Russian Cinema

I

Introduction

Russian Cinema, historical development of the cinema in Russia. The first demonstration of the Lumière Cinématographe in Russia, in 1896, prompted Maksim Gorky to write the most famous of all first reactions to film: 'Last night I was in the Kingdom of the Shadows...A world without colour and sound...Grey rays of sunlight in a grey sky, grey eyes in a grey face, leaves as grey as cinder. Not life, but the shadows of life.' Despite such misgivings moving pictures soon became fashionable, with Tsar Nikolay and his court taking an interest, as well as famous writers such as Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Blok, and composers such as Aleksandr Glazunov. All films were imported or made by foreigners before 1907, when the St Petersburg photographer Aleksandr Drankov attempted to film Boris Godunov by Aleksandr Pushkin. His next effort, Stenka Razin (1908), is the earliest surviving Russian fiction film.

Russian production over the next ten years was dominated by Drankov and his rival Aleksandr Khanzhonkov. Historical and literary subjects were soon outnumbered by sensational bandit tales and harrowing melodramas. The leading directors, Iakov Protazanov, Vladimir Gardin, and Yevgeni Bauer, developed a slow, pictorial style that allowed such stars as Ivan Mozzhukhin and Vera Kholodnaya to project a tragic intensity. Although Russian audiences generally preferred unhappy endings, bawdy comedy also flourished, until World War I gave Russian cinema a new patriotic theme.

II

Post-Revolution Cinema

When the revolution began in February 1917, film-makers quickly took advantage of relaxed censorship to tackle previously banned religious and political subjects, such as Tolstoy’s Father Sergius (Protazanov, 1918) and The Revolutionary (Bauer, 1917). However, as civil war spread after the October revolution, many producers moved first to the Crimea before emigrating to Europe and the United States. The nationalization of the film industry in 1919 by Vladimir Lenin did not restrict private production, but made the state responsible for rationing scarce supplies and producing agitational short films, which were shown on special propaganda trains and boats.

In 1919 Gardin founded the world’s first state film school and was soon joined by Lev Kuleshov, who taught montage as a radical new way of assembling film from its basic components—a similar theory to that of the Constructivist artists. Among Kuleshov’s pupils were the future leaders of the Soviet montage school, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergey Eisenstein. Another early influence was the newsreel editor Dziga Vertov (Denis Kaufman), who proclaimed the purity of unstaged documentary (“kino eye”) observation over acted cinema.

Soviet cinema developed rapidly after 1924 in two main directions. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko used montage to create a dynamic new visual language in films such as The Battleship Potemkin (1925), The Mother (1926, an adaptation of Gorky's novel), and Arsenal (1929), which were internationally admired even as they incurred political censorship. At home, the Mezhrabpom-Rus studio invited Protazanov back from exile and under his leadership launched a popular series of progressive melodramas and satirical comedies. But until the end of the 1920s, Russian audiences watched mainly imported American and German films, while Soviet classics were hailed abroad as examples of a new art.

Political censorship had started at the end of the 1920s when Stalin ordered the role of Trotsky to be cut entirely from Eisenstein’s October (1928). The comparatively late development of sound technology came midway through the first Five-Year Plan in 1931 and, although at first resisted by the montage group, led to cinema becoming a higher state priority. Under Boris Shumyatsky there were grandiose plans for a “Soviet Hollywood” in the Crimea. Chapayev and The Youth of Maxim (both 1934) were praised as examples of the new doctrine of Socialist Realism, Grigory Aleksandrov’s jazz-influenced musical The Happy Guys (1934) was commended for its entertainment value, while Dovzhenko’s Siberian adventure story Aerograd (1935) found favour with Stalin because it dealt stirringly with Soviet development of the Far Eastern part of the USSR.

Stalin’s increasing interference in production, which included actors portraying him in many films after Lenin in October (Romm, 1937), soon threatened to paralyse Soviet cinema. The German invasion in 1941 enabled Soviet film-makers to work more urgently on morale-boosting films, and gave them greater freedom from interference when the studios were evacuated to Kazakhstan. But the post-war years, before Stalin’s death in 1953, saw production reach its lowest ebb, dominated by ponderous biographies and paranoid historical epics, and with many Jewish film-makers driven from the industry.

