The party committee is powerless here – Weekend

In the early 1970s, a unique phenomenon of “industrial drama” was formed in Soviet cinema, either a genre or a special style generated by speeches from high stands and thematic plans of Goskino. However, the films made according to the patterns of production cinema were far from poster straightforwardness and ideological unambiguity. On the contrary, today it seems that they did much more to expose the absurd features of the system than semi-forbidden masterpieces of auteur cinema.

Text: Vasily Stepanov

““Production film” – what is it? Is it just some kind of thematic offshoot of our cinema or, perhaps, is it some completely new genre that has no analogues in the culture of previous eras, a genre whose specificity, perhaps, is just barely emerging before our eyes? , and its formation itself will happen later?” — this is the question asked by the venerable film playwright Valentin Chernykh, at that time already the author of the script for the popular hit “Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears,” as part of the collection “Cinema Genres” released by the USSR State Committee for Cinematography in 1979. The question, as they say, is really ripe. And who else had to answer if not Chernykh, who came to the success of a melodrama about the fate of a factory girl who grew up to be a director, having made his debut in big cinema in the early 1970s with production dramas? In 1972, he released “A Man in His Place” – about how the technical revolution is stalling on a single collective farm under the leadership of a factory engineer performed by Vladimir Menshov, in 1973 – “With fun and courage” about sea workers, and in 1977 there was “Own Opinion” (filmed by Yuli Karasik), which has something to impress the modern viewer. Here, according to the plot, a huge provincial enterprise orders a capital institute to study internal problems in the workforce – a psychologist and sociologist (Vladimir Menshov and Lyudmila Chursina) come to the plant, who are supposed to act as a kind of coaches. Point out the shortcomings and teach the latest wisdom of careful handling of personnel so that the plant can keep up with the “scientific and technological revolution”, which has been talked about so much from the high party tribunes since the late 1960s.

Actually, throughout the 1970s and up to perestroika, the entire Soviet cinema played a similar role as an interested outside observer during socialist construction, mastering the so-called non-production dramaturgy. And elements of this drama later spread across genres and films that seem to have nothing to do with the theme of the factory. In the early 1970s, a production film was the main item in the circulars of Goskino’s thematic plans. According to the party ideologists, the appeal to the topic is intended to “demonstrate the party’s efforts to improve the economic system of socialism through the rational organization of production, to make people again believe in the triumph of communist ideas.”

The direction began with the appearance in 1971 of Ignatius Dvoretsky’s play “A Man from the Outside” about the manager Cheshkov who came to Leningrad. He is called upon from the Urals to raise a gigantic workshop that cannot reach its planned targets. First, Anatoly Efros staged the play at the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya, and then Viktor Sokolov produced a film adaptation at Lenfilm in 1973. Leningrader Sokolov strangely shifts the emphasis of the discussion play already at the level of the title – “A Man from the Outside” turns into the safe and patriotic-sounding “Here is our home.” But even finishing the film about a visiting “business man” with an ideologically verified planning meeting and shots of smoking factory chimneys, Sokolov seems to smuggle in the line of an economist (Irina Miroshnichenko), tempting stern men in smoky jackets with strikingly painted eyelashes and sarcastic speeches.

Surprisingly, it would seem that life has taught the Soviet audience to shy away from the “production theme,” but the main creators of the movement—Ignatius Dvoretsky, Valentin Chernykh, Anatoly Grebnev, and, of course, Alexander Gelman—everything was in order with popularity. Their lives have not deprived them of people’s love; this is not a matter of templan. On the one hand, everything in the production film of the 1970s was correct in a Soviet way. This film is utopianly optimistic; within the framework of existing ideological guidelines, it promised a positive “resolution of spiritual and moral problems associated with the scientific and technological revolution.” The hero was born in the struggle to fulfill and exceed the plan. In this sense, the 1970s production film reanimated the spirit of 1930s cinema. On the other hand, even the most ingenuous statements of this trend, as if unwillingly, gradually revealed the absurdity of the economy of “developed socialism” (the conclusion about the absurdity of the system itself was not far off).

