Gorbashow and the Flicks

...Today's best directors, obviously aware that they are part of the ongoing struggle for the future of the nation, are communicating their commitment to Soviet audiences...

...Despite its flaws, the conference provided an unusual opportunity to experience the limitations and achievements of glasnost...

...Indeed, the film is a hymn of praise to a young girl courageous enough to stand up against an unjust society whose youth are devoid of values...

...These were people in their 50s and 60s who had matured in the Stalinist system and enjoy comfortable positions...

...The handful of prominent Soviet film historians present showed little interest in any aspect of the proceedings...

...One of the Poles, in an unabashedly Stalinist speech, recalled the peace-loving policy of the Soviet Union in 1939 and blamed the French and the British for not coming to the aid of his fatherland...

...The organizers made available anything we wanted to see...

...He gave a matterof-fact, sensible presentation of what was available on newsreels in Polish archives...

...NOW PLAYING IN MOSCOW Gorbashow and the Flicks By Peter Kenez In the middle of March I attended a conference in Moscow jointly organized by an international society of film historians and the Soviet Film Art Institute...

...Some of these were interesting, and one regretted that they were not being heard in a more appropriate forum...

...He chooses to kill himself rather than stay with his corrupt father...

...At the end, the organizers did ask Western participants to issue a communiqué supporting the "peace initiatives of the Soviet government...

...The younger, less highly placed Soviets, such as researchers at the Film Art Institute, were another story...

...A few were historians, and the rest were directors, editors of film journals, or film archivists...

...From an intellectual point of view, the event was a great disappointment...

...Western historians read the kind of papers they always do: "The Depiction of War in Postwar British Films," "The Vietnam War in Newsreels," "The Vietnam War in Australian Films," and so on...

...But the film is more significantly about the present...

...They did not appear eager to probe recent developments of Western scholarship...

...The reference to emigration, for instance, explains the problems encountered by The Theme...

...Then Gorbachev declared that everyone should see it, and now it is playing throughout the country...

...In conversations over lunch and dinner a new openness was clearly evident...

...Why, for instance, were the two notable films of Aleksei Gherman shelved...

...Gherman's My Friend, Ivan Lapshin, made in 1982, could not be shown until the Gorbachev era began...

...Still, I was overwhelmed by what I saw...

...The Scarecrow...

...Collaboration and official treatment of ex-prisoners of war have certainly been troublesome topics in the USSR, yet they would seem no more dangerous than many others allowed cinematic airing by the censors...

...No one mentioned the recent and very successful Soviet picture Come and See—directed by the new head of the Cinema Workers' Union, Elem Klimov—which ends with partisans burning German soldiers to death...

...Set in 1935, its protagonist isamemberof the Cheka...

...The viewer pricks up his ears: Am I hearing correctly...

...The Koreans, wearing dark blue suits with enormous Kim II Sung buttons on their lapels, praised the wise and peace-loving policy of their leader, causing quiet hilarity even among the Eastern Europeans...

...Exactly that remark is made in The Theme, by the eminent director Gleb Panfilov...

...the only constraint was time...

...when we refused, though, they were not insistent...

...Open-minded and educated, they exhibited a consensus that important changes are taking place in the Soviet Union, but not all were equally optimistic about the ultimate outcome of Party chief Mikhail S. Gorbachev's course...

...Perhaps our presence was merely intended to give cachet to their rhetoric about the virtues of peace and the horrors of war...

...The social involvement of the contemporary Russian filmmaker is typified by Rolan Bykov's brilliant film...

...The Communist delegates were a mixed group...

...He defects to the partisans, whose Bolshevik commander receives him with hostility and lasting mistrust...

...Approximately 20 scholars from Western nations participated...

...The Hungarian started his brief address by advising each participant to take a careful look at his own country's past before passing judgment on other countries...

...He concluded: "I am a director...

...Abuladze's point is that the current generation must deal realistically with the past, on pain of "killing" the future...

...A poster hailing it as the basis of Soviet democracy decorated the building we met in, for example, yet seemed to have escaped the attention of the Soviets who actually addressed us: There was nothing in their remarks they could not have said 20 years ago...

...The same actor plays the dead tyrant —actually a composite of Stalin and Beria, with elements of Hitler and Mussolini—and the tyrant's son, who leads a comfortable life and refuses to repudiate his father...

...With the exception of Mongolia, every bloc country was represented...

...The majority of Soviet bloc representatives, by contrast, simply exhorted us to fight for peace by using that special instrument, the cinema...

...Most important of all, there was absolutely no exchange of ideas between East and West...

...Individualism is the message...

...The grandson, representing a new generation, insists on facing up to the old crimes as the only way of exorcising the tyrant...

...Their realistic depictions, stressing everyday life and moral issues, have frequently contradicted the fanciful claims of the regime...

...The other Pole chose not to sit with his compatriot, delivered his speech in English instead of Russian, and did not speak of the "Socialist" camp but of the "East" and "West...

