Chronicles of the horrors of Russian cinema

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the year of the centenary of Russian filmmaking, our cinema is in a semi-swoon. The Bolsheviks destroyed free filmmaking in Russia and established a state monopoly. This is reflected in contemporary Russian cinema.

The Russian film industry does not meet the Day of Russian Cinema in the best condition. In the first half of 2019, 71 Russian films released on screens earned a total of 8,406,059,160 rubles, which is 27.2% of the total box office box office. In 2018, the collection of Russian film products amounted to 10,599,192,355 rubles (36% of the total box office).

Suffice it to point out that the rating of the highest-grossing films of the year in Russia included only two domestic products - the super-successful T-34 and the comedy Policeman from Rublyovka, and the latter, most likely, will leave the top ten in the coming weeks, displaced by a new film. Quentin Tarantino. In total, Russian cinema produces one film a year, which really catches the viewer.

Two or three years ago, experts predicted that Russian cinema, which creates more and more interesting, striking films, would push Hollywood products on the film market. In the book "Truth in Cinema", published at the end of the 2017/2018 film season, I had some pleasure to name about a dozen films that were interesting either as bright blockbusters - box office champions, or as interesting works of art, or emotionally hooked: "Moving up", "Ice", "Salyut-7", "Arrhythmia", "The Legend of Kolovrat", "Dovlatov", "I'm losing weight", "Trainer" - each of these films in its own way and in its genre impressed and made you think. Even such, in my opinion, failures, such as "Viking" or "Attraction", were grandiose failures. There was a feeling that Russian national cinematography was acquiring its own face, voice and becoming a significant factor in our social life.

And suddenly - like a cow licked her tongue. Almost every new domestic-made film that has been promoted is sheer disappointment, which is difficult to force yourself to even just watch, let alone review and analyze. And those rare films that, for one reason or another, are liked - suddenly turn out to be a box office failure and simply "do not enter" the mass audience.

Potential blockbusters for the most part do not shoot, because they are made very badly and lack any intelligible ideology. The works of "great masters of Russian cinema", supported by the Ministry of Culture, either do not cling to anyone, or even cause scandals, like Lungin's "Brotherhood", since they represent selective Russophobic propaganda and squandering of state funds.

The viewer does not want to consume liberal propaganda in the cinema, since he is disgusted with it, and he also fails to consume patriotic propaganda, since it is unacceptable for the invisible liberal front of the Russian film community staffed with fighters. Most of our producers, film critics, film managers, not to mention directors and screenwriters, are representatives of a very definite ideology. The cohesive environment severely punishes anyone who is out of step.

Such an exemplary punishment was the fate of the film by Renat Davletyarov “Donbass. Outskirts . The work of a big movie, a bright, intense film on an exciting topic was so staged in the distribution grid, so strangled not even by negative reviews, but simply by their absence, so terrorized by ratings on Kinopoisk and other services exposed from Ukrainian accounts (lack of objective and sovereign our cinema's viewer rating system has become a really painful problem) that just flew past the mass attention. The film was not allowed to become the event that it could have become.

And here, perhaps, the main problem of our cinema is revealed. This is not a financial, actor's, or technological problem. This is not a quality issue at all. This is the problem of making sense. There is still no national cinema in Russia.

The very choice of the date for the "Day of Soviet Cinema", which will celebrate its 100th anniversary this year, underlines the essence of the problem in the best possible way. On August 27, we celebrate the day when the Bolshevik Council of People's Commissars in 1919 adopted a decree on the abolition of Russian cinema. In the decree of the Council of People's Commissars, all Russian film factories, cinemas and other subdivisions of film production were expropriated from the owners free of charge and transferred to the jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat for Education, headed by Comrade Lunacharsky.

The short but vivid history of Russian cinema, which began on October 2 (15), 1908 with the screening of the first Russian film "The Lowest Freedman", ended in a tragic break. During its first decade, Russian cinema has managed to grow into a striking phenomenon of national culture. The filmmakers first of all took up plots from Russian history - the uprising of Stenka Razin, The Death of Ivan the Terrible, The Song about the merchant Kalashnikov, Peter the Great, the magnificent Russian Wedding of the 16th century. Along with the historical plots there were film adaptations of Russian classics - "The Queen of Spades", "Noble Nest", "Anna Karenina" …

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That is, Russian cinema immediately made a claim on the seriousness of the forms and deep nationality of the content, in a sense opposing itself to European and American cinema, where melodramatic and criminal stories came to the fore (although such films were also made in Russia).

A kind of peak of Russian cinema was "Defense of Sevastopol" by Vasily Goncharov and Alexander Khanzhonkov - an epic panorama of the great events of the Crimean War.

