Tear line – Weekend
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One of the instantly recognizable features of late Soviet cinema is a strange tonality, at the same time extremely tense and sluggish, as if emotions are restrained and erupt at the same time. It is often called an anguish. By peering into this state, one can better understand the sensitivity of stagnation.
There is a dominant emotional note in the cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s. It brings together authors who seem to have little in common with each other – directors of the mass and elite, the most subtle and the most rude – Ryazanov and Tarkovsky, Muratova and Menshov, Zakharov and Shukshin, and so on and so on – up to Leonid Maryagin, Gerald Bezhanov and other day laborers of the third row. Its main habitat is melodrama, but this note penetrates everywhere: production, political, historical, fantastic films.
The characters of stagnant films suddenly start screaming and cut themselves off, calm down, look into space, but soon the stupor is replaced by an escapade – like the wild dance of the hero Bogatyrev in Mikhalkov’s Rodna or the song about a goat in Shakhnazarov’s Courier. This tonality is most accurately called the word “tear”. Anguish is a paradoxical state between a scandal and a stupor, an extremely inadequate expression and the inability to express oneself. It arises where the usual communication – family, love, friendship – is not entirely possible.
Oddly enough, the genesis of this note is most easily explained by purely cinematic reasons. In the testimonies of stagnation directors about clashes with censorship, a plot constantly emerges: officials were terribly afraid of emotional extremes – excessive fun, excessive gloom, too much anxiety. Thanks to these restrictions, a restrained aesthetic of the 1970s emerged. It often seemed imposed on the authors themselves, but in hindsight it is clear that in many ways it creates the charm of stagnant cinema. The author, who is not allowed to go to extremes, inevitably turns out to be more sensitive to semitones. However, passions – those passions that art usually tells about – the thirst for love, revenge, justice – did not go anywhere. According to quite Freudian logic, being repressed, they returned and manifested themselves in the most inappropriate way: what is not worth showing shows itself differently.
The situation here is the same as with the notorious Aesopian language. Soviet censorship was obsessed with political allusions – looking for them in the most innocent details, so that each film was subjected to endless edits. This paranoia, in turn, gave rise to a mode of total ambiguity that pervaded stagnant cinema. If everything is under suspicion, then all the visual details, all the dialogues and the truth may mean something completely different from what it seems. Any replica can become a slip of the tongue. Tearing is the same saying, but not in the sphere of meanings, but in emotions.
Because of this note, the cinema of the 1970s did not quite succeed in becoming an escapist, entertainment art. The best example here is the main Soviet New Year’s fairy tale, a three-hour film about people who torture each other, filled with humiliating pauses and bursts of aggression, an excruciating inability to explain themselves, delusional cruelty covered with garlands and poured with sticky champagne. In the amazing love of the mass audience for the “Irony of Fate” – no matter how magnificent this film was – the key to the era. The strain was not just an effect of the Soviet filmmaking system. Unpleasant for both sides, the interactions of fearful officials and obstinate artists gave rise to a special sensitivity, and it coincided with what was off the screen. The cinematic strain was recognized by the man of stagnation as the most natural way to live the feeling.
The tear directly arises from the existential position of a stagnant person – the feeling of time stopped. The feeling of the absence of a future, the impossibility of realization passed from social life to all other spheres – and, above all, to personal life. It gave rise to apathetic, confused and incapable of relationships men and women. The sub-genres of strain are a demand that can neither be satisfied nor properly presented, and a challenge that cannot be thrown.
Escape from the action is the backbone of many stagnant films. Almost every sex symbol of the era had the pinnacle of a career as a weak male escapist: Yankovsky – “Flights in a Dream and Reality” by Balayan, Dal – “Vacation in September” by Melnikov, Mironov – “Faryatyev’s Fantasies” by Averbakh (existed, although was not so common, and the type of “running woman” – like the heroines of Elena Solovey in Asanova’s “The Wife Has Gone” and Irina Kupchenko in Reizman’s “Strange Woman”). Such characters are ideal conductors of anguish. They are destructive to themselves and loved ones. They are like troublemakers, rebels, but they do nothing – they go into denial, and this is how they discover a problem in the world, expose the fact that conversations do not make sense, connections are impossible, the pursuit of happiness is doomed. (Ryazanov’s comedies, in which doom is hidden behind unconvincing happy endings, sometimes produce an even more depressing impression than dramas in which it is openly presented.)
The anguish has something of performance in it – it is a way of producing an event in eventless time. He literally rips the feigned strong social fabric – creates a hole in it. It is curious that this word itself appeared in the Russian language in the era of another stagnation, Nikolaev. First of all, it is associated with Dostoevsky. The anguish of his characters also has a distinctly performative nature, it is always a provocation of another, reflecting the unbearability of a person for himself. So it is with stagnant heroes. Their anguish does not lead out of a desperate situation, but shakes it up by shock means – and thus gives little hope for a change, for the fact that “this is not forever.”
Like other elements of stagnant aesthetics, the anguish did not survive perestroika, when the fabric of the Soviet world finally parted, the future came, but did not bring much joy. At that moment, in both popular and intellectual cinema, from “Little Faith” to “Asthenic Syndrome”, a new tone reigned – open hysteria, an ora with convulsive bodies. Against this background, a languid stagnant anguish began to evoke nostalgia, the spell of which we still feel.
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