The Cinema Centaur

The 1960s witnessed the transformation of “film factories” from metaphor to lived reality. Lenfilm’s output rose once more to the levels its predecessor studios had reached in the 1920s, but the conditions of production were now far more complex and demanding, with staffs more than ten times the size. And while the 1960s was an era of optimistic emphasis on the Soviet film industry’s capacity to equal and surpass the world in technological terms, during the 1970s, the conviction took hold that the technological superiority of Western films was of direct relevance to audience share. Increasingly, ambitious filmmakers petitioned Goskino for permission to shoot on Kodak and to use Arriflex cameras; criticism of inferior Soviet film stock and GDR-produced film editing tables mounted, both across the USSR and at Lenfilm itself. Yet investment in studio infrastructure and technology remained at best haphazard, particularly at Lenfilm, which enjoyed less generous support from the center than Mosfilm, but also more limited resourcing than film studios in the capitals of Soviet republics. At the same time, Lenfilm had an unusually diverse, energetic, inventive, and loyal workforce, with corporate values that inspired manual workers and porters as well as “creative” personnel. Hierarchical at some levels, the work culture was egalitarian at others, and the frenetic process of scrambling to finish films in trying circumstances created strong bonds. The chapter explores the various conflicts and contradictions, but also rewards, that this situation generated.

Big Hopes and Trouble, 1961–1969

In 1961, the government bodies responsible for film production (the Ministries of Culture of the USSR and RSFSR) forcibly imposed on a reluctant Lenfilm the complete reorganization of production planning. The old Scripts Department was shut down and three “creative units” set up. This change was pushed through by Lenfilm’s energetic and flamboyant new general director, Ilya Kiselev, who had begun his career as an actor. Of the creative units, the earliest to emerge was the Third Creative Unit, which soon had a role as the flagship of contemporary cinema, a genre heavily promoted during the Thaw. However, the Third Creative Unit ran into increasing trouble as political control tightened after Khrushchev was forced to resign, and in 1969, it was closed down altogether. Yet life was not always calmer in the other units, as witnessed in particular by the difficulties that gripped the Second Creative Unit’s efforts to produce movies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967, and by the problems of the First Creative Unit in establishing its own character and repertoire. At the same time, the general political line at this period, while unpredictable, was not uniformly harsh, as manifested in the conclusion of Leningrad’s Party leader that audiences could “make up their own mind” about a film he disliked.

Private Grief, Public Mourning

Sergei Mikaelyan’s Widows (1976) is a highly unusual war movie because of its focus on civilians and on “postmemory,” the retrospective experience of the aftermath of conflict. Two elderly women campaign against the removal of the remains of two soldiers whom they found in a nearby field during the Great Patriotic War, and the publicity then inspires many people bereaved during the conflict to claim the remains as “theirs.” The chapter traces the origins of the story in a 1970 newspaper article and its slow transition to the big screen, not helped by assessors in the studio and at Goskino who found the material “tasteless.” As the analysis shows, the film raised uncomfortable questions about the significance of war memory in a new and changed society; Widows was to remain an admired movie that never quite made it into the canon.

Trust in Talent

This chapter examines the career of Ilya Averbakh, whose work more than any other director’s came to signify to 1970s audiences the essence of “Lenfilm style.” It contends that a key factor in Averbakh’s easy progress to authority among his elders was his capacity to inspire trust not just by his professional standing within the world of cinema, or his elite Leningrad background, but by virtue of his former professional life as a physician—that is, his membership of a group that enjoyed particularly high esteem from the Soviet population generally. The chapter also traces the resonance of trust in Averbakh’s own films, and particularly, Degree of Risk (which represents a cardiologist) and Monologue, where a scientist’s difficult path to professional rehabilitation is juxtaposed to his increasingly tense relations with his student-age granddaughter.

Pleasure and Danger

Yuly Fait’s A Boy and a Girl (1966) created great controversy while it was being made and in the months leading up to its premiere in Moscow (immediately before which, the movie was pulled from the screen). The chapter contends that the reason for the uproar lay less in the sexual relationship between two teenagers at the heart of the film (which was present in the original script by prominent writer Vera Panova, and had not caused trouble during discussions) than in the alteration of nuance and tone that occurred during the filming, and especially the way in which Fait placed questions of pleasure and sensual gratification at the heart of the narrative.

