EASTERN EUROPE AND THE USSR

Eastern Europe: From Refom to Revolution

“It is time to relegate to the archives the postulates of the cold war, when Europe was viewed as an arena of confrontation divided into ‘spheres of influence.’ . . . Any interference in internal affairs and any attempts to restrict the sovereignty of states—either friends and allies or anyone else—are inadmissible.”9 These remarks, made by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in June 1989, went beyond the Soviet platitudes about the independence of its satellites. Gorbachev’s glasnost policy included a greater degree of self-determination for the eastern European countries.

In the months before and after Gorbachev’s speech, these countries astonished the world—and Gorbachev himself—by throwing off their governments. Throughout 1989, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania cast out their Communist leaders and demanded democracy and economic reform along capitalist lines. Joyous crowds, gathering from all over Europe, tore down the Berlin Wall. Less than two years later, an aborted coup against Gorbachev triggered the collapse of the Communist party in the Soviet Union itself.

Twenty years before, few would have predicted such a dramatic death for eastern European communism. The 1968 Prague Spring had been aborted by an invasion of Soviet troops (p. 553), and all hopes of democracy seemed stilled. Poland, Hungary, and some other eastern countries pacified their citizens with economic reforms and boosts in the standard of living that suggested that “socialist consumerism” had finally arrived.

Yet the prosperity of eastern Europe was artificial, sustained by price controls. OPEC’s 1973 oil-price increase, along with domestic shortfalls in agriculture and consumer goods, led to the beginning of discontent. “A spectre is haunting Eastern Europe,” wrote Vaclav Havel in 1979, “the spectre of what is called in the west ‘dissent.’"10 New forces for change—labor unions, nationalist groups, and even religious bodies—began to chip away at the Communist regimes.

Velvet Revolutions and National Cinemas The most decisive events took place in Poland. During 1976 and 1977, the government’s attempt to raise fixed prices was met by a rash of strikes. In 1980, more strikes erupted when thousands of workers occupied the shipyards of Gdansk. With the aid of the Catholic Church, Lech Walesa and other workers founded a new union, Solidarity. Solidarity rapidly became a kind of popular front, claiming that it was working to turn Poland into a “self-governing republic.” The regime responded by outlawing Solidarity and declaring martial law. Leaders of Solidarity were arrested, and the organization went underground. When Gorbachev announced in 1985 that the Soviet government would not sponsor an invasion of a sovereign nation, the Polish government began negotiations with Solidarity. Eventually, in the summer of 1989 in open elections, Solidarity won a stunning victory over Communist incumbents and Walesa became president of the new Poland.

Popular movements toward liberalization emerged in Hungary and Czechoslovakia as well. In Yugoslavia and other Balkan States, the collapse of communism was accelerated by new leaders who played on nationalistic feelings. The failures of eastern Europe’s planned economies made people eager to move toward democracy, free - or mixed-market economies, and access to agricultural produce, modern housing, and up-do-date consumer goods. The “velvet revolutions” of 1989 were partly responses to the inability of communism to deliver social services and to guarantee citizens a modern lifestyle.

Political freedom, however, eventually hurt film production. East European cinema, galvanized by growing dissent after the mid-1970s, was battered by the economic crises and political upheavals of the late 1980s. In the staunch Soviet ally East Germany, for example, Socialist Realism had held firm, counterbalanced by more progressive trends toward “youth films” and “outsider films” centering on nonconformist women. The end of Erich Honecker’s regime in 1989, followed by reunification with West Germany the following year, left old-line Communist filmmakers stranded. After reunification, German films claimed only 10 percent of the national box office.

In Bulgaria, expensive historical spectacles made in the late 1970s and early 1980s ate up the nation’s film funds, just before the economic crisis in all Communist satellites let to massive cutbacks in state industries. In Yugoslavia, an emergent independent film movement, strongly decentralized production aided by television funding, and a move toward privatization were cut short by the country’s economic collapse in the mid-1980s. After the fall of communism, an ethnic war started in 1991 and destroyed the nation’s civil society. The war was grinding to a close at the end of the century, but with the creation of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and other states, Yugoslavian cinema was ended. Its wilder traditions

25.33 In a

MemOir as cine-philiac as any offered by the French New Wave, Marta Meszaros recalls sharing her mother’s love at a village movie show {Diary for My Children).