...Did that character really say he was going to Israel because the authorities here mistreated him...

...Sometimes the censor's decision is difficult to divine...

...I had heard about the remarkable crop of movies being shown this year in Moscow, so my expectations were high...

...It was fascinating to observe differences in comportment among the rather heterogeneous Communist delegations...

...Another, while granting the point, countered that the attack on privilege currently being waged in a limited way definitely had popular support...

...Under the circumstances, one wondered why the Soviets had wanted to host the conference and pay its considerable costs...

...Not surprisingly, The Scarecrow —completed in 1984 and issued immediately—was greeted with both enthusiastic approval and hostile criticism...

...The film ends on a religious note, with an old peasant woman asking the way to the church...

...Clearly it would be naive to think they have been bursting to tell the truth all these years and will now seize the opportunity to do so...

...Now that so many previously banned films have been released, too, we can get some idea of what the authorities previously regarded as unacceptable...

...Completed in 1979, this outstanding film was kept "on the shelf until last year...

...The pleasant aspect of the conference was viewing films...

...An extraordinary work, even by today's relatively dauntless standards in Moscow is Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance...

...Yet the regime is standing, and may be stronger than ever...

...The topic of the conference, "War and Peace on the World Screen Since 1945," had been carefully and cleverly chosen: It allowed Soviet bloc participants to give speeches about the importance of peace, yet appeared serious enough to elicit scholarly papers from the Westerners...

...Ostensibly about the cruelty of a class of adolescents toward one of their schoolmates, it is really an allegory of modern Soviet society: Each child has particular reasons for behaving abominably that parallel those of the adults...

...Alas, in the case of Agony the deprivation was rather slight: Klimov's film, packed with histrionics, is on the same artistic plain as the American Nicholas and Alexandra...

...Both sides may have overestimated the power of ideas...

...It was as if two separate meetings were taking place simultaneously...

...Klimov seems to justify the atrocity, and his film is so powerful that the audience tends to concur...

...In fact, by touching on sensitive matters that politicians, journalists and historians shy away from, Soviet cinema has occasionally led the way out of narrow ideological confines...

...It says with unmistakable clarity that there are still Stalins in the USSR, as well as many who are unwilling to admit the crimes of the past for selfish reasons...

...Klimov's Agony was held up nearly a decade because its subject was Rasputin, and any story dealing with the life of that remarkable figure is bound to represent the last Tsar as a weak and pathetic figure—thereby depreciating the Revolution...

...One questioned whether the society at large supported the reforms, noting that increased intellectual freedom did not mean much to the workers and peasants...

...What may have most disturbed the authorities is the grimly realistic portrayal of the Soviet Union in the '30s: People vainly crave a lump of sugar, and society is so close to anarchy that the regime must fight armed groups of bandits...

...Except for the last, dreadful years of Stalin, Soviet studios have always turned out some good films, and many have been more politically daring than the West has generally imagined...

...Only glancing allusions are made to state terror, and the Chekist is depicted rather gently, as an ambiguous figure...

...Many of them also declared that the depiction of war in Western films contributed to "war psychosis," whereas Communist films, by showing how awful war really is, promoted peace...

...A short time ago, these individuals would not have dared to talk so freely to strangers and foreigners...

...I have heard a great deal about war and peace, but what I really want to know is where I should place my camera when I film action...

...This has created an astonished excitement that is difficult to convey...

...Repentance, for the first time in Soviet cinema, makes it plain that Stalin's rule was a period of terror...

...Only the presiding chairmen knew who was going to speak, and the sessions lacked coherence...

...His Roadchecks, made in 1971, concerns a Soviet soldier captured by the Nazis, who becomes a collaborator, then decides he wants to redeem himself...

...They came in pairs: two Vietnamese, two Koreans, two Cubans, two Hungarians...

...Others were boring, as scholarly papers sometimes are...

...That none of the Soviet bloc delegates ever wanted to get involved in a discussion was disappointing...

...Prior to Gorbachev's arrival at the top, Soviet officials and numerous intellectuals shared the conviction that if the truth were spoken the entire Communist edifice might come tumbling down...

...Directors interested in attracting an audience have found it necessary—and possible—to make films that reflect the actual experience of the Soviet people...

...Peter Kenez, a previous NL contributor, is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz...

...Possibly the most revolutionary Soviet film ever made, it was finished in 1984 and finally shown only to restricted audiences at the end of last year...

...There were, however, frequent citations of Western films that portrayed combat in an unhealthy way—Rambo had a high count...

...Into this bleak moral landscape the director also inserts a representative of the old intelligentsia, who preserves his decency, rises above petty materialism, and defends past values...

...One senior Soviet scholar, R. N. Iurenev, left the hall after delivering his talk and never bothered to return...

...No progress was made toward resolving the underlying issue: What makes a film depicting war pro-peace or pro-war...

...What is now being expressed in Soviet cinema is, if not the whole truth, at least a substantial portion of it...