Gorbachev’s Program : Soviet Films: Key to New Social Era

The private screening was over and Elem Klimov, an obscure Soviet movie director who had made the film, was walking out of the theater when a friend approached, clearly in agitation.

“You’re dead,” he told Klimov.

Klimov’s friend had reason to be fearful, for the movie violated a longstanding Soviet taboo by showing Czar Nicholas II, the ruler shot after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, to be a good person.

That was in 1975. But today Klimov is not only very much alive, he is the most powerful man in Soviet cinema. And the offending film, “Agonia,” which censors shelved for nine years, has been released to critical acclaim and packed theaters.

Panel Reviews Films

One by one over the last two years, once-forbidden films like “Agonia” have been released. And, in the next few weeks, a little-noticed panel, formed six months ago with the blessing of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, is expected to complete its review of the 50 or so films previously considered too politically sensitive for the Soviet citizenry--and release nearly all of them.

Such ferment has expanded to include almost all forms of art. The change is an explicit part of Gorbachev’s sophisticated attempt to use the creative community in his “reconstruction” program to re-invigorate the moribund Soviet economy, according to a close reading of the official press and Soviet officials interviewed here.

The aim, say the sources, is to use movies, and the mass audiences that they draw, to provoke widespread discussion of the failings of Soviet society, to float trial balloons of economic experiments and to rekindle social involvement.

Looking for Support

Gorbachev clearly is also attempting to line up supporters in the intelligentsia to fight a bureaucracy that is resisting his changes. By going along with him, members of the creative community are advancing their careers.

In addition to the expected release of about 50 films, many long-suppressed books are being readied for publication this year. On stage, theater directors are being given the freedom to plan their own repertoires--and the responsibility that if their plays bomb, they may have to shut their doors. Even rock music is being encouraged--somewhat.

But in Gorbachev’s campaign to win over the hearts and minds of his countrymen, the film and filmmakers are at the forefront.

The Soviet leader’s explanation for the new policy of glasnost , or openness, is that the Soviet system requires “self-criticism” since there is no opposition party to point out shortcomings of the ruling elite.

To be sure, Gorbachev also made amply clear that glasnost is no blank check for artistic freedom, and he has labeled as “anarchy” an unrestricted policy of press and artistic freedom. Yet, somehow, without going too far, artists are supposed to break through to a cynical Soviet public long accustomed to shrugging off stale propaganda--to dispel the widespread indifference, gloom and pessimism about Soviet society.

Gorbachev gave this explanation during a private Kremlin meeting in June with a group of writers, according to accounts that have reached the West. In it, he also urged the writers to take their cues from filmmakers.

It was the filmmakers who first whipped up a press campaign about a year ago to discredit the film industry’s Old Guard, which came to power during the late Leonid I. Brezhnev’s suffocating 18-year reign.

Old Guard Outmaneuvered

The filmmakers then outmaneuvered the Old Guard last spring during delegate selection to the annual meeting of the Assn. of Filmmakers, which was attended by Gorbachev and other members of the Politburo and the Central Committee.

By the time the May meeting was over, the Brezhnev holdovers had been ousted. Klimov was installed, and the conflicts commission--as the review panel promptly became known--was created.

The reverberations have continued. Just last month, Filipp T. Yermash, head of Goskino, the state film committee, was forced into retirement without even the customary public thank-you that signals that a Soviet official is departing in good grace.

Allegory of Stalin Era

Most explosive among the films about to be released is “Repentance,” a thinly disguised allegory that treats dictator Josef Stalin’s terror tactics with a candor never seen before on the Soviet screen.

The film conjures up the suffering of millions of Soviet citizens who lost friends or relatives during the purges. In one harrowing scene, a tortured man hangs painfully by manacled hands to an almost unbearable soundtrack of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from the Ninth Symphony. Seconds later, the man’s daughter parrots the Stalinist excuse that the sacrifice of her father is insignificant compared with the importance of the party program.

The movie, previewed in Moscow and shown in Soviet Georgia where it was filmed, is scheduled to be shown soon on national television. It also will be the Soviet Union’s entry in May at the Cannes Film Festival.

Already released is “From Payday to Payday,” a film that strikes at another linchpin of Soviet ideology. It portrays a fictional modern Soviet factory operating under a radical experimental program of profits and losses. Inefficiency forces the factory to face something unthinkable in the Soviet system, the possibility of bankruptcy and unemployment.

Criticism in Pravda

The movie industry itself also has become the focus of discussion and criticism in the pages of Pravda and other newspapers over the complicated and arbitrary structure of state censorship of movies and the behind-the-scenes studio power plays that would rival any Hollywood bloodletting.

For the last year, a deeply demoralized pool of creative talent has been detailing personal horror stories of careers wrecked, health threatened and films shelved for reasons that verge on the ludicrous. Typically, such outbursts criticize mediocrity, cronyism, nepotism, corruption, arbitrariness, cowardice and “hacks, time-servers and fast operators” in the industry. There also has been the suggestion of enhancing the movie industry’s prestige by creating a Soviet version of the Oscars.

