Russia and Soviet Union



STAGNATION PERIOD: 1969โ€“1985

Russian cultural historians labeled the 1970s and early 1980s a period of stagnation because of the dissipation of creative energy and innovation in the arts. The film industry became more heavily bureaucratized in the 1970s. The industry's planning agency, now known as Goskino, provided sinecure jobs for veteran Communist Party officials who sometimes proved to have little or no expertise in film. They were often at odds with members of the creative community. In a few cases, outside political interference became scandalous, as when the avant-garde director Sergei Parajanov (1924โ€“1990) was arrested in 1974 and released from prison only after the Kremlin responded to foreign pressure. Nevertheless, the era produced aesthetically sophisticated work in areas that may have been considered safe, such as literary adaptations. In his late career, for example, the veteran director Grigori Kozintsev (1905โ€“1973) concentrated on elaborate adaptations of such canonized writers as Cervantes and Shakespeare; this culminated in the release of Kozintsev's magnum opus, Korol Lir ( King Lear ), in 1971, four years before his death.

Some of the most innovative work of the era was done in alternative genres, notably in children's film. A respected practitioner in this genre was Rolan Bykov (1929โ€“1998), who often used his otherwise mild, comic stories about children to explore problems inherent in the Soviet system. His charming 1970 film Vnimanie, cherepakha! ( Attention, Turtle! ) has some gentle fun with the Soviet doctrine of collective action. By the early 1980s, however, Bykov's vision of childhood and the Soviet experience had grown darker. His Chuchelo ( The Scarecrow , 1983) took a harsh view of the extent to which the collectivist ideology had turned into an obsession with social uniformity in the story of a nonconforming school girl who is mistreated by her peers.

ANDREI TARKOVSKY
b. Zavrazhe, Ivanono, Russia, 4 April 1932, d. 28 December 1986

Andrei Tarkovsky remains the most esteemed Soviet filmmaker of the post-World War II era despite having a relatively small body of work. An uncompromising artist and visionary who refused to bend either to Soviet governmental authorities or to commercial considerations, he completed only seven features and one short. His films were years in the making and often faced distribution delays or limited release. Each answered to his personal vision and gave form to the central concern of his own life, the difficulty of sustaining a sensitive, artistic temperament in a harsh world.

After studying music, drawing, and languages, he entered the Soviet film school VGIK in 1954 and completed his diploma film, the short Katok i skripka ( The Steamroller and the Violin ) in 1960. This elegant children's film about a meek young musician who seeks the protective friendship of a Soviet worker anticipates the central theme of Tarkovsky's later features: the conflict between the artist's sensibility and the realities of the modern world. Tarkovsky's austere narratives found their visual complement in a long-take style that stressed the duration of experience. He rejected the montage tradition of classical Soviet cinema and advocated a style that rendered the linear experience of time in lengthy takes and slow, elegant camera movements.

The image of youth coping with external threats carries over to Tarkovsky's first feature, Ivanovo detstvo ( My Name Is Ivan , 1962), a World War II story of an orphaned boy living through the turmoil of war. Tarkovsky's mature work begins with Andrei Rublev (1966, USSR release in 1971), which concerns the tribulations of the great Russian icon painter. Tarkovsky's science fiction allegory Solaris (1972), based on a Stanislaw Lem novel, suggests that modern scientific knowledge is an inferior substitute for creative imagination. His most formally complex film, Zerkalo ( The Mirror , 1975), uses a highly elliptical narrative design to trace out the fragmentary memories and dreamscapes of its dying protagonist, who must reflect on a life of emotional failure. In Stalker (1979), Tarkovsky returns to science fiction in a tale, set in the not-too-distant future, of a journey through a dystopian realm called the Zone.

The motif of the artist's alienation from his own society took literal form in the last phase of Tarkovsky's life and career. Nostalghia , an account of a Russian musicologist living in self-imposed exile from his homeland, was shot in Italy in 1983, and Tarkovsky never returned to the USSR, eventually defecting to the West. He made his last film, Offret ( The Sacrifice , 1986), in Sweden, but its landscape was chosen to resemble Russia, evoking a homesickness that tormented Tarkovsky until his death.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Katok i skripka ( The Steamroller and the Violin , 1960), lvanovo detstvo ( My Name Is Ivan , 1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), Zerkalo ( The Mirror , 1975), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), Offret ( The Sacrifice , 1986)

FURTHER READING

Johnson, Vida T., and Graham Petrie. The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema . Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.

โ€”โ€”. Time Within Time: The Diaries, 1970โ€“1986 . London: Verso, 1993.

Vance Kepley, Jr.

Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the period's movies, cinema remained a strong national institution. The studios thrived in the 1970s, releasing over 125 theatrical features annually. Movie-going remained a vital part of the social routine of Soviet citizens. There was none of the audience decline evident in the United States in the same period, for example, even though the USSR had full television service by the 1970s. Per capita attendance in the USSR was over sixteen movie outings annually, approximately three times the annual attendance rate of Americans.

Andrei Tarkovsky.



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