Most people are familiar with the "boy loves girl, girl loves tractor" scenario of the Soviet socialist realist movie, even if no one can actually remember seeing one. Actually, except for some of the work produced for home consumption during the Stalin era, most Soviet films are not really like that. That is not to say that they are of a quality to compete with Hollywood for the attention of cinema-going audiences around the world, or for that matter, even of Budapest, Prague, or Warsaw. It is not so much that the films vaunt the merits of the communist system--no one would go to see them if they did--as they appear to ignore its existence. The hardships, the triumphs, and the tragedies of life continue form day to day, irrespective of who the political masters are, apparently. Most of the people depicted on screen appear decent and hard working, trying to cope as best they can with their one and a half room apartments, their unsympathetic bosses (who invariably turn out to be the way they are because they too have too much on their plates), and the dearth of household goods in the stores, a scarcity they complain about and yet accept. (Subject matter perfectly acceptable to the regime, of course.)
International Acclaim
In recent years, other than the works of Andrei Tarkovsky, which appeal largely to the more esoteric film-lovers, the only Soviet movie until the days of glasnost to receive wide international acclaim has been Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1980), which, surprisingly, won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film that year. This film, though pleasant enough, could hardly be said to have been opening new paths, either formally or in terms of subject matter. In fact, it was a typical Soviet movie, heavily sentimental, the telling of the lives of three women and above all distinctively Soviet in its morally uplifting tone. What appealed to Western audiences was the presentation of life-styles that strove to ape the West. The women were attractive, the men handsome and nicely turned out, and the sex scenes, though hardly racy, had something of the sophisticated spiciness reminiscent of the movies of Eric Rohmer. The film is conservative aesthetically and hardly politically radical in its outlook. Life is pretty much all right as it is. If there has to be change, then let it remain in the realm of personal relations. Admittedly, one cannot go too far in advancing that proposition, for Soviet man can still hardly be said to be in a position to decide where he is going to live and work and shop.
Mikhail Gorbachev's arrival on the Soviet scene has meant that, for the time being at least, exposure and denunciation of those disagreeable features of Soviet life for which he himself does not bear any responsibility would carry the official seal of approval. Soviet filmmakers, needless to say, were not slow to catch the drift. Lev Kulidzhanov, who as first secretary of the Filmmakers Union for more than twenty years had set the stolid, pious tone of Soviet movies, was replaced by Elem Klimov in May 1986. A protégé of Alexander Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev's closest confidants and the man most clearly identified with the glasnost program, who in the past had also had some difficulty in getting one or two films released (Rasputin, made in 1975, not shown until 1984,) Klimov wasted no time in enunciating the new line. "The most complex and the hottest issue of our cinematography," he declared, is "the issue of its fundamental, radical perestroika." And the close correlation between what is on the front page of Pravda and what is up on the screen has continued as before. Stalin-bashing has found
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