The German invasion of June 1941 produced an immediate crisis of national survival and led to a four-year ordeal for the Soviet population, eventually costing the lives of approximately 20 million Soviet citizens. All major industries were pressed into emergency service after June 1941, including cinema. But the initial military situation also disrupted the film industry's operations. The two major production centers, Leningrad and Moscow, soon came under threat from the German army. Much of the Moscow film community and production infrastructure was evacuated to the east. A makeshift production facility went up in Alma Ata in Kazakhstan. Leningrad remained under daily bombardment for more than two years, and key film factories located in the city sustained serious damage. The army conscripted 250 experienced camera operators to make front-line newsreels, and nearly 20 percent of them died in combat. Veteran filmmakers such as Dovzhenko took military commissions and served the effort by producing propaganda documentaries.
As an immediate response to the crisis, the industry rushed out a series of "Fighting Film Albums" ( boevye kinosborniki ), short, topical films that combined documentary and scripted materials. Each episode offered a clear, pointed message on the importance of contributing to the war effort. Twelve such propaganda pieces were released in 1941 and 1942 while the industry regrouped. Throughout the remainder of the conflict, film resources went primarily to war-related documentaries and newsreels. Between 1942 and 1945 the industry released only seventy feature films. Most of their stories were set in the present and promoted the theme of national resistance to the German invaders. Characteristic of this trend was the emotional drama Raduga ( The Rainbow , Mark Donskoi,1944), the tale of a Russian peasant woman who is captured and mercilessly tortured by the enemy but who never betrays her country during the ordeal.
One of the leading figures of the post-World War II Russian cinema, Elem Klimov's influence was felt as both a filmmaker and as a film industry reformer who helped guide his nation's cinema through the transition to democratization and privatization in the late Soviet era. Born and raised in a family of Communist Party members, Klimov eventually became a critic of the Soviet system, in part because his work often ran afoul of Soviet censors, and also because he championed the reform movement that helped end party control over the arts.
After studying aviation in the 1950s, Klimov was able to enter cinema during the post-Stalin "thaw," which opened up new opportunities for young filmmakers. He studied at the national film academy VGIK and began his film career in the early 1960s as part of a talented "new wave" generation that included Andrei Tarkovsky, Vasily Shukshin, and Klimov's own wife, Larisa Shepitko. His early comic satires, Dobro pozhalovat, ili postoronnim vkhod vospreshchyon ( Welcome, or No Trespassing , 1964), and Pokhozhdeniya zubnogo vracha ( Adventures of a Dentist , 1965), targeted Soviet authoritarianism, and their releases were delayed by nervous censors. His historical drama Agoniya ( Agony ), on the final days of the czarist era, was completed in 1975 but not released until 1984.
Klimov's work took a dark turn after the death of his wife, Larisa Shepitko, in a car accident in 1979, cutting short her brilliant film career. He directed a documentary tribute to her, Larisa (1980), and he took over and completed her unfinished project Proshchanie s Matyoroy ( Farewell , 1983), a sad tale about the destruction of an ancient village and the relocation of its residents as a byproduct of industrial development. This film too was nearly banned by Soviet authorities, who disagreed with its warning about the environmental costs of progress. Klimov's most severe work was his masterpiece, the relentlessly grim war film Idi i smotri ( Come and See , 1985). Set in Belarus during the Nazi occupation, the story concerns a sensitive boy who lives through the war's turmoil and atrocities and becomes jaded and hardened by the experience.
Klimov completed no other films in the last two decades of his life. He turned to political activism in 1986, becoming First Secretary of the Union of Filmmakers and a leading spokesman for the Russian film community. In that role he was instrumental in implementing changes supported by the reformist regime of Mikhail Gorbachev under the banner of artistic "openness" ( glasnost ). Klimov's efforts helped end bureaucratic control over creative affairs in cinema and secured the release of previously banned films. He left office at the end of the decade to resume his filmmaking career, hoping to adapt Mikhail Bulgakov's classic novel The Master and Margarita (translated edition released in 1967). He never finished that ambitious project, in part, ironically, because the film privatization process that he championed actually caused the Russian film industry to retrench in the 1990s.