25.34 Werckmeister Harmonies: shot in an intricate long take, a young man teaches the inebriated tavern patrons to dance in a pattern that mimics the solar system.

Were recalled in Emir Kusturica’s Felliniesque black comedy Underground (1995), which traces the history of Yugoslavia from 1941 to the Bosnian war.

Hungary: Old and New Auteurs Events in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland illustrate further how eastern European film moved from the stagnant years of the mid-1970s to the bleak conditions of the 1990s. Hungarian cinema suffered the least radical changes. In the 1970s, Hungary became a crucible for reform within a socialist economy, and the state’s “New Economic Mechanism” successfully raised living standards through a mixture of centralized control, private businesses, and joint ventures with the capitalist West. The Communist party, though firmly in control, had tolerated multicandidate elections, and censorship was relatively relaxed. After the fall of communism, Hungary was able to recover somewhat faster than its neighbors. Yet, as in most former Soviet satellites, U. S. films captured the market. The government’s Motion Picture Foundation, created in 1991 to ease the transition to a free market, was still funding most local films ten years later.

Both before and after the fall, Hungary turned out between twelve and twenty features per year, many of

Them signed by major directors. The most internationally visible director was Istvan Szabo, whose Confidence

(1979) led him to the high-budget, high-profile German-financed Mephisto (1981), Colonel Redl (1983), and Sunshine (1999). Arguably the most consistent and accomplished senior director in Hungary was Marta Meszaros. “I tell my own life story in most of my films. The search for Mother and Father is a determining experience in my own life.”ll Meszaros dramatized her quest in Anna (1981) and the fictionalized series of her memoirs of growing up under Stalinism: Diary for My Children (1984; 25.33), Diary for My Loves (1987), and Diary for My Father and Mother (1991). Meszaros’s former husband MiklOs JancsO remained prolific, but none of his 1980s films aroused the acclaim that had greeted his 1960s work. He eventually recaptured his home audience with absurdist comedies featuring two popular clowns playing gravediggers (e. g., Damn You! The Mosquitoes, 1999).

In the 1990s, a group of younger Hungarian directors came to attention with black-and-white films that were sour in tone, enigmatic in subject matter, and extravagantly stylized in execution. Gyorgy Feher’s Passion (1998) is a dank, grainy story of rural adultery, shot in long takes. The most famous exponent of the grimy style was Bela Tarr. Tarr came to international attention with Satan’s Tango (1994), an adaptation of a classic Hungarian novel. In a bleak, muddy village, the relations among characters unfold with aching slowness, all observed by a doctor sitting at a window and trying to write down everything he sees. The film runs for seven and a half hours. In Werckmeister Harmonies

(2000), a seedy small town plays host to a traveling circus, complete with a stuffed whale.

An admirer of the early JancsO, Tarr relied on tightly choreographed long takes but kept them at a lugubrious pace, as if the characters are laboring with every movement (25.34). Why is everything so slow? Tarr answered that a shot had to respect many protagonists, not just the characters: “Scenery, the weather, time, and locations have their own faces and they are important.”l2 Recalling the German sensibilist trend, Tarr reinvigorated the tradition of contemplative cinema.

Slovakia and the Czech Republic Czechoslovakian filmmakers had a less equable time during these decades. The crackdown after the Prague Spring of 1968 kept pressure firm. The government tightened control over film units, where byzantine bureaucracies and corps of “literary advisers” steered production away from political subjects and toward popular entertainment. Many

25.35,  left Man of Marble: Birkut’s triumphs as a bricklayer staged for the “documentary” camera.

25.36,  right Man of Marble: Agnieszka discovers the statue glorifying Birkut.

Directors emigrated to the United States, Canada, and western Europe.

