NEW CINEMA IN THE USSR AND EASTERN EUROPE

Young Cinema in the Soviet Union

The “thaw” after Stalin’s death in 1953 ended quickly: in the political sphere, with the 1956 crushing of the Hungarian Revolution; in the artistic domain, with the 1958 attacks on Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr. Zhivago. But, in 1961, Nikita Khrushchev launched a new de-Stalinization campaign, calling for openness and greater democracy. Intellectuals and artists responded eagerly, and a Soviet youth culture began to emerge.

In the cinema, most older directors continued to work in traditional ways. Joseph Heifits’s Lady with the Little Dog (1960), for example, continued the stolid 1950s deep-focus technique in telling its story of a love affair in a declining class (20.51). Still exploiting the monumental style, Mikhail Romm displayed a more liberal stance in Nine Days of One Year (1962), a social-problem film about nuclear radiation. Although Romm had been a major Stalinist filmmaker, he proved a progressive force after the thaw, training and encouraging several of the important directors of the postwar decades.

A new emphasis on youth could be seen in several films about children. Other filmmakers, like their counterparts abroad, concentrated on young adults in the contemporary world. Vasily Shukshin, a fiction writer, directed There Was a Lad (1964), in which a good-natured trucker encounters teenage life in the USSR (20.52).

The most celebrated young director was Andrei Tarkovsky. The son of a major poet, he studied under Romm at VGIK. Like many of his contemporaries, Tarkovsky became interested in European art cinema, particularly the work of Bergman, Bresson, and Fellini. His first feature was Ivan’s Childhood (1962). After winning the Grand Prize at Venice, it became one of the most widely admired Soviet films of the 1960s.

The plot of Ivan’s Childhood adheres to many conventions of the Soviet World War II film. A boy vows to avenge his parents’ deaths and becomes a scout for a band of partisans. But Tarkovsky treats this material with an unusual lyricism (20.53, 20.54). The wordless opening sequence, a dream in which Ivan floats through the trees to greet his mother and take a drink of water, establishes a cluster of visual motifs. After Ivan has died at the hands of the Nazis, the film concludes with a glowing sequence of fantasy images. The ambiguity is characteristic of 1960s art cinema; the sequence could be Ivan’s final reverie, or it could be the filmmaker’s free elaboration and comment. The authorities resented

20.51 The continuation of deep-focus shooting in the prestigious literary adaptation The Lady with the Little Dog.

20.52 Youth culture in socialist humanism: in There Was a Lad, a disdainful Muscovite confronts locals at a club dance.

Tarkovsky’s effort “to replace narrative causality with poetic articulations.” 9

The new liberalization soon ended. After Khrushchev denounced I’m 20 (1963, Marlen Khutsiev) for insulting the older generation, the Young Cinema encountered greater resistance. In 1964, Khrushchev was forced to resign, and the conservative Leonid Brezhnev took over as party secretary. Under the rubric “harmonious development,” Brezhnev halted reforms and tightened control of culture. Nonconformist films were reshot or banned. Andrei Konchalovsky’s Asya’s Happiness, finished in 1966, was withdrawn for its supposed insults to the peasantry. Alexander Askoldov’s Commissar (1967) was suppressed for its positive portrayal of Jewish characters. After Grigori Chukhrai’s Beginning of an Unknown Era (1967) was shelved, he closed his experimental studio.

The fate of Tarkovsky’s second feature exemplifies the difficulties filmmakers faced. Andrei Rublev (1965), a long, somber drama of the life of a fifteenth-century icon painter, followed the strategy Tarkovsky had pursued in Ivan’s Childhood. Once more he took a formu-

20.53, 20.54 Tarkovsky’s battle-scarred landscapes in Ivan’s Childhood have a Bergmanesque starkness and stand in contrast to the lush tranquility of nature in Ivan’s imagination.

