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AMERICAN
CINEMA PAPERS
1987 |
SOVIET SPRING GLASNOST IS
FRAGILE For Mykola and Raisа Radenko by Harlan Kennedy If there were an
international Word of the Year competition, the 1987 prize would have to go
to glasnost. Millions of people who a year ago could not tell a glasnost from a glockenspiel now meet the
word daily. It crops up on front pages and news bulletins whenever East meets
West. Glasnost: "openness." Cinema in the Soviet
Union barely comprehends the arrival of glasnost. Approaching the
70th birthday of Lenin's introduction of state censorship – November 9,
1917, when a machinery of centralized control was introduced – filmmakers
have been conditioned to accept state decisions, with the only appeal possible
directly to the presidium itself. The first indications
that the situation might be changing came in May 1986 with the Fifth Congress
of Soviet Union Cinema Workers. This event was opened by no less a luminary
than Mr. Gorbachev, and its main event was the election of the new first
secretary for the Cinema Workers Union, filmmaker Elem Klimov (of Agony, Come and See, and Farewell). Klimov
was voted in by a hand count after being proposed by Aleksandr
Yakovlev, the Communist Party S.U. Central Committee's
secretary for ideology. So whatever else this election was, it was not a
spontaneous gesture from the rank and file. It was clearly, however, a
gesture, since Klimov is the first change at the
top of the filmmakers union in 20 years. His predecessor was CPSU Central
Committee member Lev Kulidzhanov, who many feared
would be glued to his post for life. Not content with
introducing new clout into the union, Gorbachev then overhauled the
leadership of Goskino. This tired old beast is the
Central State Committee for Soviet Cinematography – or Film Ministry, in
essence – with responsibility for script approval, finance, production
planning, and censorship. In January, Goskino's
chairman Filip Yermash fell to Alexsandr Kamshalov. Kamshalov's mission: to signal and effect a change in
attitudes, to supervise the relaxation of 70 years of censorship laws, and to
rescreen and release some of the banned films. The union and Goskino are now planning to work together as equal
voting partners on major movie issues, from the vetting of new movie
projects to the selection for entry of films at foreign festivals. Klimov and 20 colleagues – film directors, screenwriters,
critics, Goskino representatives – set up a
Conflict Commission to draw up a list of films to recommend for release that
were banned or shelved between 1966 and 1980. The controversial Kyra Muratova's 1971 The
Long Goodbye, Gleb Panfilov's 1979 Theme (which,
when shown for the first time in the West, at the Berlin Film Festival, won
top prize), and Tengiz Abuladze's
1984 Repentence, an exposé of Stalinist personality cults, are at last
seeing the light of day. There are two major
problems with glasnost. First, it will be a long time before
non-Soviet observers can know how much the reforms now being implemented
represent through-and-through liberation rather than a promise that cannot
be delivered or, finally, window-dressing for Western eyes. Russian
filmmakers remember the Khrushchev thaw followed swiftly by the Brezhnev winter,
and the Prague spring followed swiftly by "tanks for the memory."
The residual fear in announcing a cultural and political spring is that,
like the fate of Mao Tse-tung's spring of "a
thousand flowers," Gorbachev or the apparatchiks
who
survive him will lop their heads off once they stand up and identify
themselves. One of the obstacles
to greater freedom in the USSR is that repression is an age-old Russian
tradition. Censorship does not date from the storming of the Winter Palace
but goes back over 400 years of autocratic rule, taking in the heyday of
Russian literature on the way. The phenomenon of the "long novel" –
The Brothers Karamazov,
War and Peace, Anna Karenina – was itself a product of
censorship. For in 19th century czarist Russia, books were allowed to be
published unmolested if – and only if – they exceeded a certain length. In modern Soviet
cinema, not even that escape clause has existed. Three factors have made it
probably the most controlled and ideologically "directed" cinema in
the world. Every movie script must be approved by one of the State Cinema
Committees set up in each of the 15 republics. "It is they who make the
final decision on it," Georgian director Georgi
Shengelaya explained to me recently. "In
judging the project's suitability, they take into account its artistic
quality, its commercial potential, and its ideological content." Also, the state has
complete control over a movie's distribution, deciding how wide or narrow its
release will be. There are three categories, ranging from nationwide release
in big theaters to minority club distribution, sometimes confined to Moscow
alone, for films like Tarkovsky's or Paradjanov's. Finally, the state has the option of
banning a movie completely, and of refusing to give a green light to any
other films from its maker. There are apologists
for this system who see no significant difference between the ideological
pressures of filmmaking in the USSR and the commercial pressures of Western
cinema. "There's no such thing as freedom in any film
industry," claims Soviet emigré director Andrei Konchalovsky. "Filmmaking
requires an enormous amount of money, and it doesn't matter if that money is
state money or corporate money. People who pay for the music order the tune.