Of the New Wave directors who stayed, Jiff Menzel did not make a film until 1976 and thereafter turned out several characteristically bittersweet comedies, notably Seclusion Near a Forest (1976), Cutting It Short (1980), and My Sweet Little Village (1986), which was a triumph at home and a foreign art-house success. Vera Chytilova, after campaigning for years against the sexism of the regime’s film policy (p. 553), returned to directing with The Apple Game (1976), a farce about sexual relations that earned official disapproval but was marketed abroad. She followed this with films that mixed commercial narrative forms with eroticism and social satire.

After the 1989 revolts, major banned films came off the shelf. Audiences around the world saw what the censors had forbidden, and the vivacity of the Prague Spring was recaptured. Menzel’s Larks on a String (1969; p. 553), taken out of the vaults, won the main prize at the Berlin Film Festival twenty years after it was finished. More recently banned works, such as Dusan Hanak’s I Love, You Love (1980), also received international notice.

In 1993, the country split peacefully in two, creating the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The significantly more active Czech industry was growing at the start of the new century, while Slovakia relied on coproductions, chiefly with Czech funding.

Poland: From Solidarity to Kieslowski The most energetic eastern European cinema of the 1970s and 1980s was to be found in Poland. Neither as liberated as Hungary nor as repressive as Czechoslovakia, Poland offered filmmakers some latitude for social criticism. Although production units had been dissolved in the wake of the 1968 demonstrations (p. 554), they were soon reconstituted, and filmmakers acquired greater freedom. Each production unit consisted of an artistic director (usually a major filmmaker) and a literary director (usually a screenwriter). During the early 1970s, filmmakers adhered to safe literary and historical subjects. Midway through the decade, in synchronization with popular discontent with economic policy, there arose the “cinema of moral concern.”

A prime example was Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (1976), a fictionalized investigation of a “model worker” from the 1950s. The filmmaker Agnieszka tries to find out why Birkut, a loyal bricklayer, was erased from history. In a knowing echo of Citizen Kane, her interviews with people who knew Birkut frame extensive flashbacks. Wajda’s exposure of Stalinist and post-Stalinist political intrigue reflexively invokes cinema’s ability to create ideology (25.35). At first, Agnieszka trusts the camera as a documentary tool (25.36), but by the end of the film, denied raw stock and a camera, she must discover the truth directly, through human contact with Birkut’s son.

Along with Krzysztol Zanussi’s Camouflage (1976), a depiction of conformity and idealism at a summer camp for college students, Man of Marble signaled a disaffection with the regime. A harder-line vice-minister of culture for films came to power, and the filmmaking community protested. Directors pointed out that the public was treating film as the conscience of Poland, the only witness to the conditions of social life. Feliks Falk’s Top Dog (1977), Zanussi’s Spiral (1978), and other films of “moral concern” countered the regime’s boasts about improved living standards with charges that Poles had sacrificed their honor and conscience. Many of the younger directors, born after the war, grew up in Stalinist culture and were alert for its signs in contemporary life.

When Solidarity’s strikes galvanized the nation in 1980, film workers rallied to the cause. As Solidarity won initial concessions from the government, the annual national film festival in Gdansk announced a new socially critical cinema. The filmmaker, Wajda declared in 1980, “can succeed only if he makes an honest scrutiny of contemporary realities and the scale of the human effort and suffering they contain. . . and explores them for the chances they offer of man’s spiritual victory.” 13

25.37 In The Decalogue 1, young Pawel embarks on his search for the soul—which his father will deny exists—with tragic results.

From the production units supervised by Wajda and Zanussi came several films reflecting the new realism. The most celebrated was Wajda’s Man ofiron (1980), a sequel to Man of Marble in which Agnieszka and Birkut’s son press their investigation into the 1960s and 1970s. It was shot during the Solidarity strike and incorporated documentary footage of contemporary events. Attacking the government with unprecedented audacity, Man of iron quickly became the most widely seen Polish film in history.

When the gains of Solidarity were overturned by the government, the outspoken filmmakers felt the counterblows. But Gorbachev’s new policies toward eastern Europe led the government to open negotiations with Solidarity, and Polish filmmakers returned to the cinema of moral urgency. The most significant director from an international prospective was Krzysztof Keis-lowski. He had made his name during the 1970s with barbed television documentaries and The Scar (1976), an acerbic study of an ineffectual factory foreman. In Camera Buff (1979), a worker tries to make an amateur film about his factory but runs into problems of honesty and bad faith.