20.55 The mystical tactility of Tarkovsky in Andrei Rublev: a bloody hand slumping into a stream produces a milky stain.

20.56 As Tartars pillage a town, geese float down from the sky (Andrei Rublev).

Laic genre—here, the biography of the great artist—and infused it with mysteriously poetic imagery (20.55, 20.56). Andrei Rublev also had disturbing contemporary overtones. Surrounded by viciousness and cruelty, Rublev gives up speaking, stops painting, and abandons religious faith. Some viewers saw Tarkovsky’s film as

An allegory of art crushed by social oppression. Goskino administrators denied it a release.

Despite political pressures, several films of the Brezhnev era broached issues of importance to youth and intellectuals. Two significant women directors emerged. Larissa Shepitko centered Wings (1966) on a

20.57,  left A Godard-style shot from Brief Encounters.

20.58,  right A man is struck by an axe, and blood dribbles down the camera lens (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors).

Female pilot learning to become a school supervisor. Kira Muratova’s Brief Encounters (1968) shows a man from the viewpoints of the two women who love him (20.57).

The studios of the Soviet republics, closer to folk traditions and less vulnerable to official reprimands, produced some oblique, poetic films. Older than the “new” directors, Serge Paradzhanov grew up in Georgia, graduated from VGIK in 1951, and during the 1950s made several films in the Ukraine. His Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) tells of a man haunted by the death of the woman he loved. The folklike story, however, is rendered in a flurry of hysterically modernist techniques. Jerkily hand-held, the camera races through landscapes. Paradzhanov gives us shots taken from treetops, ceremonially still compositions, and abrupt subjective images (20.58). Paradzhanov’s aggressive style made authorities limit the film’s distribution in the USSR but also helped it garner over a dozen international prizes.

Once Brezhnev’s regime was firmly in place, Paradzhanov, Tarkovsky, and other innovative directors found it difficult to launch projects. Instead, the industry and the Party made Sergei Bondarchuk’s massive War and Peace (1967) the official emblem of Soviet film. The film was trumpeted as the most costly production in history and was widely successful in the export market. Bondarchuk cautiously inserted a few self-consciously contemporary techniques (slow-motion, hand-held camera), but on the whole he revived the monumental tradition. A new period of “stabilization”—later to be known as “stagnation”—set in, and not until the early 1970s would Soviet cinema and other arts have the chance to explore new avenues.

New Waves in Eastern Europe

The USSR’s resistance to cinematic experimentation had its parallels in some eastern European countries. Still, in the early 1960s new waves sprang up in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Hungary.

During the late 1950s, eastern Europe’s economy strengthened, and countries sought to enter western markets. Films proved to be valuable export items. In addition, economic reforms led many governments to increase artistic freedom. Each new wave typically participated in a broader cultural renaissance including literature, drama, painting, and music.

Several eastern European countries simultaneously developed production structures that were more decentralized than the rigidly controlled Soviet hierarchy. In 1955, Poland had pioneered the system of “creative film units”; in each one directors and scriptwriters worked under the supervision of a senior filmmaker. In 1963, both Czechoslovakia and Hungary adopted variants of the film-unit system. Yugoslavia’s decentralized system, in place since 1950, was revised in 1962 to allow filmmakers to form independent companies to make a single film. Since nearly all these countries were threatened by the advance of television, the reorganization offered ways of competing with the new rival.

Consequently, filmmakers in these countries were freer to try fresh subjects, themes, forms, and styles than were their Soviet counterparts. The films that emerged linked eastern European cinema to the art cinema that had been flourishing in western Europe since the war. Because eastern Europe had always imported more foreign films than had the Soviet Union, directors and audiences were more aware of other new cinemas. And, as eastern European films entered festivals and international distribution circuits, western viewers encountered innovative examples of cinematic modernism.