It's the censorship of power or money." If there is a
difference in kind between the random market prejudices and preferences of
studios or producers in the West and the monolithic ideological commandments
operating in the USSR, it also involves when, at what point, the filmmaker
feels the clamp – before or after a film's realization. The only
"random" element is which political regime in the USSR happens to
be in power when a filmmaker wants to make or release his film. For even if
lucky enough to get a movie with a potentially troublesome subject made, a
filmmaker can still find that Soviet history has stolen a march on him by the
time he's seeking to distribute the film – as Konchalovsky
himself found out with Asa's Happiness, his only film to be banned in the Soviet Union. "It was the
second film I made; it was never released. Or, rather, it was released but
just on three screens, in clubs, for three days. It was politically
unacceptable. It was a story of peasants speaking quite "open"
language – dirty, colloquial – and they talked about concentration camps,
prisons, Stalin times, and things like that. It wasn't a dissident picture;
it was just reality. But I was unlucky with the timing: I was late by two
years. When it was due to come out, Khruschchev had
just been replaced by Comrade Brezhnev, and the `thaw' had started to get a
little frozen." Konchalovsky's response, during the
rest of his film career inside Russia, was to stick mainly to patriotic
themes (Siberiade),
or to Party-approved masterworks from great literature (Uncle Vanya,
A Nest of Gentlefolk). In the latter tendency, he comes
uncomfortably close to the Bondarchuk Syndrome: a
tendency to shore up Soviet self-esteem by annexing pre-Soviet literary
classics (in Sergei Bondarchuk's
case War and Peace, Boris Godunov) and processing them into
movies whose uninflected fidelity guarantees instant Party approval. It also
guarantees instant inertia; Masterpiece Theatre Soviet-style. Other filmmakers –
notably Andrei O Tarkovsky, Sergei Paradjanov, and Otar Ioseliani – have a
different riposte to the dangers of censorship and ideological pressure. They
search for personal, autobiographical, or folk-cultural settings and
subjects, ones that stand apart from political or propagandist connotations
and at the same time avoid the deadening imprimatur of literary adaptation.
They do not say yes to the Soviet cultural-historical hegemony, nor do they
say no. They merely, in a phrase beloved of Tarkovsky,
"drink from their own glasses." In a country that forbids outright
dissent, making determinedly personal films is as close as most artists can
get to defying the state, unless they want to be locked away. Even these filmmakers
sometimes flirt with subjects that are overtly subversive. In his native
Georgia, Ioseliani made Songthrush
and Pastorale, films full of an off-kilter poetry and wry comedy. (Ioseliani looks like Jacques
Tati and makes films to match.) He then went to
Paris in 1983 to make Les Favoris De La Lune, a surreal
black comedy about art forgery, prostitution, crime, and terrorism. He has an
intriguing answer to the question "Why go to Paris to make a film like
this?" "I wanted to look
at the pure play of these market energies in a country where they freely
happen. You cannot make a film about fraud or corruption or prostitution in
a country where they are forbidden or where, in theory at least, they do not
exist. So the idea to make a spectacle of human nature in its anarchic side
is muddied by the fact that you must argue first that these things happen.
In the West, even when they are illegal, people are quite open that they
exist." Invidious moral
comparisons made by the East about life in the West are one of the classic
tools of Soviet censorship: Life is corrupt and/or corrupting in the West –
including, of course, the West's movies. In his book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky
recalls his student days at Moscow's Soviet Institute of Cinematography:
"We didn't see enough films (and now, I understand, institute students
see even fewer), because teachers and those in authority were afraid of the
baneful influences of Western films.... Of course, this is absurd: How can
anyone bypass contemporary world cinema and still become a professional? The
students are reduced, as it were, to inventing the bicycle." Paradoxically, looking
at films by Tarkovsky or Paradjanov,
you think they did invent the bicycle. They did create a new kind of
cinema, with a style of imagery and narrative – surreal, oneiric,
poetic – unlike anything being created in the West. The
censorship-vs.-freedom debate never lacks for those who argue that it does
the artists good to have to invent the bicycle.
