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.