Khrushchev made cinema a focus of his attack on Stalin in 1956, condemning the false image it had been forced to give of the achievements of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In 1958 The Cranes Are Flying (Kalatozov), the lyrical story of a girl’s loyalty to her soldier fiancé’s memory, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival and proclaimed a new era in Soviet cinema. A new post-war generation of film-makers had been taught at film school by Mikhail Romm to follow their own consciences. The result was a flood of subjective, satirical, and often highly experimental films by Vasily Shukshin, Andrey Tarkovsky—who won the Golden Lion in Venice with Ivan’s Childhood in 1962—Andrey Konchalovsky, Elem Klimov, Larisa Shepitko, and many others, together with new talent from the Soviet republics, such as Eldar and Georgy Shengelaya in Georgia and Sergo Paradzhanov in Armenia. In 1964 a powerful Hamlet, directed by one of the survivors of Stalin’s disapproval, Grigory Kozintsev, made Innokenty Smoktunovsky the first international Russian star.

The reaction came in 1967, after Khrushchev’s forced retirement, when some completed films, such as Askoldov’s sympathetic portrayal of Jewish life in The Commissar, were abruptly banned, and Soviet cinema was urged to preach conformity. But when Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev was held up for five years (from 1966 to 1971) there were international protests. Soviet film authorities were caught between conflicting demands: to earn hard currency from foreign sales, to encourage interest in even controversial Soviet cinema as a form of diplomacy, or to follow what often seemed arbitrary political orders. On the home front, a growing number of films were critical of Soviet society, attacking corruption, immorality, drunkenness, and teenage wildness.

III

Late 20th Century

The early 1980s saw two short-lived Soviet leaders, Andropov and Chernenko, try to reassert control over a cinema that was increasingly acting as the conscience of a faltering empire. In 1986 Gorbachev encouraged the Film-makers Union to reform itself and make public the full history of film shelving. The resulting revelations made a mockery of censorship criteria and helped to fuel demands for radical political change. A series of widely debated films helped focus these demands: Repentance (Abuladze, 1987) showed the Stalinist legacy still alive; Is it Easy to be Young? (Podnieks, 1986) spoke for a generation still haunted by the Afghan War; and Little Vera (Pichul, 1988) revealed the misery of working-class life.

As the USSR disintegrated, film-makers were on hand to record key moments in the struggle, and one was killed while filming a demonstration in Riga. A carnival unreality pervaded fiction films of the period 1988 to 1991 by directors such as Vadim Abdrashitov, Valery Ogorodnikov, and Sergey Ovcharov, with Soviet history often subjected to merciless ridicule. Others, such as Kira Muratova and Aleksandr Sokurov, have continued to use highly experimental and demanding forms to probe the psychic changes involved in the ending of the Soviet era.

By 1991, when the Soviet system finally collapsed, cinema had lost much of its popularity in Russia, with attendances less than a tenth of their 1986 level and few films attracting much attention either domestically or abroad—although, paradoxically, production peaked at a record 300 films in 1990. However, only a small number of these ever reached cinema screens, which were already dominated by American imports. Production subsequently dropped to an average of 30 to 40 features per year, with television and video the main outlets for Russian films.

The established film-makers who continued most successfully towards the close of the 20th century were Nikita Mikhalkov, with his Chekhovian 1930s political exposé Burnt by the Sun (1994), and Sergei Bodrov, who created a timely parable of Russian bewilderment in his hostage-exchange drama The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1995). Mikhalkov’s extravagant historical epic The Barber of Siberia (1998), despite its many flaws, also found a huge audience at home. Traditional Russian self-mockery through comedy made a strong comeback in Aleksandr Rogoshkin’s outrageous drinking satire Peculiarities of National Hunting (1995); in the veteran Georgi Danelia’s mockery of “new Russian” manners, Heads and Tails (1996); and in the films of Dimitri Astrakhan. However, the figure who appeared most often in Russian films of the late 20th century was the gangster—by turns sentimental, sinister, romantic, comic, and brutal—a true sign of the times.

IV

Regeneration

After reaching its lowest point in 1997, a year in which little over a dozen films were made domestically, the Russian film industry began to revive in 2000. Political and economic stability led to a relative rise in prosperity and consumer spending, and there was a consequent boom in cinema attendances. Traditional cinemas, which since the collapse of the Soviet Union had been subject to closure or conversion for other use, began to be replaced by new modern film houses, with the number of cinemas nationally rising from 100 in 2000 to 500 by the end of 2005. Box-office sales, only US$6 million in 1997, had risen to US$331 million by 2005. Homegrown productions, a marginal presence in 1997, had also mushroomed by 2005 to make up over a quarter of Russia's box-office revenue. A new wave of home-produced blockbusters was ushered in by the vampire thriller Night Watch (2004) by the Kazakhstan-born director Timur Bekmambetov, which became Russia's highest-grossing film and a successful European export. It was superseded in turn by Dzhanik Faiziyev's historical drama Turkish Gambit (2005) and the Soviet-Afghan war film Company 9 (2005), directed by Fyodor Bondarchuk (son of Sergei Bondarchuk). A sequel to Night Watch, Day Watch, also broke Russian box-office records in 2006.