Kieslowski’s skepticism about political answers led him to probe more essential questions: “What is the true meaning of life? Why get up in the morning? Politics don’t answer that.”14 Chance (1981) presents three hypothetical plots, tracing out the life choices available to a man: becoming a party leader, an opposition fighter, or an apolitical bystander. No End (1984) was the boldest film about martial law. In a pungent mixture of the religious and the secular, KieSlowski’s series of television films, The Decalogue (1988), offers a story for each of the Ten Commandments (25.37). Two of these somber tales were expanded into features (A Short Film about Killing and A Short Film about Love, both 1988).

After 1989: The Threat of Hollywood Just before the 1989 revolutions, reform was brewing in several film industries. Yugoslavia made its regional studios autonomous. Hungary and Poland abolished the state monopoly on film and gave the production units their independence, urging them to pursue financing and create joint productions with capitalist nations. After the 1989 events, Czechoslovakia dissolved its central film bureau. Throughout eastern Europe, film companies were privatized, and western money was welcomed. Censorship was virtually abolished. Hungary made a distribution arrangement with American companies in 1989, and soon other countries opened their markets.

The new conditions created a fresh barrage of problems. Under Communist regimes, ticket prices had been absurdly low (usually less than a dollar), but open-market conditions required a price rise, which drove audiences away. Theaters had lacked maintenance for years, but without state subsidy there was no money for renovations. Home video, late in penetrating eastern Europe but offering unrestrained (often pirated) access to popular western films, further cut theater attendance.

Worst of all, post-1989 freedom put filmmakers head to head with Hollywood. The results were predictable. American films, long barred from eastern Europe, flooded the market much as they had deluged western Europe after 1945. In 1991, 95 percent of the films playing in Poland were from U. S. companies, and Czechoslovakian films attracted less than one-fourth of domestic box-office revenues. In the same year, the audience for Hungarian films was only one-seventh of what it had been two years before. The local product played in small art theaters and barely broke even.

Eastern European governments sought to imitate western Europe by offering loans, subsidies, and prizes, but funds remained pitifully small. With eastern countries struggling to heal fractured economies and inflation running high, art cinema could no longer expect much help. Filmmakers had little choice but to pursue international cinema. “We want to make films for viewers in Paris, New York, Tokyo,” announced one Polish director. “We cannot make films only for Poland.” 15

Doubtless most directors dreamed of a success such as that met by Kieslowski’s Double Life of Veronique (1991). Its plot, involving two apparently identical women living in different countries, found a ready audience around the world. Shot in Poland and France, it was funded by a French production firm and Canal Plus.

Even more successful was his “three colors” trilogy on contemporary Europe: the mournful Blue (1993), the satiric White (1993), and the spiritually mysterious Red (1994), which ends by showing how the protagonists of the other two films have fared. Unabashedly humanistic, teasing the viewer with secret doublings and fateful coincidences, wrapped in thrilling musical scores by Zbigniew Preisner, these films convinced critics that the tradition of postwar modernism could still flourish. Kieslowski died in 1996, honored by all.

After dissolving the Warsaw Pact in 1991, eastern Europe sought to join the European Community. Some filmmakers began to receive funds from Eurimages, but most would take many years just to achieve the defensive, beleaguered position of most of their western European counterparts.

The USSR: The Final Thaw

From 1964 to 1982, Leonid Brezhnev served as secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. Opposed to reform, favoring rule by elderly officials, Brezhnev’s regime presented an image of solidity and apparent growth. During the 1970s, citizens acquired televisions, refrigerators, and cars. At the same time, Brezhnev committed himself to a policy of military intervention, assisting revolts in Angola and Ethiopia and invading Afghanistan.

