A crippled secret – Weekend – Kommersant

In late Soviet cinema, the Western world was a territory that was either inviting or threatening, and as a rule, both at the same time. It was a fictitious country, not amenable to depiction by means of Soviet cinema – and at the same time appealing to him.

Text: Igor Gulin

When it comes to the relationship between Soviet cinema and the Western world, two plots immediately appear – arguing and intertwining. The first is a narrative of confrontation, propaganda and counter-propaganda, suspicions and revelations. The second is a narrative of mutual influences and inspirations, delights and obsessions.

Cinema is an international art. It closes itself within boundaries with much greater difficulty than literature or painting, because it always remembers too well its origin. This origin is Western: European and American. From there – technologies, techniques, genres. The great innovators of the Soviet avant-garde were all people of international culture. They did not draw a line of division, but, on the contrary, brought Soviet cinema to the big world. The West occupied an important place in their imagination. The most characteristic figure here is Lev Kuleshov. His paintings about Americans and American life, from The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) to The Great Comforter (1933), despite the satire and denunciation of the vices of capitalism, always look like declarations of love, like a kind of statement to the citizenship of the common homeland of cinema.

The era of late Stalinism, the time of the most severe confrontation between the Soviet Union and the Western world, was not so different in this sense. On the contrary, the demand for anti-American films, for example, made it possible to shoot stylish imitations of Hollywood. Mikhail Romm’s The Russian Question (1947), a thriller about a left-wing journalist who is forced to write propaganda lies about Russia, is a great example.

Through waves of political crises and detentes, the Western world remained a source of attraction for Russian filmmakers throughout the Soviet era. However, the generation of directors that formed in the 1920s, who really felt themselves an organic part of the world film process, gradually left. One of his last centenarians was Sergei Yutkevich. His 1981 denunciation of the petty-bourgeois protests of 1968, Lenin in Paris, is a curious monument to avant-garde conservatism, a claim of forgotten rights to export the revolution that unfolds like a charmingly ludicrous farce.

Generations of authors who came to cinema in the post-war decades, even those who traveled to international film festivals and made friends with foreign colleagues, were carriers of a completely different mentality. They soaked up influences, responded with their films to the films of Bergman and Fellini, Leone and Peckinpah. But the Western world itself seemed to be a much greater mystery to them than it was to their teachers.

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However, he was quite accessible to them. At least – the most privileged of them. In the 60s, 70s and especially the 80s, a lot of co-productions were filmed. Joint projects with Western countries attracted filmmakers, promised unprecedented financial and creative opportunities, but in reality they almost always turned into incomprehensible kitsch. The best example is Tehran-43 by Alov and Naumov with Alain Delon and Truffaut star Claude Jade (1980). However, most films of this kind – Chukhrai’s “Life is Beautiful” (1979), Ryazanov’s “The Incredible Adventures of Italians in Russia” (1974) – are even more cranberry. Even Kalatozov’s virtuoso “I am Cuba” (1964) is a postcard in which magnificent views remain material for a banal poster. Soviet directors were not good at working with real Western texture – both geographical and human, acting. It was as if she did not succumb to the Soviet cinema eye. In “Nostalgia”, another co-production of the early 1980s, Tarkovsky directly shows this inability of the Russian to consider the seemingly so tempting foreign country.

Soviet cinematography was much better at inventing its own West. In his well-known book It Was Forever Until It Was Over, anthropologist Aleksey Yurchak refers to such fiction as the “Imaginary West.” This is a collection of images and stories that form the most important fantasy of a late Soviet person – a fictional country, as if opposing his faded everyday life.

Late Soviet cinema fed this fantasy wonderfully. The main material here was classical literature – and not quite a serious segment of it: the England of Conan Doyle, Stevenson and Jerome, the America of Mark Twain and Mine Reed, the France of Dumas, Jules Verne and frivolous 19th-century operettas like The Straw Hat. This toy, “own” West was perfectly built from improvised props and settled in by your favorite actors. Maslennikov’s series about Sherlock Holmes was the undisputed pinnacle of style here. The cozy bourgeois world of the Victorian era, with loud, but seemingly fake passions, unfrightening crimes, legacies made of glass, was a kind of palliative – a lightning rod of that anxious desire that the modern capitalist West evoked in Soviet people.