This happened partly because the central conflict (usually along the lines of the struggle between innovators and conservatives, technology and storming) was replaced on the screen by secondary conflicts (here it was always about the personal), partly because of the looseness of intonation, the form of debate adopted, which inevitably forced the heroes to blurt out, even if they spoke in speeches that were correct from the point of view of the system. The most striking example here, of course, is the legendary “Prize,” filmed by Sergei Mikaelyan based on the script by Alexander Gelman, and later converted into the play “Minutes of One Meeting.” The starting point for the conflict that unfolds at a meeting of the party committee is the collective refusal of the construction crew to receive a bonus. On behalf of the workers, foreman Potapov speaks, whose wife is a painter, whose daughter is always sick, but most importantly, he has the face and body of Yevgeny Leonov, an appearance that exists on the screen in radical stylistic contradiction with the appearance of, say, the secretary of the party committee played by Oleg Yankovsky, careerist and temporary ally of Potapov in the struggle. The film was a success at Soviet and foreign festivals, and in 1976 it was awarded the USSR State Prize. But that’s not what made it an event. And how dashingly director Sergei Mikaelyan and director of photography Vladimir Chumak pulled the party meeting out of the stuffy office with wooden panels and dusty curtains and thereby unbalanced the system. The office set with wide windows was built right on the construction site, and the actors were allowed to improvise using mobile cameras on cranes. The frame literally shakes with nervous excitement. The meeting at which Leonov’s character convinces the trust to give up the fake bonus is more like a group psychotherapy session, where all the participants sit in a circle on chairs. The correct, seemingly systemic words sound, but every now and then they are drowned out by dump trucks and telephones passing outside the window – someone gets a call from a kindergarten, where a child is waiting for their parents who are late at work, whom dad asks to “take up with plasticine”, someone is freezing dinner and friends ran away. The second plan is devoured by the frontal conflict of the first plan, constructed based on party congresses. We should not forget that it was not public, but rather personal, “selfish” interests that brought foreman Potapov and his protests to his superiors: he is not a romantic revolutionary, but the head of a team of piece workers, whose downtime at a construction site hits their pockets. These personal losses cannot be compensated by a handout in the form of a bonus.

The new industrial drama was intended to bring to the forefront a new hero – a person from the outside or an ordinary employee who took it upon himself to control the actions of his immediate management with a passion unknown to the ordinary Soviet person, but the very tone of the conversation about the roughness of work life forced us to move on to talking about the person as such – in all the varied monotony of his personal, everyday problems. And the production drama inevitably mutated into melodrama. A classic example is “Old Walls” (1973) by Viktor Tregubovich (based on the script by Anatoly Grebnev), where the heroine of Lyudmila Gurchenko wondered who she was first of all in this life: a deputy and director or a woman and mother? The open ending hinted that there were hardly any correct answers here. A development of the theme, although much more stylish and dramatically powerful, seems to be “I Ask for the Word” (1976) by Gleb Panfilov, where Inna Churikova plays the chairman of the city executive committee, an idealist, unmercenary, who dreams of living and working for people, but obviously that is why she falls out of Brezhnev’s time . You can sing “The gloomy forest stands like a wall all around” with Pyatnitsky’s choir as much as you like and call for a fight with reality, this will not add revolutionary romanticism to it. And the main event in this drama is the death of a child, whose life was literally sacrificed on the altar of the mother’s high ideals.

“I Ask for Your Word” is a clever, surprising picture, at times paradoxically reminiscent of the films of Wes Anderson to the modern viewer (not only thanks to the work of production designer Marxen Gaukhman-Sverdlov, but also because the idealism of the main character in the proposed circumstances has Anderson’s comical, grotesque features ). In many ways, it took place because it was generated by the climate that reigned at Lenfilm at that time, where the editorial department could skillfully package even radical author’s statements into the production style according to the template, like the films “Ksenia, Fyodor’s Beloved Wife” (1974) by Vitaly Melnikov ( by the way, also based on the script by the author of the Prize, Alexander Gelman) or Experiencing the White Light (1978) by Kira Muratova. On the “periphery,” of course, things were possible that the center could not afford. For example, if a production film was made at the Georgia-Film studio, then the result could be “Falling Leaves” (1966) by Otar Ioseliani. There, a young winery technologist fights with disgusting saperavi, bottled in order to fulfill the plan, but this is perhaps the last thing you want to talk about when remembering this masterpiece.

In Moscow, however, the optics of the industrial drama demonstrated the shortcomings on the ground with such straightforwardness that one felt as if the system was exposing itself. The parody could either be inherent initially – something similar appears, for example, in “Athos” (1975) by Georgiy Danelia, which is fascinating to watch precisely as a production film – or read by the viewer after the fact, as in “We, the Undersigned” (1981) Tatiana Lioznova (script by Alexander Gelman). There, an employee of a construction trust, played by Leonid Kuravlev, actually puts Afonya’s trickster qualities at the service of high ideals – in a couple of hours by train he must force the commission to sign an acceptance certificate for the unfinished bakery. To do this, you will have to manipulate a lot, pretend, lie (we are almost faced with a spy drama) – and all this in order to save a talented boss who is forced to work in conditions of developed socialism as an undercover agent (Lioznova’s name in the credits, of course, makes us remember Stirlitz).

Aida Manasarova’s film “From Paycheck to Paycheck” (1985), which closes the era of stagnation, makes a similar impression. This is not the most famous or great film of the 1980s, but today it crystal clearly shows the problems that the country is about to face as it enters perestroika. With a planned economy, everything is already clear, but no one will say how to build another one. At Manasarova’s, the director of a shoe factory is launching an experiment to restructure production in order to finally not just follow the plan, but to produce sneakers that are in demand by the buyer and enrich the team. Prognostically reminiscent of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, the hero of Andrei Myagkov takes out a loan from the state bank for two years… and fails miserably on all fronts. Because engineers and bosses don’t know how to lead, employees don’t want to work in a new way, and the bank’s debits and credits don’t match. And here, of course, no party committee will help.

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