Although consumer comforts increased, culture suffered another “ freeze.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and other dissidents were silenced by exile or imprisonment. Sergei Paradzhanov, the director of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and The Color of Pomegranates, was released from prison in 1977, but he was forbidden to emigrate or to work in cinema. Goskino, the agency overseeing cinema, had become a bloated bureaucracy, encouraging popular entertainment in tune with the new socialist consumerism. The strategy was rewarded by the international success of Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1980), the first Soviet film to win an Academy Award. As in Hollywood during the same period, the bulk of box-office income was supplied by relatively few films.

Despite the conservatism of the Brezhnev era, some slice-of-life films gave voice to the problems of daily existence, especially among Soviet youth. Dinara Asanova (The Restricted Boy, 1977), Lana Gogoberidze (Some Interviews on Personal Matters, 1979), and other women directors created distinctive psychological studies. The lyrical, or poetic tendencies associated with the republics’ studios continued in the work of Tengiz Abuladze (e. g., the banned Repentance, 1984).

25.38 In the course of The Ascent, Sotnikov becomes paralleled to Christ in his willingness to sacrifice himself for other Russians captured by the Germans.

Tarkovsky and the Ethics of Art In addition, several directors created idiosyncratic, self-consciously artistic works that reflected both European art cinema and Russian traditions. In the massive Siberiade (1979; banned), Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky offered a personalized historical epic, while in A Slave of Love (1976) and Unfinished Piece for Player Piano (1977) his brother Nikita Mikhalkov experimented with reflexivity in the manner of Fellini and other European directors. Larissa She-pitko’s films emphasize individual conscience and moral choice in the vein of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and contemporary anti-Stalinist literature. Her World War II film The Ascent (1977) shows two partisan soldiers captured by the Germans and forced to decide between collaboration and execution. The intellectual Sotnikov, having conquered his fear of death in an earlier skirmish, bears up under torture and accepts death with an eerie, Christ-like gentleness (25.38).

The most visible exponent of an artistic cinema opposed to mass genres and propaganda films remained Andrei Tarkovsky. Solaris (1972) had somewhat mitigated the scandal of Andrei Roublev (1966; p. 458), but the obscure, dreamlike The Mirror (1975) confirmed that he worked in a mystical vein fiercely opposed to the mainstream.

Considered a “reactionary,” Tarkovsky insisted on the family, poetry, and religion as central forces in social life. He declared himself against cinema with a political message and argued for a cinema of direct, evocative impressions—a position that put him close to the sensibilist German directors. But his somber films seek to engage the spectator in a weightier way than do those of Herzog and Wenders. Stalker (1979) presents an allegorical

25.39,  left The hard, westernized Soviet teenagers of Scarecrow.

25.40,  right To-camera address intensifies the brutality of Come and See. Here the young hero returns to his village and is told that his family has been massacred.

Expedition through a wrecked postindustrial landscape into “the Zone,” a region where human life can be fundamentally changed. Filmed in a blue murk, Stalker uses hypnotic, achingly slow camera movements to create what the director called “the pressure of the time” running through the shots (Color Plate 25.28).16

Tarkovsky went to Italy to make Nostalghia (1983), a melancholy, virtually nonnarrative meditation on memory and exile (Color Plate 25.29). He decided not to return to the USSR. He directed some stage productions, and in Sweden he filmed the Bergmanesque The Sacrifice (1986), which won the special jury prize at Cannes. By the time of his death in 1986, Tarkovsky had become an emblem of the cinema of artistic conscience. His prominence abroad had saved his films from shelving, and, even if they went unseen in the USSR, they were salable foreign exports. He influenced the pictori-alist strain of European cinema during the 1970s and 1980s, and his Soviet contemporaries gathered courage from his resistance to official policies. A self-conscious auteur on the European model, Tarkovsky demanded that art be a moral quest: “Masterpieces are born of the artist’s struggle to express his ethical ideals.”l7

During Tarkovsky’s silence and exile, Soviet cinema was changing. Rolan Bykov’s Scarecrow (1983), a film about a village girl despised by her classmates, quietly celebrates indigenous tradition and historical memory over the harsh selfishness of the new consumerist Russia (25.39). Alexei Guerman’s My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1983; banned until 1985) eclectically mixes newsreels and abstractly staged footage to criticize Stalinist conceptions of political crimes. The World War II movie was given a new savagery in Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985), a harrowing portrayal of the German occupation of Byelorussia (25.40). Based on an idea of Klimov’s wife, the deceased Larissa Shepitko, Come and See presented the naive young hero as something less than the Socialist Realist ideal. During the same period, Paradzhanov returned to feature filmmaking. The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984) recalls The Color of Pomegranates in its stylized simplicity and vibrant textures (Color Plate 25.30). Even a “parallel cinema” shot on 16mm and super 8mm was beginning to lurk in students’ apartments and artists’ basements (p. 598).