Young Cinema in Poland In the early 1960s it might have seemed that Polish filmmaking had lost none of its force. Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerors (1960) adapted his style to an intimate subject, a couple’s night together. Mother Joan of the Angels (1961), by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, offered a daring tale of possession in a convent. By 1960, the Polish system of producing films by independent units was working smoothly, and strict Socialist Realism was firmly in the past.

Yet political pressures were intensifying. Films were seldom banned, but they might be denounced by critics and politicians, and this slowed the progress of older directors. After Innocent Sorcerors, Wajda made no film in Poland for several years, opting instead for international coproductions. His Polish historical epic, Ashes (1965), did not find much favor. Similarly, Kawalerowicz made the long, brooding Pharaoh (1966) after six years of preparation. On the whole, the older directors of the Polish School seemed to have run out of energy.

In the early 1960s, there was the possibility that Poland’s younger directors would cultivate a modest, realistic approach in contrast to the “baroque” tendencies of Wajda and Kawalerowicz. A few intimate films based on sociological observation did appear, but the two most celebrated young directors avoided such realism and moved toward a strongly dramatic, technically flamboyant approach to youthful subjects.

Roman Polanski was an actor before going to film school and attracting international attention with a short, Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958). After spending a few years in Paris, he returned to Poland to make Knife in the Water (1962). At one level, the film is an intimate suspense drama. An unhappily married couple take a young hitchhiker along on a sailing trip, and the tension builds as the husband taunts the young man mercilessly. Knife in the Water could be defended as politically accurate in attacking the new “red bourgeoisie” who lived in western luxury. But the young man can hardly be a positive hero, since he is at best naively confused and at worst somewhat cynical.

Polanski avoids most of the technical innovations of the European new cinemas, relying on orthodox cutting and vivid deep-focus shots that keep the characters in tense confrontation (20.59). Yet in other ways Knife in the Water relies on art-cinema conventions. The opening derives from Voyage to Italy, although by 1962 Polanski needed none of the expository dialogue that Roberto Rossellini required: we can infer that the couple are quarreling when the wife gets out of the car to let her husband drive. The film’s finale, with the couple reunited in their car and the husband wondering if the young man is really dead, became an emblem of the lack of closure in 1960s cinema.

Jerzy Skolimowski, scriptwriter for Innocent Sorcerors and Knife in the Water, became the Polish director closest in style and theme to the Parisian Nouvelle Vague. Identification Marks: None (1964), assembled out of student footage, shows a draft-dodger moving through Polish youth culture. Walkover (1965) centers on a prizefighter who eventually wins a factory boxing match. Barrier (1966) draws upon Felliniesque fantasy to portray contemporary Polish youth rebelling against cynicism and bureaucracy. In each film, Skolimowski’s

20.59 Harsh, Wellesian depth in Knife in the Water.

20.60 Dazzling reflections in Identification Marks: None.

20.61 False depth and flatness, in Walkover.

Hero (usually played by the director) is a sensitive drifter disillusioned by society but still hoping to find happiness in a woman’s love.

Skolimowski’s films exhibit the casual improvisation we find in early Truffaut or Godard. They also have a flashy, almost exhibitionist style. There are long takes, with complex camera movements and zooms; abstract, often perplexing compositions (20.60); and surreal images of the contemporary city (20.61). In Identification Marks: None, after a traffic accident a hand covers the lens; only then do we realize that the shot represents the protagonist’s optical point of view.

The late 1960s marked an end to the Polish School. After Knife in the Water, Polanski went into exile. Skolimowski made Le Depart (1967), a Nouvelle Vague echo, in Belgium; the banning of his next Polish production, Hands Up! (1968), led him to work in England and western Europe.

The Czech New Wave Czechoslovakia offered more favorable conditions for a New Cinema. The years from 1962 to 1966 saw steps toward “market socialism” and

20.62 After a hospital is bombed, Menzel’s flat, Keaton-esque shot shows Milos, miraculously unscathed, lifting his coat off the rack.