Recognizable images of historical heroes, magnificent battle scenes. A large-scale and believable display of military events was made by Khanzhonkov and Goncharov four years earlier than American David Wark Griffith in his "Birth of a Nation", which reproduced the events of the American Civil War. And we can say with certainty that the work of Russian filmmakers was not inferior to the creation of the American genius of cinema - but, unlike his film, it was almost forgotten.

Now, however, the opposite is happening: the "Defense of Sevastopol" is remembered more and more often, but "The Birth of a Nation" in a communizing America is almost banned as racially politically incorrect.

Unfortunately, we cannot fully appreciate the beauty of "Defense of Sevastopol" today, since we have come down to a version of the picture prepared by the Soviet Gosfilmofond, from which all church and monarchist scenes were removed. But it's good that the tape has survived at all.

And this bright, complex development, promising in the long term the brightest results, was suddenly interrupted by the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of August 27, 1919, which robbed and ruined film studios, transferred the entire film industry into the hands of the Bolshevik People's Commissariat for Education, which was supposed to produce, first of all, communist propaganda. It was in this context, as Lunacharsky recalled, that Lenin's formula that “of all the arts, cinema is the most important for us” (historical justice requires it to be pointed out that the words “cinema and circus”, which are sometimes quoted as Lenin’s phrase, are fiction).

Vladimir Ilyich told me that the production of new films, imbued with communist ideas, reflecting Soviet reality, must begin with a chronicle, that, in his opinion, the time of production of such films may not have come yet: "If you have a good chronicle, serious and educational films, it doesn't matter that some useless tape, of a more or less usual type, is used to attract the public. Of course, censorship is still needed. Counter-revolutionary and immoral tapes should not take place ",

- wrote Lunacharsky in a letter to Boltyansky, in which the famous Leninist formula was also quoted.

In the category of "counter-revolutionary and immoral tapes", practically all Russian national cinematography was scrapped. The time has come for new - grasping propaganda tapes, such as Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin", which is not only a distortion of the historical events of the sailor rebellion, but also a stinking slander against historical Russia, represented as rotten meat eaten by worms …. Is it any wonder that of all the production of Soviet cinema, this very tape is considered, including by Western left circles, "cinema classics"?

Cinema, more than any other sphere of Russian culture, has undergone total communization, firstly, because its development was interrupted at the very beginning, and secondly, because cinema is an industry. It was possible to be a writer both underground and in the camp, even without a table and paper - Solzhenitsyn learned the lines of his first poem "The Path" in the camp by heart. And to make a movie, expensive equipment and extensive capital investments were required, as well as a large-scale audience market. There were none of them underground, or even in the Russian emigration.

And how the official Soviet films were filmed is well known. Hours-long meetings of the Politburo and all kinds of commissions with Stalin's own elaborations, sending ready-made films to the shelf that did not please the leader and party officials, cutting out the leader himself for the sake of the conjuncture as soon as he became irrelevant.

The amazing creative genius of the Russian people showed itself in the fact that even in these monstrous conditions, Soviet cinema nevertheless became one of the leading cinematographic schools in the world. Russia forced even its haters to accept itself. For 12 years, the same Eisenstein went from "Battleship Potemkin" to "Alexander Nevsky" - the masterpiece anthem of Russian history and the Russian spirit. When "The Cranes Are Flying" triumphed in Cannes, and "War and Peace" at the Oscars, when the whole world was captivated by Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublev", it was a triumph of Russian culture.

But, alas, the Russian national origin could manifest itself either in the form of following the official state patriotism of the Stalinist era (with all its limitations), or as a kind of "fig in your pocket", a double bottom of officially permitted statements. But both forms, although they sometimes produced wonderful films, were a game according to Lenin's rules of agitation and propaganda even when the directors dared to ridicule Lenin (as Gaidai did in Ivan Vasilyevich, tying his cheek to his impostor on the royal throne Bunche, in the manner of "Lenin in October").

The late Soviet thaw led, unfortunately, not so much to the conversion of Soviet cinema to Russian foundations, as, on the contrary, to the development of a kind of double Russophobia. There was official, Soviet Russophobia, sprinkled with superficial Stalinist patriotism. And there was unofficial, anti-Soviet Russophobia, which expressed the worldview of the growing “creative class”. It was she who became the leitmotif of Russian cinema in the post-Soviet era.