Behind the facade of Brezhnev’s regime, the USSR had stagnated. Agricultural and industrial production had declined, and so had health and living standards. Corruption, inefficiency, and overextended military commitments were draining the state’s resources. Neither Brezhnev nor the two elderly general secretaries who succeeded him faced up to the challenges. A younger politician, Mikhail Gorbachev, assumed leadership in 1985 and revealed that the USSR was on the verge of financial collapse. His announcement that the USSR would no longer sustain its satellites in eastern Europe led to the overthrow of Communist regimes there. Gorbachev also called for a policy of glasnost, which was to initiate a long-overdue rebuilding of Soviet institutions, or perestroika (“restructuring”). Another “thaw” had begun.

Glasnost and Perestroika in the Cinema At first Gorbachev sought to implement reforms through the chain of party command, but in 1987 he began to call for fundamental changes. Glasnost meant confronting the errors of the past. Stalin’s regime was excoriated, and citizens were encouraged to discuss the failures of the economy, the rise of crime and drug use, and the sense that the Soviet system bred people to be hard and selfish.

Glasnost gave filmmakers an unprecedented freedom. Stalin’s policies were attacked in The Cold Summer of ’S3 (1987), a sort of Soviet Western that shows a village terrorized by a gang of released political prisoners. Valery Ogorodnikov’s Prishvin’s Paper Eyes (1989) portrays the early days of Soviet television, with jabs at propaganda filming and a remarkable sequence that mixes newsreels and Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps massacre to suggest that Stalin is selecting the victims from a balcony.

Youth films dwelt upon student rebellion, often laced with rock music and a post-Punk anomie (e. g., Sergei Solvyev’s Assa, 1988). Chernukha, or “black cinema,” rubbed audiences’ noses in the sordidness of daily life and predatory politics. Satiric films mocked party tradition and current fashions. Even mass entertainment exploited the new attitudes, as when the enormously successful gangster film King of Crime (1988) showed the KGB, the state, and criminals conspiring to defraud the public. Internationally, the hallmark of glasnost cinema was Vasily Pichul’s Little Vera (1988). Vera’s cynical amorality and casual promiscuity once and for all deflated the myth of the virtuous heroine who could sacrifice all for the collective.

Most of these films would not have been made had not perestroika opened up the film industry. In May 1986, at the Congress of Soviet Filmmakers, Elem Klimov, director of Come and See and a friend of Gorbachev’s, was elected head of the union. The same congress set in motion the restructuring of Goskino. Under the new policy, Goskino would serve principally as a conduit for funds and a source of facilities. Filmmaking would be in the hands of free creative production units on the eastern European model. In addition, censorship was markedly liberalized.

One of Klimov’s major reforms was the establishment of the Conflict Commission, aimed at the review and release of banned films. Soon critical works such as the humanistic war dramas My Friend Ivan Lapshin and Commissar (1967) and the surreal Ukrainian satire Repentance (1984) were unshelved. In the year after his death, Tarkovsky was honored with a complete retrospective in his homeland.

Glasnost and perestroika gave more autonomy to the republics as well. In Kazakhstan, quasi-Punk directors offered films like The Needle (1988, Rashid Nugmanov), a drug movie bearing the influence of Hollywood melodrama, Fassbinder, and Wenders’s road sagas. In Georgia, Alexander Rekhviashvili made The Step (1986), a structurally adventurous, wryly absurd film about the meaningless routines of Soviet life. Before Paradzhanov’s death in 1990, he directed Ashik Kerib (1989), a literary adaptation transformed by his ritualized treatment of Georgian legend and ethnic custom.

