(4 of 4)
This hassling creates a climate of self-censorship and an implicit demand to pretty-up reality. Says Topol: "If you just set up a camera anywhere in the Soviet Union and shoot life as it is, it looks terrible. It jumps out at you from the screen." Yet the directors soldier on. Some search patiently for a historical or fantastical work that will not overstrain the censorious mind. Still others find a style of shooting an approved scene that will change its meaning without altering a word of the preapproved script. A happy ending darkly lit will not, for example, play in quite the way the editors thought it would.
For some directors, the endings are darkly lit. The first director assigned to Slave of Love was a wildly talented young Uzbek named Rustam Hamdamov, the hope of the Soviet film school, who seemed destined to drag this once proud national cinema back to glory. But according to a friend, when the editors saw Hamdamov's lyrical-surreal footage, they fired him and brought in Nikita Mikhalkov to reshoot the film. Hamdamov's art, it seems, no longer appears in state cinemas; it hangs on the walls and in the closets of private homes. At last report, the U.S.S.R.'s most promising director was in Soviet Georgia, working as a painter and dress designer.