These
crusaders for the fecund influence of oppression on a culture point to the
imaginative use of allegory in censorship-ridden countries. If you cannot
say something directly, disguise it: say it in parables. The trouble with
allegories is that over time their once clear subtext, and even some of their
urgency, fades. In Soviet cinema, allegory scarcely exists as a force worth
reckoning with. Occasional controversial movies are made, like Elem Klimov's initially banned film
about Rasputin, Agony, which could be construed as a portrait of present
oppression disguised as past oppression. But most such films could equally
validly be construed as a portrait solely of past oppression, in which case,
far from subverting or criticizing the present, they shore up the status
quo by implying how much worse things were. This skepticism could
also be applied to the spate of movies about the Stalin era, now being thawed
out in the era of glasnost. Do they represent self-criticism or
self-congratulation? Sometimes, the past
clearly is used to invoke the splendors of the national character – both
now and then. World War II is a favorite stomping ground in Soviet
cinema. In Bondarchuk's They Fought for Their
Country, or in Larissa Shepitko's The Ascent, or Klimov's
Come and See, there
is no hint whatsoever that the struggles of Russians against Nazis has
reflective irony in the restrictions imposed within the Soviet Union. For Adolf Hitler
can you read Stalin or Brezhnev or Andropov? The real function of these films
is to keep reminding people, inside and outside the USSR, that Russia was
then, and essentially is now, a country of Good
Guys fighting on the Right Side. (Western filmmakers may question that
assumption, but rather rarely do they take the Nazis' side.) When state propaganda
and dissident parable prizefight each other in Soviet cinema, it's hard to
find any clear instances when parable wins out. And the most original and
imaginative movies of all – those of Tarkovsky and Paradjanov – spar away outside this arena altogether. Not that even
aloofness keeps them safe. For the ultimate menace of censorship is that it
does not always confine itself to political-ideological matters. It can seek
out other margins and comers where new thought or imaginings are being born.
For the new can itself be a danger: an energy for change in a society where
change is the enemy. With the recent death
of Tarkovsky, Sergei Paradjanov is almost certainly the filmmaker with the
most original vision now working in the Soviet Union. Yet his career has been
strewn with obstacles and interruptions. In the Sixties, he made two of the
most imaginative Soviet films ever: Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors and
The Color of Pomegranates. After completing the second, the life of a
poet told in richly symbolic tableaux and an attempt virtually to write a
new hieroglyphic language for the cinema, Paradjanov
was unable to work for another 14 years. For most of that time he was in
prison on an obscure cluster of charges, of which the only one identified for
Western reporters was homosexuality (a punishable offence in the USSR). Soviet directors I
have quizzed about Paradjanov's punishment –
including his fellow Georgians, Georgi and Eldar Shengelaya – call it a tragic
interlude while maintaining it had nothing to do with his films. Yet those
films have had to struggle desperately for exposure inside Russia, despite
acclaim outside, and a recent Moscow radio program investigated the vicissitudes
surrounding the release – or virtual non – release-of his latest film, The
Legend of Suram Fortress. The program announced
that it had received letters complaining of the unavailability of Paradjanov's film. "Has this film," one letter
asked, "like Paradjanov's other works, really
disappeared without a trace?" The program's presenter, having done some
detective work, discovered that only 61 prints exist for the whole USSR
(compared to several thousand for most movies). He contacted Valeny Viktorovitch Markov, head
of the chief directorate for the provision of cinema facilities, and asked
why. Markov replied curtly, "The film has not been
popular with audiences. If the filmgoer doesn't see Legend of Suram Fortress, he won't be missing
anything." The criterion of
audience appeal is a persuasive one. If a director like Paradjanov
is not likely to have filmgoers storming the turnstiles by the millions –
and indeed he isn't – why bother to give him a large release? But what the
program discovered is that his films are not even getting through to the
film clubs, where Paradjanov would be assured of a
following. The president of one regional film club said that not only had Legend
of Suram Fortress not been shown in his
town but he had not seen a single Paradjanov film. Interviewer: "What have you
heard about this director?" Club president: "I've heard his
films are compulsory viewing." The club, he
explained, puts on films "commonly regarded as difficult" and tries
to show that these works "get easier somehow with the passage of
time." They are "perhaps a little ahead of their time compared with
the stock perceptions that are foisted on us by the run of films whose
artistic language could be termed elementary." It is important to
discuss these films, he said, because otherwise they will be made completely
unavailable for "lack of interest." So which comes first,
the lack of audience interest or lack of the film? One certain way to
freeze the growth of a culture is to use the congenial-sounding reason that a
work is "difficult" as a pretext to spare audiences the trouble of
seeing it. Thus the easy and familiar are institutionalized, the new and
strange are ostracized, and the complainers will remain in a manageable
minority. The chill of censorship
in the Soviet Union is ingeniously multifold. (1) Your film may not get
funded if it is not ideologically acceptable. (2) If it is funded and made,
it may not get released. (3) If it is released, it may be to so small an audience
that the fires of discussion and enthusiasm can never spread. One kind of sentiment
keeps recurring in conversation with Soviet directors. It is spoken
matter-of-factly and ungrudgingly, as if it were a natural law of human
life. "Every director has his own censor in his own head," says Otar Ioseliani. "You know
how far you can go and what you can say," reflects Andrei Konchalovsky. And, "Naturally
you do not include things that are ideologically unacceptable," per Georgi Shengelaya. The axiomatic quality
of these remarks is their most chilling aspect. It is as if most Soviet
filmmakers believe this is the way of the world, not just of the USSR. When glasnost
comes to Soviet cinema, it will be a matter not just of thawing the icy
grip of political censorship and the machinery of state control, but also of
removing the censor in the soul. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED
IN THE JUNE 1987 ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT. ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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