A mood of reform. The cinema took an active part in cultural renewal. A decentralized production system placed a director-scriptwriter team at the head of each unit. As television became the main source of popular entertainment, the cinema became subsidized by the state. By 1968, production units had become independent and censorship had diminished.

The Czech New Wave crested in the period between 1963 and 1967, winning international prizes and even Academy Awards. Although some nations in the Soviet sphere disapproved of the new Czech films, elsewhere they were almost as influential as the Nouvelle Vague.

The younger directors, most of them graduates of the film school FAMU, made their entry with short films in the early 1960s. All the filmmakers knew Italian Neorealism, the Polish School, and the French New Wave, and all to some degree felt the effects of Direct Cinema. But, like most new waves, the Czech phenomenon can only loosely be considered a stylistic movement. For the most part filmmakers shared only conditions of work, thematic concerns, and an urge to move beyond Socialist Realist formulas.

One tendency was toward an art-cinema realism. Jaromil JireS’s The Cry (1963), often considered the first manifestation of the Czech New Wave, used nonactors and Direct Cinema technique to explore the life of a couple expecting a baby. Ewald Schorm’s Courage for Every Day (1964) and Return of the Prodigal Son (1966) owed more to Antonioni in their probing of the problems of the middle-class professional.

Jiff Menzel, who found international success with Closely Watched Trains (1966) and Capricious Summer

(1967), took to an extreme the shifting of tone that

20.63 The final shot of Intimate Lighting: obstinate eggnog.

Neorealism made a major principle of postwar cinema. In Closely Watched Trains, Menzel mixes solemn issues with erotic jokes, satire on authority, and moments of sheer absurdity. The film shifts instantly from mocking the young hero’s petty ambitions to appreciating his courage, however inadvertent, in participating in partisan sabotage. Individual images display reflexive wit (20.62).

The single Czech feature made by Ivan Passer presents a gentler blend of comedy and social criticism. A sketch of the reunion of two musicians, Intimate Lighting (1965) contrasts city and country manners, amateur and professional music making, and traditional and modern conceptions of women’s roles. The fragmentary incidents have a muted pathos and humor: a hen hoping to hatch a car, hosts and guests patiently trying to drink eggnog that will not leave their glasses (20.63).

Milos Forman was also influenced by Neorealism and Direct Cinema, but his films present more caustic social criticism than do those of Menzel and Passer. His first feature, Black Peter (1963), centers on a teenager similar to Menzel’s Milos. Barely holding down a job, constantly at odds with his father, clumsily seeking romance, Peter becomes a comic emblem of confused Czech youth. In the first half of Loves of a Blonde (1965), Forman focuses with cruel hilarity on the effects of an army unit assigned to a factory town where women vastly outnumber men. In the second half, the heroine pursues a traveling piano player to Prague, where she learns that neither he nor his parents care for her. The film’s grim undertones blend with Forman’s satire of meaningless work and official morality.

At the center of Black Peter and Loves of a Blonde are long seriocomic scenes of couples flirting at a dance. In The Firemen’s Ball (1967), Forman builds an entire plot around such a situation. Concentrating on the single evening of a party honoring a retiring fire chief, Forman does not develop characters in depth. Instead, he fills his film with incisive running gags and revelations of human vanities. As the ball goes on, prizes are stolen, an impromptu beauty contest creates a scandal, couples make love, and

20.65 Harsh Direct Cinema techniques rendering the boys’ escape in Diamonds of the Night.

20.66 The central fantasy of the empty tramcar in Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night.

20.64 The long lens picks out details in documentary fashion (The Firemen’s Ball).

20.67, 20.68 In Something Different, Vera’s meeting with the bike boy cuts to another vertical and centered shot in Eva’s practice session.

An old man’s home burns down. Stylistically, The Firemens Ball exemplifies the emerging worldwide tendency to use long lenses and documentary techniques to film staged material (20.64). Forman’s portrait of socialist society, with its frustrated sexuality, incompetent bureaucracy, and petty pilfering, drew torrents of criticism.

