Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
28
The Russian Silver Screen
An excellent way to prepare for your Russia trip would be to watch at least one
movie from the Soviet era and one movie made since then. There are few bet-
ter ways to glimpse how the country has changed over the past generation.
Soviet filmmakers were heavily censored but free of commercial constrictions;
post-Soviet filmmakers face the opposite problem, desperate for money but
free to produce movies as political, tasteless, or shallow as the viewers will bear.
The selection of Russian movies available abroad is limited, and those that are
available are often too dense or tragic for Western audiences, but a few sugges-
tions are listed below.
Russian film in the 20th century mirrored Russian politics more closely than
any other medium. Vladimir Lenin quickly recognized the new “moving picture”
as an excellent propaganda tool. But early filmmakers were crippled by the
devastation to the country's basic infrastructure (including reliable electricity)
wrought by World War I and the ensuing revolution and civil war, and by the
loss of top performers and writers who fled abroad to escape the Communist
regime. Eventually, a new artistic community emerged eager to define Soviet
film as something more experimental than the commercial products coming
out of capitalist America. Sergei Eisenstein was the most well-known of this
group, and his
Battleship Potemkin,
released in 1925, became an international
classic. Short propaganda films known as
agitki
were carried to towns and vil-
lages from Siberia to central Asia to advertise the wonders of modern technol-
ogy—and by extension, of Soviet rule. Communist Party leaders became
increasingly restrictive, however, and the 1930s and 1940s saw few artistic
breakthroughs. The thaw under Khrushchev led to some internationally
acclaimed films, but was followed by 2 more decades of stagnation under
Brezhnev, an era dominated by bland dramas and goofy comedies. Gorbach-
ev's
glasnost
produced some of the best Russian films to date, though most are
pretty grim, reflecting the uncertain state of the USSR and the whole Commu-
nist experiment.
Russian film today is on the upswing, and movie selections look more and
more like those in stable European countries: sci-fi blockbusters packed with
special effects, psychological crime dramas, romantic teen comedies, and eso-
teric art films honored at international festivals. Russian animation—for both
children and adults—has long been a strong genre that tends to be edgier
than western animation, so if you have a chance to see some Russian animated
shorts at a film festival near you, seize it.
2
own works into English. His stylized alle-
gories on art and life include
The Luzhin
Defense,
Invitation to a Beheading,
and his
most notorious novel,
Lolita.
Of Russia's modern writers,
Alexander
Solzhenitsyn
was the most iconic. Impris-
oned in a labor camp in the 1950s for his
dissident views, he emerged even more
determined to fight the Soviet system. His
Gulag Archipelago
chronicled the network
of labor camps in exhaustive and exhaust-
ing detail. He earned a Nobel Prize but
