Table Of ContentReal Images
Published and Forthcoming in KINO: The Russian Cinema Series
Series Editor: Richard Taylor
Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (second, revised edition)
Richard Taylor
Forward Soviet! History and Non-fiction Film in the USSR
Graham Roberts
Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema
Edited by Birgit Beumers
Forthcoming KINOfiles (paperback companion handbooks to films in
Russian cinema from its inception to the present day)
The Battleship Potemkin
Richard Taylor
Bed and Sofa
Julian Grafiy
Burnt by the Sun
Birgit Beumers
The Cranes are Flying
Josephine Woll
The Man with the Movie Camera
Graham Roberts
Mirror
Natasha Synessios
Repentance
Denise Youngblood
REAL IMAGES
Soviet Cinema and the Thaw
JOSEPHINE WOLL
I.B.Tauris Publishers
LONDON • NEW YORK
First published in 2000 by I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd,
Victoria House, Bloomsbury Square, London WC1B 4DZ
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
website: http://www.ibtauris.com
In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by
St Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © Josephine Woll, 2000
The right of Josephine Woll to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or
any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
A full cip record for this book is available from the British Library
A full cip record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 1 86064 369 8 hardback
ISBN 1 86064 550 X paperback
Library of Congress catalog card number: available
Set in Monotype Calisto by Ewan Smith, London
Printed and bound in Great Britain By WBC Ltd, Bridgend
Contents
Illustrations vii
KINO: The Russian Cinema Series General Editor’s Preface viii
Preface x
Part I The Big Sleep, 1953-56 1
1 The Big Sleep: Introduction 3
2 The Fallen Idol 14
3 Beat the Devil 30
4 Modem Times 42
Part II The Rules of the Game, 1957-59 57
5 The Rules of the Game: Introduction 59
6 The Best Years of Our Lives 66
7 Great Expectations 83
PartHI The Grand Illusion, 1960-64 101
8 The Grand Illusion: Introduction 103
9 Children of Paradise 112
10 Lost Horizon 125
11 Kameradschaft 138
12 Meet John Doe 151
PartlV Strange Interlude, 1964-65 161
13 Strange Interlude: Introduction 163
14 Odd Man Out 169
15 The Last Laugh 184
PartV Forbidden Games, 1965-67 199
16 Forbidden Games: Introduction 201
17 To Have and Have Not 209
18 Farewell, My Lovely 225
Notes 229
Filmography 252
Bibliography 255
Index 258
Illustrations
1. Soldier Ivan Brovkin 15
2. The Big Family 17
3. The Forty-first 40
4. Spring on Zarechnaia Street 49
5. Carnival Night 54
6. Heights 68
7. Heights 70
8. The Cranes are Flying 73
9. The Cranes are Flying 76
10. The House I Live in 80
11. The Communist 85
12. The Fate of a Man 88
13. The Fate of a Man 89
14. The Fate of a Man 90
15. Ballad of a Soldier 98
16. Serezha 114
17. Clear Skies 119
18. Peace to Him Who Enters 122
19. Nine Days of a Year 132
20. And What If It’s Love? 135
21. Ivan’s Childhood 140
22. Ilich’s Gate 147
23. I Walk Around Moscow 159
24. A Boy Like That 172
25. Welcome, or No Trespassing 174
26. The First Teacher 196
27. The Sky of Our Childhood 211
28. Watch the Car 215
29. Wings 219
30. Brief Encounters 220
31. July Rain 222
KINO: The Russian Cinema Series
General Editor’s Preface
Cinema has been the predominant popular art form of the first half of the
twentieth century, at least in Europe and North America. Nowhere was this
more apparent than in the former Soviet Union, where Lenin’s remark that ‘of
all the arts, for us cinema is the most important’ became a cliché and where
cinema attendances were until recently still among the highest in the world. In
the age of mass politics Soviet cinema developed from a fragile but effective
tool to gain support among the overwhelmingly illiterate peasant masses in the
civil war that followed the October 1917 Revolution, through a welter of
experimentation, into a mass weapon of propaganda through entertainment
that shaped the public image of the Soviet Union - both at home and abroad
and for both élite and mass audiences - and latterly into an instrument to
expose the weaknesses of the past and present in the twin processes of glasnost
and perestroika. Now the national cinemas of the successor republics to the old
USSR are encountering the same bewildering array of problems, from the
trivial to the terminal, as are all the other ex-Soviet institutions.
Cinema’s central position in Russian and Soviet cultural history and its
unique combination of mass medium, art form and entertainment industry,
have made it a continuing battlefield for conflicts of broader ideological and
artistic significance, not only for Russia and the Soviet Union but also for the
world outside. The debates that raged in the 1920s about the relative revolu
tionary merits of documentary as opposed to fiction film, of cinema as opposed
to theatre or painting, or of the proper role of cinema in the forging of post-
Revolutionary Soviet culture and the shaping of the new Soviet man, have
their echoes in current discussions about the role of cinema vis-à-vis other art
forms in effecting the cultural and psychological revolution in human conscious
ness necessitated by the processes of economic and political transformation of
the former Soviet Union into modern democratic and industrial societies and
states governed by the rule of law. Cinema’s central position has also made it
IX
General Editor’s Preface
a vital instrument for scrutinizing the blank pages of Russian and Soviet history
and enabling the present generation to come to terms with its own past.
This series of books intends to examine Russian and Soviet films in the con
text of Russian and Soviet cinema, and Russian and Soviet cinema in the
context of the political and cultural history of Russia, the Soviet Union and the
world at large. Within that framework the series, drawing its authors from both
East and West, aims to cover a wide variety of topics and to employ a broad
range of methodological approaches and presentational formats. Inevitably this
will involve ploughing once again over old ground in order to re-examine
received opinions but it principally means increasing the breadth and depth of
our knowledge, finding new answers to old questions and, above all, raising
new questions for further inquiry and new areas for further research.
The continuing aim of the series is to situate Russian and Soviet cinema in
their proper historical and aesthetic context, both as a major cultural force in
Russian history and Soviet politics and as a crucible for experimentation that
is of central significance to the development of world cinema culture. Books
in the series strive to combine the best of scholarship, past, present and future,
with a style of writing that is accessible to a broad readership, whether that
readership’s primary interest lies in cinema or in Russian and Soviet political
history.
Richard Taylor
Swansea, Wales
