TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041089/04108900.049

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7KB | 138 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 127

CENSORS' DAY OFF


As audiences cheer, filmmakers are ushering a May Day parade of
social ills -- and a little sex -- onto the screen

By Richard Corliss


    Start with the happy ending. Like a song escaping from jaws
long wired shut, the political voice of Soviet films is
suddenly loud and clear. Did we say loud? Listen to the rock
music that carpets the sound tracks. It drowns out everything
but the angry shouts of the teen heroes, who sleep around and
do drugs while aiming to be an amalgam of Elvis and Che. The
revealing documentary Is It Easy to Be Young? portrays a
generation given to graffiti and hooliganism. "I don't think
about what will happen to me," says one young man, spiked hair
framing a pocked face. "I don't particularly want to know ...
Hey, you just gotta enjoy yourself!" Goodbye, dialectical
materialism. Hello, California pleasure principle.

    In Vasili Pichul's smash hit Little Vera, the kids look
like Sunset Strip punks and act as if they'd just invented
adolescent angst. Vera's dad is a drunken oaf, abusing the
children who hate him yet cling to him and lie to protect him.
He could be the petty dictator of a pre-Gorbachev regime, and
his daughter the strident soul of rebellion. In her sharp,
defiant voice, you can hear the sound of breaking glasnost.

    The filmmakers are no less rambunctious. Gone are the days
when criticism of the system was voiced in picture parables so
obscure they sometimes eluded the censors -- and all but the
most discerning audiences as well. Now everybody gets the
point. Filmmakers are sending a May Day parade of social ills
-- class resentments, alcoholism, stifling bureaucracy, domestic
brutality, a nationwide streak of malaise -- past the cheers of
public opinion. On the reviewing stand, Mikhail Sergeyevich
smiles. After all, it's his party.

    Glasnost cinema is good news for Soviet citizens, who go to
the movies four times as often as Americans and ten times as
often as the British. Today Soviets get to watch sexual barriers
fall like dominoes in slow motion. Little Vera features a love
scene -- 82 seconds of topless necking and a quick tickle under
Vera's dress -- that has shot viewers' eyebrows up through their
hairlines. By American cable-TV standards the episode might be
tame, but in a culture as repressed erotically as it is
politically, Little Vera is big news.

    In another sense, all Soviet cinema has become sexy, a
novel commodity on the global culture market. Little Vera opens
this month in the U.S., after playing the New Directors/New
Films series at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in tandem
with Boris Frumin's The Errors of Youth, shot in 1978 but just
completed this year. Eleven Soviet filmmakers are touring the
U.S. with Glasnost Film Festival, whose 22 documentaries include
robust exposes on Chernobyl, the Armenian revolt and the war in
Afghanistan.

    But does freer mean better? Can liberalism guarantee
artistry? Alas, no. Nor are today's Soviet films likely to be
superior to those of the first flush of revolution. Now that the
specter of Stalinism has receded, another shadow haunts Soviet
filmmakers, and it may be harder to escape. This is the legacy
of Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko and
Dziga Vertov, the giants of Soviet silent cinema. Their works
(October, Mother, Earth, Man with a Movie Camera) remain at the
core of every film curriculum; movies are still made in the
visual language they helped invent.

    Don't expect some 21st century director to filch a scene
from Little Vera the way David Lean, Brian De Palma and others
have quoted the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's
Potemkin. For one thing, critical realism, the style of most
glasnost films, eschews the bold editing effects and pristine
iconography of the Soviet silents. But style is subordinate to
message just now: the priority is journalism, not art. To U.S.
eyes, the rebels without a cause in an alienated-teen drama like
Valeri Ogorodnikov's The Burglar are a sight as nostalgic as
Hula-Hoops. But in the U.S.S.R. these films play like bulletins
from the front lines. So for audiences at home and abroad, the
excitement of Soviet movies is not so much in their quality as
in their very existence.

    This is no small triumph, considering the sorry history of
repression exercised by Goskino, the state censorship board.
For any reason or none, Goskino could cut a scene, ban a film,
put a director out of work or put him in jail. Sergei
Paradjanov, a lyric poet in the Dovzhenko mold, spent nearly
four years in prison. Andrei Tarkovsky, the greatest Soviet
director since Eisenstein, filmed Andrei Rublev in 1966; the
complete version was not shown publicly in the U.S.S.R. until
1987, just after Tarkovsky died in exile. Alexander Askoldov's
The Commissar, filmed in 1967, was accused of "Zionist
tendencies" and suppressed for 20 years; Askoldov has yet to
make another movie. Erakli Kvirikadze made his satire of
Stalinism, The Swimmer, in 1981, but a crucial scene was deleted
until 1987. The director stashed the offending footage in his
refrigerator and waited.

    Now comes the thaw, and the index of once prohibited films
has become an honor roll. Enforced neglect has turned their
directors into celebrities, legendary fighters in the film
resistance. Frumin, who immigrated to the U.S. after The Errors
of Youth, a bleak road movie, was shelved a decade ago, returned
to Leningrad last year to finish editing the film. Elem Klimov,
a tenacious renegade whose own films (the historical drama
Agony, the peasant-revolt parable Farewell) have been censored
and suppressed, is the union's first secretary, unlocking vaults
and disarming the Goskino octopus. For the first time, a
filmmaker runs the country's movie industry. Not only have the
insurgents stormed the winter palace, they are sitting pretty
in it.

    The danger is in believing Klimov and his colleagues can
produce an ideal creative climate. But Soviet filmmakers know
not to expect too much. In Vyacheslav Krishtofovich's poignant
comedy Lonely Woman Searching for a Life Companion, a seamstress
places a personal ad on walls around her town. The results are
dire. The first man to answer the ad insults her, tries to rob
her and then leeches on her kind nature. A trio of Young
Pioneers, encouraged to take pity on the "sick and the lonely,"
offers to take her for walks in the countryside. She nearly
loses her job. She never finds Comrade Right. But in the last
shot, her neighbor is tiptoeing down a night street, slapping
her own ads on the walls.

    The first single woman is the Soviet moviemaker of
yesterday, whose failed struggle made the new freedom possible.
Her neighbor is today's film artist, whose pictures are as
artless as a cry for help and as urgent as the dream of a better
future. It would be nice if the U.S.S.R. could produce a few
masterpieces, as it did 60 years ago. But happy endings are,
after all, the stuff of movies, not moviemaking. And what Soviet
filmmaker would dare hope for more than a resolute beginning?