While international circles grew interested in the “New Soviet Cinema,” Gorbachev’s attempt to reform communism from the top down was proving unworkable. He pressed for a more rapid shift to individual initiative and a market system. In 1989, the government demanded that film studios become profitable and encouraged filmmakers to form private companies and independent cooperatives. Formerly Goskino had sole distribution power, but now independent producers could distribute their own products.

The decline in state funding came at a bad time, since technology was in disrepair. The thirty-nine Soviet

25.41 Ramshackle structures and a sea of mud: the landscape of Soviet life in Freeze, Die, Come to Life!

Studios badly needed renovation. Only one had Dolby sound equipment, a necessity for western markets, and Soviet film stock was still the world’s worst.

Cinema and Market Bolshevism The free market was an anarchic one. No legislation regulated film activity. Video piracy flourished. Clandestine companies churned out pornography, often as diversions for black-market funds. Before glasnost, national production averaged 150 features per year; in 1991, 400 features were made. A year later, there were fewer than 100.

As in India and other countries of unpredictable production, very few completed films found their way into theaters. Attendance dropped to around one-tenth of theater capacity, as were most of the upstart entrepreneurs. The devaluation of the ruble increased production costs tenfold, and top directors could not get their films released. Although the Hollywood Majors refused to release new films until the USSR took antipiracy measures, old or cheap Hollywood pictures dominated the market, capturing 70 percent of audiences.

The final years of Soviet cinema were nevertheless prestigious ones. Filmmakers joined writers and composers as representatives of a vigorous, eclectic culture. Not since the 1960s had so many Soviet films won praise in the West. Taxi Blues (1990, Pavel Loungine), a Soviet-French effort, portrays a decaying urbanism and amoral, rudderless characters (Color Plate 25.31). Vitaly Kanevsky’s Freeze, Die, Come to Life! (1990), a “black film,” suggests the savagery and spite pervading contemporary Soviet life by means of a story about children’s corruption in a village during World War II (25.41). The Ukrainian-Canadian production Swan Lake: The Zone

(1990), directed by the veteran Yuri Ilienko from a story by Paradzhanov, renders a political fable with Bres-sonian asceticism. An escapee from a prison camp hides in a gigantic, hollow hammer-and-sickle sign. The ponderous symbolism of the looming, rusting emblem is counterbalanced by a rich sonic texture and a painstaking rendering of the man’s cramped, dank shelter.

The End of the Soviet System An aborted coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 triggered the dissolution of the Communist party. Boris Yeltsin ascended to leadership, and the USSR was replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Now Russia, the Ukraine, Armenia, and other former Soviet republics would function as separate nations. The cold war that had ruled world political strategy since World War II was ended.

Like their counterparts in eastern Europe, CIS filmmakers were eager for productions with the West. Yet the “common European home” envisaged by Gorbachev, a huge market stretching from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains, was not taking shape. The CIS had a collapsed economy, a steeply declining standard of living, and modern problems of crime and drug addiction. The European Community proved reluctant to aid or assimilate CIS nations.

Communism may have failed as a political ideology, but well-connected party officials grew rich in the frenzy of privatization. In Russia, organized crime moved into government and major industries. Amidst charges of corruption, Yeltsin was succeeded in 2000 by former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, who continued the punitive war against breakaway region Chechnya. As Russia defaulted on its debts, the economy stumbled from crisis to crisis, crashing in 1998 and only slightly recovering in 2000. Buildings and streets were crumbling, and the population, among the sickest in the world, was shrinking fast. In light of all this, foreign investors stayed out.

The CIS film industries moved in synchronization with the boom-and-bust cycle. British, French, and Italian film companies launched “international” pictures featuring prominent western stars in CIS locales. Mos-film, Lenfilm, and other studios became service facilities for runaway productions. Because the studios attracted cash, the state resisted privatizing them, but it did foster tax concessions for film investment. Cowboy capitalism reigned. In the mid-1990s, Vladimir Gusinsky’s Media-Most emerged as the dominant private force, funding several films and seeking, unsuccessfully, to take over the state-protected Mosfilm studios. A few years later, Gusinsky was hiding in Spain, resisting extradition to Russia to answer charges of fraud.

