on the art film market. Nikita Mikhalkov emerged the clear winner. By the turn of the century he became the president of the Russian Filmmakers’ Union, the president of the Russian Cultural Foundation, and the president of the only commercially successful Russian studio, TriTe. He established a fruitful partnership with the French company Camera One,
MOVEMENT FOR DEMOCRATIC REFORMS
which coproduced his movies and distributed them abroad. He took enormous pride in the fact that Burnt by the Sun, his 1995 exploration of the beginnings of the Great Terror, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture that year, only the third Russian-language film to have done so, and certainly the best.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, therefore, it seems that the glory days of Russian cinema are past. This past, however, has earned Russian and Soviet films and filmmakers an enduring place in the history of global cinema. See also: AGITPROP; ALEXANDROV, GRIGORY ALEXAN-DROVICH; BAUER, YEVGENY FRANTSEVICH; CHA-PAYEV, VASILY IVANOVICH; CULTURAL REVOLUTION; EISENSTEIN, SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH; MIKHALKOV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; ORLOVA, LYUBOV PETROVNA; SOCIALIST REALISM; TARKOVSKY, ANDREI ARSE-NIEVICH; THAW, THE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Horton, Andrew, and Brashinsky, Mikhail. (1992). The Zero Hour: Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kenez, Peter. (2001). Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin. London: I. B. Tau-ris. Lawton, Anna. (1992). Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time. New York: Cambridge University Press. Leyda, Jay. (1960). Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. London: Allen amp; Unwin. Taylor, Richard. (1979). The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1929. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Richard. (1998). Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 2nd rev. ed. London: I. B. Tauris. Taylor, Richard, and Christie, Ian, eds. (1988). The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tsivian, Yuri, comp. (1989). Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 1908-1919. Pordenone and London, 1989. Tsivian, Yuri. (1994). Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception. Friuli-Venezia: Edizioni Biblioteca dell’immagine; London: British Film Institute. Woll, Josephine. (2000). Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw. London: I. B. Tauris. Youngblood, Denise J. (1991). Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935. Austin: University of Texas Press. Youngblood, Denise J. (1992). Movies for