Agoniya ( Agony , 1975/1984), Idi i smotri ( Come and See , 1985)
Vronskaya, Jeanne. Young Soviet Film Makers . London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972.
Woll, Josephine. "He Came, He Saw: An Overview of Elem Klimov's Career." Kinoeye 4, no. 4 (2004).
Vance Kepley, Jr.
Fewer historical films were included in wartime production plans, but this genre did yield at least one masterpiece, Eisenstein's Ivan Groznyi I ( Ivan the Terrible, Part I , 1944). Conceived in 1941 as an epic trilogy on the Russian czar most admired by Stalin, it was produced
under war conditions at the Alma Ata facility. Eisenstein again collaborated with Prokofiev on an operatic score for this lavish production. Part I of the project was completed in 1944 and released to much acclaim in January 1945. With the war still under way, it was treated in the official Soviet press as a history lesson on the importance of Russian unity in a time of national crisis.
After the German surrender, the film industry took stock of wartime losses and looked toward rebuilding. The war had taken a hard toll. Approximately twelve percent of all persons who had been employed in the movie industry in 1941 perished during the conflict. Much of the cinema infrastructure had been in the western regions of the USSR, the areas most affected by the fighting. Over half of the USSR's movie theaters were put out of operation by 1945 because of battle damage. Responding to the crisis, the Soviet government allocated 500 million rubles to invest in the cinema infrastructure over five years (1946–1950), and postwar economic planning supported the recruitment and training of new personnel. The rebuilding program yielded quick results, and by 1950 the Soviet film industry's personnel and productive capacity actually exceeded pre-1941 levels.
Yet even as the industry grew in material capacity, figures on annual feature film releases fell to all-time lows. Each year annual production plans confidently predicted the release of eighty to a hundred features, and each year the actual figures proved paltry. Only twenty features were released in 1946; that number dropped to eleven by 1950, and to just five by 1952. This bizarre situation was caused by a draconian episode in the cultural politics of Stalinism. In the late 1940s the arts in general and cinema in particular came under intense Communist Party scrutiny, during what proved to be the single most repressive moment in the cultural history of Russia. A 1946 party decree ordered the banning of several new films, including Eisenstein's Ivan Groznyi II ( Ivan the Terrible, Part II , released in 1958), for alleged flaws, and then announced the party would not permit future films to go forward unless they passed the most rigorous examination. This gave rise to an official "theory of masterpieces" in postwar Soviet cinema; whereas very few films would be released, each film approved for release after such exacting review would be, by definition, a masterpiece. This harsh environment meant that most films that passed muster simply embraced party ideology and Stalinist idolatry. Characteristic of this was Padenie Berlina ( The Fall of Berlin , Mikheil Chiaureli, 1949), a bloated war drama in which Stalin is credited with making one brilliant military decision after another, thereby defeating the Germans and saving the nation.
In this restrictive cinema environment, Soviet movie audiences had few choices, but they kept attending movies. Spectators would watch every new feature, often more than once, and they had the chance to see rereleases of past favorites such as Chapayev . The meager cinema menu of the late-Stalin era was enhanced by a curious addition, however: so-called trophy films ( trofeinye fil'my ) became available to Soviet audiences after 1945 and proved to be quite popular. These were Western-made features confiscated from Germany after the Nazi surrender. Most were German, but some were from other nations, including the United States. They went into Soviet commercial release with new printed introductions that instructed audiences to take note of the decadent ways of Western capitalism that were on display in the film. Audiences apparently gave such disclaimers little heed; the films provided welcome glimpses into foreign cultures at a time when the state otherwise forbade contact with the West.
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