Movies for the Masses

Film makers must edify as well as entertain

Cinema is for us the most important of the arts," declared Lenin in 1922, and not since Pope Julius ii commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling had the proclamation of a chief of state resulted in such a sunburst of high art. A troika of young film maker-theoreticians--Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko--seized the movie toy and remade it into a sophisticated machine that dazzled the world intelligentsia, even as it instructed the Russian proletariat. As long as the party hierarchy was amused too, all was well. But in 1924 Stalin rephrased the famous dictum, and his diaphanous threat holds to this day: "The cinema is the greatest means of mass agitation. Our problem is to take this matter into our own hands."

There the matter has rested for the past half a century, and the hands of the Soviet film industry's "editors" (censors) can be heavy indeed. The two men who by international critical consensus are the heirs of Soviet film greatness--Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Paradjanov --have been harassed, cajoled and officially criticized. Tarkovsky, best known for the chilling sci-fi parable Solaris (1972), recently was named "People's Artist of the U.S.S.R.," but the film bureaucracy has refused to fund some of his projects, delayed the release of others or exhibited them for only a few weeks in out-of-the-way theaters. Paradjanov astonished Western film buffs with the extravagant lyricism of his Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964), but the state saw him as a troublemaker and sent him to prison--for almost four years.

Paradjanov's more cautious colleagues have referred to him as "kind of mad." It may be equally delirious for Westerners to demand of today's Soviet film makers that they bring to their craft the passionate recklessness of their predecessors. Revolutionary fervor, like first love, passes quickly; in the long run, any marriage of art and the state demands fidelity and fealty. Official Soviet cinema is settling into middle age with all the virtues of a Chekhovian "good wife": it is handsome, thoughtful, often charming and, above all, discreet about the master's excesses and failings.

It is precisely this Chekhovian quality --the rueful romanticism, the generous fatalism, the belief that everyone has his reasons--that permeates the best "approved" Soviet films, and perhaps the spirit of the men and women who make them as well. In the Soviet system, everyone has his function. Some people make films (about 150 features a year from the three major and 20 regional studios). Some people "edit" them (there are often three censors assigned to a production). Some people exhibit them (though theater managers, who have admissions quotas to meet, frequently pair Soviet films with livelier fare from abroad). And some people go to see them (80 million tickets were sold every week in 1977, at an average cost of 50-c- each).

The Soviet public may get to see only bland or self-critical films from the West, but the elite are permitted to study the works of leading film makers from all nations. As a result, the best Soviet movies, whatever their content, have the look and feel of the best European films.

There are directors who, if they worked elsewhere, would surely have achieved international recognition.

Among them is Georgi Daneliya, who made the appealing, comic Autumn Marathon (1979). It is about a teacher-translator trying to balance the requirements of his overextended double career with the equally pressing demands of a suspicious wife and a possessive mistress--a situation familiar to members of the Western bourgeoisie. The movie offers an agreeable insight into the life of the educated, privileged class in the Soviet Union.

Daneliya is working safe terrain here: the romantic comedy. There are other comfortable places for a Soviet director to work--screen adaptations of classic novels and plays, for example. Pictures that show the suffering and steadfastness of ordinary citizens during World War II also win the approval of the editors --and of the public. As the Revolution of 1917--which provided the first Soviet film makers with their great subject--recedes in memory, World War II has replaced it in the country's hagiography.

Nikolai Gubenko's The Orphans (1978) takes place in a state orphanage right after the war. If the institution's staff is seen as rather too noble, the problems of the children--ranging from withdrawal to rebelliousness--are sensitively portrayed. It is a strong and absorbing work.

So is the somewhat ungainly but poetic Siberiada (1979), directed by Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky. The Soviets have lost neither their taste for, nor their skill with, the epic historical drama. Siberiada traces the history of an obscure Siberian village from snowbound primitivism and isolation at the beginning of this century through war and revolution, to the discovery of a great oilfield in the late '60s. Like Dovzhenko before him, Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky has a way of linking a peculiarly Russian feeling for the sacredness of native ground with the developing force of the revolution.

