Film makers must edify as well as entertain
Cinema is for us the most important of the arts," declared Lenin in 1922, and not since Pope Julius ii commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling had the proclamation of a chief of state resulted in such a sunburst of high art. A troika of young film maker-theoreticians—Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko—seized the movie toy and remade it into a sophisticated machine that dazzled the world intelligentsia, even as it instructed the Russian proletariat. As long as the party hierarchy was amused too, all was well. But in 1924 Stalin rephrased the famous dictum, and his diaphanous threat holds to this day: "The cinema is the greatest means of mass agitation. Our problem is to take this matter into our own hands."
There the matter has rested for the past half a century, and the hands of the Soviet film industry's "editors" (censors) can be heavy indeed. The two men who by international critical consensus are the heirs of Soviet film greatness—Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Paradjanov —have been harassed, cajoled and officially criticized. Tarkovsky, best known for the chilling sci-fi parable Solaris (1972), recently was named "People's Artist of the U.S.S.R.," but the film bureaucracy has refused to fund some of his projects, delayed the release of others or exhibited them for only a few weeks in out-of-the-way theaters. Paradjanov astonished Western film buffs with the extravagant lyricism of his Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964), but the state saw him as a troublemaker and sent him to prison—for almost four years.
Paradjanov's more cautious colleagues have referred to him as "kind of mad." It may be equally delirious for Westerners to demand of today's Soviet film makers that they bring to their craft the passionate recklessness of their predecessors. Revolutionary fervor, like first love, passes quickly; in the long run, any marriage of art and the state demands fidelity and fealty. Official Soviet cinema is settling into middle age with all the virtues of a Chekhovian "good wife": it is handsome, thoughtful, often charming and, above all, discreet about the master's excesses and failings.
It is precisely this Chekhovian quality —the rueful romanticism, the generous fatalism, the belief that everyone has his reasons—that permeates the best "approved" Soviet films, and perhaps the spirit of the men and women who make them as well. In the Soviet system, everyone has his function. Some people make films (about 150 features a year from the three major and 20 regional studios). Some people "edit" them (there are often three censors assigned to a production). Some people exhibit them (though theater managers, who have admissions quotas to meet, frequently pair Soviet films with livelier fare from abroad). And some people go to see them (80 million tickets were sold every week in 1977, at an average cost of 50¢ each).
The Soviet public may get to see only bland or self-critical films from the West, but the elite are permitted to study the works of leading film makers from all nations. As a result, the best Soviet movies, whatever their content, have the look and feel of the best European films.