But what is surprising is that it was in the cinema, in a sense earlier than in literature or journalism, that a clear “no” began to be heard to the rampant of hellish forces that the country experienced in the next “era of upheavals”. A kind of "partisan" cinema became an amazing phenomenon of the nineties. Pyotr Lutsik's "Outskirts", Stanislav Govorukhin's "Voroshilov Shooter", and finally, the great "Brother-2" by Alexei Balabanov became films where the path of the Russian soul from confusion and protest to a strong desire to act was recorded - "You will answer us for Sevastopol!" …

Unfortunately, this bright outburst of rage, when new content was packed into forms intercepted from Hollywood, was followed by a long era of timelessness, which continues, as we see, to this day. The reason for this timelessness is rather commonplace - the extreme degree of state monopolization of our cinema in the absence of a real systemic cinema policy.

On the one side. Almost all modern Russian films are shot in one form or another with government money. This is the legacy of the very decree a hundred years ago that killed private film production in Russia. Nowadays, almost no one can and does not want to shoot a film completely "on their own", and it cannot be said that such a movie is especially welcomed by the state itself.

However, the modern Russian cinematographic state order is infinitely far from the Stalinist state cinematography, when the script for the picture could be worked out for months at the meetings of the Politburo. The state gives money for cinema, but at the same time it does not know what it wants for this money. There is no intelligible national ideology, no vision of history and modernity behind the state film policy …

Under these conditions, state cinema politics turns into the distribution of large monetary grants to various more or less influential feudal "houses" of the creative intelligentsia. The size of these grants is determined not so much by talent, not so much the ideological and moral importance of the topic, not so much by the commercial profitability of the project, as by the administrative resource of one or another film-feudal clan.

Moreover, once having made a decision, then our Ministry of Culture and the Film Fund become the actual hostages of this decision. Let us recall how fiercely our bureaucratic establishment fought for the shameful cinematographically and historically vile "Matilda" of the Teacher. Let us recall how the protests of Afghan warriors against the mocking “Brotherhood” of Lungin were virtually ignored. If you are a member of the class of those who are "given money", then you can turn back almost anything you want - to mock the Russian people, Orthodoxy, history, to shoot the shameful wampuku, not to think about quality at all - and at the same time consider yourself a proud independent artist, who did not care about the opinion of this plebs with his patriotism.

How inevitable is this situation? In part, it is economically predetermined. Yes, the Russian film market is the largest in Europe, with a volume of about $ 800 million. One problem is the 2 ½ budget films The Avengers. The final". The average "price" of a top-notch Hollywood blockbuster is $ 150-200 million. Even taking into account the fact that everything is much cheaper in Russia, our film market would not be able to pull more than a dozen "Hollywood" films in terms of scope a year, even if foreign films were not shown in our country at all. In reality, the most expensive Russian films are cheaper than the third-rate Western wampuki …

In the USSR, the situation was different. Due to the specific nature of the economy, film production prices were quite low, production was centralized within the Goskino system, and returns were high. Soviet cinema brought fabulous income to the state, and foreign competition was minimal (besides, the main distributor was the same Goskino, that is, foreign films again worked for Russian film production). This allowed the USSR to maintain an excessively large class of filmmakers who were only marginally competitive on a global scale.

All these special conditions also collapsed with the collapse of communism. The Russian film industry in its current form cannot pay for itself in the market and compete with Hollywood on an equal footing, especially since it works almost exclusively for the domestic market, while Hollywood - for the whole world. This means that either a huge number of filmmakers are superfluous in our market, or our entire cinema should be supported by the state.

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And here the question arises: should the state contain a layer of creatively helpless, often technically and culturally illiterate, inflated with a sense of their own greatness mediocrity, moreover, hating "this country", which are now a significant part of filmmakers? Or, nevertheless, let them float on the waves of the free market, leaving only that part of the filmmakers on state support who can do work of high quality in form and ideologically intelligible in content, having social significance and excluding the situation when a director takes money for a film about a feat, and handing over chernukha, calling it "the author's view"?

It is clear that the creative problems of contemporary Russian cinema are not healed overnight. But a significant part of them was laid down by the decree of August 27, 1919, which destroyed free film production in Russia and established the Bolshevik state monopoly. It is as a result of this decree that we today do not have, as in Hollywood, film companies with a long history, which were created by real geniuses, like Disney (and what Hanzhonkov was) and which over a century have adapted to the market and rebuilt it around themselves, finding the proper balance between commerce and creativity.

The model of the feudal-clan disintegration of the Soviet state monopoly is destructive for Russian cinema. This was proved by the history of the take-off of our cinema, which began in 2017, but did not take place as a result. Let's hope that some kind of productive model of the film business and film-making in Russia will nevertheless be found. God did not deprive the Russians of the talent of filmmakers.