Besides impulses toward satiric realism, there were efforts to find a more formally complex approach on the model of Resnais, Fellini, or Robbe-Grillet. Jan Nemec’s first feature, Diamonds of the Night (1964), takes as its situation two young men’s escape from a train carrying them to a concentration camp. This incident, a likely basis for a Socialist Realist war film, triggers an exercise in 1960s modernism. The physical frenzy of the boys’ flight is rendered via documentary techniques: hand-held camera, high-contrast cinematography (20.65), and a sound track dominated by gasping and thrashing noises. NemeC goes on to interrupt the action with fragmentary, jumbled flashbacks that mix indiscernibly with fantasy scenes (20.66).

If Diamonds of the Night owes something to Hiroshima man amour, NemeC’s next film, Report on the Party and the Guests (1968), echoes Last Year at Marien-bad. As if to compensate for the virtual absence of dialogue in Diamonds of the Night, NemeC fills this film with talk—the empty absurdities of bourgeois life. These are only the prelude to a symbolic critique of a Stalinist police state. Banned upon completion and released two years later, Party and the Guests proved to be the most controversial film of Czech New Cinema.

The New Wave pushed toward even purer fantasy. In Vojtech Jasny’s Cassandra Cat (1963), a magical cat wreaks havoc when its special eyeglasses turn people different colors. Jan Schmidt’s End of August in the Hotel Ozone (1966), about survivors of an atomic war, also became an abstract political allegory. NemeC’s third feature, Martyrs of Love (1966), consists of a trio of three surrealistic tales on the border between fantasy and reality. In a remark that would have provoked the wrath of Communist officials a few years before, NemeC summed up the attitude of many Czech filmmakers: “The director must create his own world, a world independent of reality. ”10

The work of Vera Chytilova partakes of several of these trends. Her Something Different (1963) intercuts the lives of Eva, a gymnast who trains arduously, and Vera, a bored housewife. Since Eva and Vera never meet, the viewer is obliged to compare their situations. Chyti-lova also links the stories through film style. The piano music accompanying Eva’s training is heard over scenes of Vera’s life, while shots in one story graphically resemble those in another (20.67, 20.68). Eva’s story is filmed in a modified Direct Cinema style, while Vera’s is presented as a more conventional fiction, setting up an interplay between two trends in the Czech New Wave itself.

With Daisies (1966), Chytilova moves into symbolic fantasy, satirizing a society of consumption and waste. Like Something Different, the film concentrates on two women, but now their personalities are robotically identical. Taking them through a string of sight gags and escalating bouts of eating and mayhem, Chyti-lova mocks female stereotypes when special effects reduce the heroines to cut-outs and pin-ups (20.69).

Menzel, Passer, Forman, Nemec, and Chytilova were the most widely known filmmakers of the New Wave, but many others played a role in reviving Czech production. During 1966 and 1967, the government attempted to retighten cultural policy. Authorities attacked liberal writers and banned several films, including Daisies and Report on the Party and the Guests. The year 1968, an important benchmark in cinemas around the world, would put the Czech New Wave to a crucial test.

Yugoslavian New Film Since 1948, Yugoslavia had evolved its own nationalistic, market-based version of socialism. In the years 1960 to 1961, and 1966 to 1967, workers’ councils gained more power over industrial production, and this tendency benefited cinema workers. A revised film law (1962) gave regional republics greater autonomy in filmmaking and allowed filmmakers to create independent enterprises. Such companies could compete for generous state subsidies. Soon the number of production units tripled.

These conditions encouraged Yugoslavia’s Novi film (“New Film”). Influenced by Neorealism, the Nou-velle Vague, and recent eastern European cinemas, young directors advocated experimenting with film form in the name of socialist humanism. As in other countries, filmmakers and critics wrote for periodicals and translated articles from foreign journals.