Most-favored-director status goes to Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky's brother Nikita Mikhalkov, 34. His Slave of Love was one of the few recent Soviet films to receive critical acclaim and a measure of box-office success when it was released in the U.S. last year. A touching, gently comic portrait of a movie company on location in 1917, Slave of Love shows a group of innocents trying to avoid being caught up in the revolution. In Five Evenings, Mikhalkov tells the story of a middle-aged man and woman trying to pick up the threads of a romance they were forced to sever during World War II. And in his latest film, Oblomov, he tackles the elusive, lethargic hero of Ivan Goncharov's 19th century masterwork.

Mikhalkov, who recently returned to the U.S.S.R. from a trip to the U.S., sees similarities between the best films of both countries. Says he: "It seems to me that the time has come to return to a type of romanticism--to Chaplin, to films that give people some hope--Breaking Away, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nashville, Paper Moon." But as a Soviet film maker, is he not asked to make cuts in his movies to satisfy the cultural bureaucrats? Mikhalkov shrugs his shoulders. "Of course, that's only natural," he replies. "Whoever pays can call the tune. Here it is from Goskino [the centralized film bureaucracy]; in America it would be the producer. But as far as I am personally concerned, if I have to be financially dependent, I would prefer that I not be dependent on one or two producers but on what is called the fatherland. I just try to do my job as honestly as possible."

The question is whether "honesty" and "fatherland" are, in the U.S.S.R., irreconcilable enemies. Soviet film makers work under many ideological restraints --some subtle, some blatant--that began with a five-year plan set down by Goskino. Like the production schedule of an oldtime Hollywood studio, the code calls for production funds to be divided among pictures in a variety of genres. But the genres in question touch on themes that only an apparatchik could love: tales of young workers and peasants heroically exceeding their quotas.

All scripts must be filtered through an editor, who claims that his desire is merely to "clarify" the writer's aims. Says Mikhail Bogin, an emigre Soviet director: "The editor wonders, 'What can be learned from this film? How does it serve the Soviet people?' He'll probably begin to think, 'I'm afraid. I'm worried.' " He should be, for he will share the blame with the film's creators if something offends someone further up the line --a cultural bureaucrat in one of the republics, or perhaps even the Central Committee in Moscow. Like Stalin before him, Brezhnev has been known to enter these debates. He once got a movie shelved simply by inquiring after a screening, "Who needs it?"

Usually, however, a film is well laundered before the party boss gets to play movie mogul. One director found himself squabbling with censors when he made a comedy about corruption in the wine industry: in one scene a bad barrel was labeled "48," which happened to be precisely the number of years that had passed since the revolution. Was he perhaps implying that the revolution had gone sour too? Another film maker got into trouble when he included a song called Bring Me a Piece of the Moon--during the time that Americans had landed there and the Russians had not. Was he belittling the Soviet space effort? Edward Topol, an emigre screenwriter, once tried to explain a picture about juvenile delinquency to a Soviet official, who said that in his travels round the Soviet Union he had never seen any youthful criminals, so how could they exist? Re-edited and reshot, a new version was permitted to go forth by KGB Boss Yuri Andropov.

This hassling creates a climate of self-censorship and an implicit demand to pretty-up reality. Says Topol: "If you just set up a camera anywhere in the Soviet Union and shoot life as it is, it looks terrible. It jumps out at you from the screen." Yet the directors soldier on. Some search patiently for a historical or fantastical work that will not overstrain the censorious mind. Still others find a style of shooting an approved scene that will change its meaning without altering a word of the preapproved script. A happy ending darkly lit will not, for example, play in quite the way the editors thought it would.

For some directors, the endings are darkly lit. The first director assigned to Slave of Love was a wildly talented young Uzbek named Rustam Hamdamov, the hope of the Soviet film school, who seemed destined to drag this once proud national cinema back to glory. But according to a friend, when the editors saw Hamdamov's lyrical-surreal footage, they fired him and brought in Nikita Mikhalkov to reshoot the film. Hamdamov's art, it seems, no longer appears in state cinemas; it hangs on the walls and in the closets of private homes. At last report, the U.S.S.R.'s most promising director was in Soviet Georgia, working as a painter and dress designer.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.