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Traces of this desire are scattered throughout films about ordinary Soviet life: packs of Marlboro, imported scarves and lighters, some catalogs and posters. All these were fragments of a fantastic other world. But, of course, Soviet cinema was eager to present it in a general way, to lift the veil. With some frequency, the directors tried to make their own Western film: a political thriller – like “Rafferty” by Semyon Aranovich (1980), a musical – like “June 31” by Leonid Kvinikhidze (1978), a fantastic parable – like “The Flight of Mr. McKinley” by Mikhail Schweitzer ( 1975). All these paintings, very different in aesthetics, have one problem in common.

Late Soviet cinema was an art of extreme scarcity of funds. This applied to material resources, film language, and emotional tone. Asceticism dominated even the most lacquered works. The Soviet Union, as it appeared on the screen, was a sublime territory, sometimes proud of its lack. The capitalist West, on the contrary, was portrayed as a territory of excess, abundance, temptation and threat – a place where the most daring desires are fulfilled, but do not bring good. In this sense, Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” (1979) is the same part of a large metatext about the destructive pursuit of happiness, like, say, Alexander Stefanovich’s comic book based on Mikhalkov’s play “Dear Boy” (1974) about the kidnapping of the sons of an American millionaire and the Soviet ambassador by bandits.

However, it was more difficult to build real capitalism from improvised means than the mythological London of the 19th century. The Soviet film look was too innocent to present something truly shocking. Images of seduction passed from film to film: whiskey, campari and juice (the scriptwriters were sure that if you call the juice an English word, it will immediately get notes of depravity), races and horse races, rock, which was almost always the soundtrack of lust, pantomime on the club stage. The Soviet cinema-West has always remained an absurd trinket. What attracted and frightened, caused anxiety, turned out to be unimaginable (like the wishing room from Stalker, which no one entered). But the anxiety was genuine. Perhaps the most curious manifestations of this anxiety are two films made in a stagnant era about those who nevertheless crossed the line – about defectors.

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The first of them, “Residence Permit” by Omari Gvasalia and Alexander Stefanovich, was published in 1972. This is a story about a Soviet psychoanalyst who decides to stay in an unnamed European country during a tourist trip in order to find a use for his talents. The hero is drawn to the West by a thirst to treat neuroses, but, finding himself in a country where suppressed desires are given the full right to be realized, he discovers a dull, insensitive and cruel world. This film is a strange fusion of quite straightforward agitation and a subtle, Antonioniev-like picture about alienation. The West here is an alluring wrapper, a decoration that conceals emptiness and promises the death of the soul.

Shot 13 years later, Flight 222 by Sergei Mikaelyan is based on the story of Bolshoi Theater artists Alexander Godunov and Lyudmila Vlasova. In 1979, during an American tour, Godunov asked for asylum in the United States and expected his wife to follow suit. Vlasova decided to return to the USSR, but her return turned into four days of negotiations with the participation of Soviet and American authorities, lawyers, doctors, theater functionaries. Throughout this time, the plane with Vlasova on board was denied the right to take off.

Mikaelyan shoots this story as a thriller about the hijacking of an airplane by terrorists, only the agent of terror here is the American state. America itself, however, is practically not shown. She is the outer darkness, the source of mysterious dangers. A husband who betrays his homeland is not a weak neurotic who has gone on about the temptation, like the hero of the “Residence Permit”. He is a man who has done the unexplainable, a werewolf, a black hole. His wife’s only dream is to escape from this evil magic, and her salvation looks like a miracle.

A wonderful director and obviously a sincere patriot, the author of “Prize” and “Widows”, Mikaelyan tries to make a political film, but madness crawls through the cracks of politics. In relation to the picture of Gvasalia and Stefanovich, he raises the stakes: the flight from the USSR is not just a stupid mistake, but a betrayal of the revolutionary past and the communist future. However, in the mid-1980s, there was practically no social reality behind this rhetoric. These are lofty, but almost empty words. The impossibility to comprehend oneself politically increases the impossibility to think and imagine the enemy. In the last round of the Cold War, the fantasy of late-Soviet cinema about the West collapses into paranoid delirium. This fantasy sometimes disturbed, sometimes consoled, caressed and frightened, but also protected, presenting the image of the other. Its end revealed the tragic defenselessness of the Soviet world when faced with a different order. That is why Mikaelyan’s ridiculous, comical film looks so desperate.

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