The peak period of New Film, from 1963 to 1968, revealed active groups in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana. Two directors had particularly strong influence outside Yugoslavia.

Aleksandar PetroviC, whose Two (1961) helped launch New Film, represented an “intimate cinema” that examined personal problems in contemporary society. His Days (1963) portrays the empty life of a young urban couple. Three (1966) is a triptych of World War II stories. PetroviC called for “personal films” that “claimed the right to subjective interpretations of the lives of individuals and society, the right to ‘open metaphors,’ leaving room for viewers to think and feel for themselves.”11

20.69 Daisies: the interchangeable heroines as disassembled parts.

20.70 Armed with a knife, the protagonist enters the mattress-stuffing room at the climax of I Even Met Happy Gypsies.

PetroviC’s most widely known film, I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967), isan open-ended study of a tough gypsy merchant of goose feathers whose romantic involvement with two women leads him to murder (20.70). Petrovic relies on long lenses and hand-held shots, and he uses nonactors speaking their various native languages. The overall effect is of pseudo-documentary realism in the portrayal of an oppressed minority.

Far more freewheeling, close to the flamboyant experimentation of the Czech fantasists, are the works of Dusan Makavejev. Makavejev’s first feature, Man Is Not a Bird (1965), announced his penchant for deflating the pretentions of politics with earthy humor. In one scene, lovers copulate to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, played for the edification of workers. In Love Affair, or the Tragedy of a Switchboard Operator (1967) he utilizes a collage form which owes something to Resnais and

Godard but which is treated with Makavejev’s bawdy humor. While Chytilova’s Something Different crosscuts two simultaneous lines of action, Makavejev alternates the progress of a love affair with flashforwards that show the affair’s grisly outcome. The film also includes newsreel footage and lectures on criminal behavior. The viewer learns quickly that the affair ends in the death of Isabella. But which of her two lovers killed her? The film mixes gruesome scenes (an autopsy, a search for rats) with racy comedy and satire on socialist ideals.

At one level, Makavejev’s next film, Innocence Unprotected (1968), is a Direct Cinema inquiry into the life of Aleksic Dragoljub, a professional acrobat who also made the first Serbo-Croatian sound movie. Interviews with Aleksic and his surviving collaborators are interrupted by intertitles, newsreels, and extracts from the original film (also called Innocence Unprotected). Makavejev further “decorates” the found footage with tinting, toning, hand-coloring (Color Plate 20.4), and ironic musical accompaniment. The collage strategy allows Makavejev to mock Nazi and Communist politics, satirize show business, celebrate naive filmmaking, and pay tribute to the national pride expressed in Aleksic’s “very good old film.” Through their collage form, Love Affair and Innocence Unprotected create the sort of “open metaphors” Petrovic had called for in New Film.

New Cinema in Hungary The French New Wave had a strong influence on Hungarian cinema. As one filmmaker put it, “Everybody went to Paris to see Truffaut’s and Godard’s films....At the time, people imitated them but that was liberating.” 12 Such influences would not have had much consequence, however, without favorable production circumstances.

As the political scene liberalized and television became more popular, production became decentralized. In 1958, the Bela Balazs studio (named after the pioneer film theorist and scriptwriter) was created to give graduates of the film academy a chance to make shorts and first features. In 1963, the industry adopted the Polish “creative film unit” system, which assigned each director a place in a unit but also allowed him or her to propose a project to another unit. The units were coordinated by MAFILM, which also allocated studio facilities. The industry’s reorganization yielded an output of twenty or more films per year, twice the 1950s average.

Like other new cinemas, Hungary’s included two generations. In the early 1960s, older directors such as Karoly Makk, Zoltan Fabri, and Istvan Gaal seized new opportunities. Most widely seen was the work of Mik-los Jancso, who made his first feature in 1958, when he was thirty-seven, and who achieved fame with the films he made after he turned forty (see box).