Cast a Cold Eye

Boris Frumin was perhaps Lenfilm’s most obstinate younger director when it came to the editorial and vetting process, and in the case of The Errors of Youth (1978), the result was a major conflict both with the studio and with Goskino. What appeared to be a harmless script by Eduard Topol turned into a film that resembles a Soviet version of Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! Frumin’s movie provoked outrage, during vetting, with a whole range of bureaucracies, including the army, the Party, and Goskino. After the tragic death of Stanislav Zhdanko, the film’s lead actor, and the emigration from the USSR of Topol, and then Frumin himself, the movie was abandoned before completion and shelved. It was later to become a hit of the perestroika era. This chapter examines the vicissitudes that beset Frumin’s project, many of them related to the insolently detached demeanor of the movie’s hero.

Personal Happiness

Vitaly Melnikov is best known for his film comedies, beginning with the children’s movie, Gruff Visits Bobby (1964), the merry tale of the havoc created when a street dog decides to visit the home of his pampered canine friend. Mother’s Got Married (1969), which portrayed a late teenager trying to adjust to his mother’s recent and unexpected marriage, had a less easily defined emotional register. The film chimed with new views of the status of happiness that had emerged during the Thaw, yet there were also complaints that its central characters were “nothing like the real working class.” This chapter traces the movie’s difficult progress to the screen, and in particular the challenges posed by scriptwriter Yury Klepikov and Vitaly Melnikov’s decision to explore the uncommunicative emotional life of people often ignored in the Soviet cinema.

Socialist Embarrassment

Viktor Tregubovich’s first movie, A Hot July, nearly wrecked his career at the outset, because it was a de-Stalinizing project begun mere months before the deposition of Khrushchev. Released after extensive production delays, the film had been reduced to mere tatters of the original endeavor. But Tregubovich rehabilitated himself with his gentle and offbeat movie about a tank battalion in combat, War Is War, and a series of remarkably diverse projects followed. Go If You’re Going provoked surprise at Lenfilm because it was a film comedy, and thus, his colleagues believed, a departure from Tregubovich’s established style. The laughter it provoked was decidedly uncomfortable, a point remarked (without enthusiasm) in studio discussions. Released after a significant delay, it became the subject of critical comment in a 1979 article by the deputy chairman of Goskino, Boris Pavlenok. Go If You’re Going is perhaps the nearest Lenfilm movie to the socialist “new wave” traditions of directors such as Jan Němec, a tribute to a filmmaking style that had resurfaced after nearly a decade in the cold.

Ludic Love

This chapter discusses the single movie made at Lenfilm by one of the USSR’s most important avant-garde directors, Kira Muratova. As she worked on the script, Muratova transformed a mild and sweet story about a pretty young factory worker, Lyuba, who was in love with two men at once, into a philosophical meditation on love. Yet any aspirations to deep thinking were constantly called into question by the playful nature of the representation. Music-hall effects, comedy repetition, and parodic echoes of Stalin-era official films jostle film noir and citations from new wave. Reactions at Lenfilm were wary, and the collaboration with Muratova ended at one film. But Getting to Know the Wide World remained Muratova’s favorite film even at the end of her life; though she resented the criticism that she got at Lenfilm, the frustration that it generated turned out to be creative.

Fervor and Tenderness

The production of “major films” was an insistent preoccupation of Soviet cinema’s regulatory bodies both at government and at Party levels. A director regarded as particularly successful in this respect was Gleb Panfilov. His 1975 film, May I Speak?, addressed issues of personal responsibility. The balance of public and family duties, which were of enormous importance in political debates at the time the screenplay was written, and its sympathetic portrait of a leading official were reassuring to commentators at Goskino and in Party offices at various levels. Panfilov was, unlike most younger artists at Lenfilm, a member of the Party and valued his parents’ Communist principles. The argument of some post-Soviet commentators—that May I Speak? represents a veiled attack upon its protagonist, Elizaveta Uvarova—is difficult to sustain. Yet Uvarova remains an ambiguous figure, and the treatment of her is enigmatic, not least in terms of gender identities, as the discussion here shows.