Despite overwhelming video piracy, the Hollywood studios cautiously sent films in, but Russia hardly constituted a major market. In 1999, even though they dominated the theaters, Hollywood releases took in less than $9 million at the box office. Most of the twenty to forty Russian films made each year played only at state-funded local festivals. A few Russian films earned overseas attention, with several being nominated for Academy Awards and one, Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun (1994), winning an Oscar. Returning to 1953, Alexei Guerman’s Khroustaliov, My Car! (1998), shows a doctor caught up in the paranoia of Kremlin leaders right after Stalin’s death. With the camera squeezing through overstuffed parlors and kitchens, it presents a comic phantasmagoria of a bloated and decaying society.

Sokurov and the Tarkovsky Tradition Aleksandr Soku-rov had been making films for twenty years before he attracted strong attention outside Russia. His first feature, The Solitary Voice of a Man (1978; shelved until 1987), harks back to the 1920s avant-garde in its elliptical narrative and crisp montage, but it also has a disturbingly dreamlike quality that would typify much of his work. Sokurov initially became known for his literary adaptations, but after glasnost, usually with foreign financing, he was able to develop his expressionistic side. The Second Circle (1990), a stark black-and-white exercise, examines the minutiae of a primal ritual: in the space of ninety-two minutes, a son prepares his father’s corpse for burial. Whispering Pages (1992) meditates on Nikolay Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky, with an apparently entranced hero drifting along murky canals and through cavernous tunnels. We glimpse the action dimly, through drifting haze; occasionally white birches are superimposed on the scene.

Sokurov’s most widely seen expressionist exercise was Mother and Son (1997). A companion piece to The Second Circle, it shows a young man visiting his ailing mother. He carries her out from her farmhouse and reads to her. He takes her back inside. He wanders out into a vast, phantasmic landscape. He returns to find her dead, and he lays his face on her hand. Almost completely without dialogue, Mother and Son creates a piercing sense of loss through the simplicity of its situation and Sokurov’s daring use of distorting lenses and filters. He films the landscape through paint-streaked glass, a “special effect” that creates an unearthly realm halfway between realism and abstraction (Color Plate 25.32).

Sokurov had Tarkovsky’s unswerving seriousness in exploring a mournful spirituality. He maintained, however, that Tarkovsky’s influence on his generation was not wholly beneficial: “A director [today] doesn’t think of himself as a professional who can make a drama, a comedy, a thriller, et cetera. . . . It’s called Tarkovschina [the Tarkovsky syndrome]—to be great philosophers and make unwatchable films.”18 Sokurov may have thought his later films, emblematic dramas involving major historical figures (Hitler in Moloch, 1999; Lenin in Tauris, 2001), would reach wider audiences, but the true populist was Alexei Balabanov. His gritty action film Brother (1997) centered on a soldier returning from Chechnya who becomes a hired killer. It became the most popular Russian film of the post-Soviet period. Balabanov produced a sequel called, in true Hollywood fashion, Brother II (2000).

As the market for U. S. films expanded in the 1970s, Hollywood’s European competitors were forced to rely on export markets and cross-national financing. During the postwar decades, European filmmakers relied on governmentally overseen coproductions, but in the 1970s and 1980s, coproductions were also funded by the EU and media empires. Soviet and central European directors like Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, and Tarr also benefited from these initiatives. More broadly, European film production was torn between individual nations’ demands for films that reflected their uniqueness and pressures toward EU solidarity in order to fight Hollywood.

The strengthening of European unity and the collapse of communism accelerated pressures toward less overtly political, more accessible cinema—the panEuropean film. Some filmmakers, like Germany’s von Trotta, Spain’s Almodovar, and France’s Jeunet, sought to entice audiences with variants upon the popular genres and art-cinema conventions pioneered in earlier eras. Yet other directors, from Loach and Pialat to Duras and Sokurov, remained wedded to more difficult cinema, offering either uncomfortable realism or formal experiment. By maintaining the gap between auteur cinema and popular film, they consigned many European products, from West or East, to the festival circuit.