There are even proposals circulating that would require film studios to make a profit and to use advertising blitzes to lure teen-agers from the seductions of foreign attractions like “Angelika,” a French-made historical adventure-romance, and bring them to the half-empty halls showing slower-paced Soviet films with higher ideological content.

To be sure, Soviet cinema even before Gorbachev’s latest initiatives was a far cry from the monolith that it was when Stalin himself edited the “Battle of Stalingrad,” which depicted in the Soviet heroic style the life-and-death World War II struggle.

But the new policy comes at a time when attendance at Soviet films is markedly on the wane. At its peak in 1969, Soviet citizens averaged 21 visits per year; today, that average is about 15. More than half of the films attract only one-fourth of the targeted box office numbers. The popularity of films made by the largest Soviet studios has fallen off by 50% in the last 10 years, while foreign films are playing to packed theaters.

Soviet officials blame much of the decline on the same forces that produced an industry shake-out in the United States 20 years ago: the rise of television and the growth of hobbies and other cultural activities. And they are quick to point out that the industry, which sold more than 4 billion tickets last year, remains profitable as a whole, netting more than 1 billion rubles, according to the latest annual statistics.

Low Appeal to Youth

Most troubling, Soviet officials concede, is the low appeal of Soviet films among the young people. This is what a teacher from Penza, about 300 miles southeast of Moscow, wrote in Socialist Industry in February, after polling his high school students on their film-viewing habits:

“What they mentioned most often were the Western ‘hits’ that our movie distribution agencies have so zealously crammed into audiences in the last two or three years. . . . The young moviegoers excitedly described battles to the death, fistfights, luxurious bars, hotels, nightclubs, beaches. You see how the conclusion ripens in them: how easy, beautiful and carefree it is, this life overseas.”

But by the time the letter was published, the press campaign against Brezhnev holdovers in the movie bureaucracy was already in full swing.

Typically, it had begun modestly enough several months earlier. The first salvo was buried in the final paragraphs of a Nov. 16, 1985, article in Komsomolskaya Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party youth organization, that dealt with the drawing power of foreign films.

Best Films on Shelf

Responding to criticism from the now-retired Yermash, who simply urged Soviet filmmakers to produce better movies that would outdraw foreign films, the article’s author pointed out acidly there was no lack of good films or directors, merely that some of the country’s best films had been shelved for up to 20 years.

And in an unusually bold move, the article went on to list 11 prominent directors whose films had been shelved. The list became a tip sheet for Soviet editors seeking firsthand accounts of problems with censorship. Criticism of Goskino quickly expanded.

One of the 11, Vladimir Motyl, wrote two weeks later in the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya that state film distribution officials had inflated attendance figures of Soviet-made films and lowered audience counts for foreign films in order to hide their increasing popularity. Motyl said he had told Goskino about the fraudulent figures.

“It turned out,” he added, “that Goskino not only closes its eyes to the ‘improvement’ . . . but sometimes makes additional ‘improvements.’ ”

Gives Up Directing

Another of the 11, Andrei Smirnov, wrote a few weeks later in Izvestia’s weekly supplement Nedelye that he had given up directing “because I could not feed my family.”

He had made four films in 15 years that were released, including the acclaimed “Byelorussky Station,” a penetrating look into the generational clash between the postwar generation and those who had fought in World War II. But Smirnov said it was not worth the protracted struggles to gain approval, which sometimes went all the way to the minister of culture himself.

“Tens, at times hundreds, of people will give advice--sometimes directly contradicting each other . . . And--most remarkable--not one of this horde . . . takes any sort of personal responsibility,” he complained.

Shooting Is Stopped

Twice, the censors inexplicably stopped the shooting of “Byelorussky Station,” Smirnov added. “The question of continuing it hung by a thread. We succeeded in finishing it only because Mikhail Romm, my professor who was still alive, desperately defended it.”

Leningrad film director Alexei German, another of the 11, recalled in Nedelye several months later that when censors objected to his acclaimed “My Friend Ivan Lapshin,” the offense turned out to have nothing to do with the plot.

“Where did you find such narrow streets, why is the apartment so poor?” the censors had demanded.

The film eventually was released in 1985, and critics here considered it one of the main events of the cinema season.

The new-found candor has reached such a point that some filmmakers now are revealing in interviews how they had to use blat --the Soviet term for connections--all the way to the Politburo level to defeat Goskino censors.

Help From Shevardnadze

Georgian director Lara Gogoberidze recalled several incidents involving Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, then-party chief of Soviet Georgia and a personal friend.

“Shevardnadze was always calling Yermash to say, ‘We like this script,’ or ‘We like this film. Let us have it. Don’t interfere,’ ” said Gogoberidze.

It was different in Leningrad, where then-Politburo member Grigory Romanov kept tight reins on the arts.

Internal documents from the Leningrad Film Studio portray a grim picture of artistic strangulation: The studio had enthusiastically endorsed a film entitled “Mistakes of Youth,” but the party apparatus deemed it ideologically flawed.

“The creative team ate out of (the director’s) hand and wasn’t able to force (him) to implement their suggestions,” a party official complained.

The ultimate outcome of the affair, wrote Soviet emigre film critic Val Golovskoy, who published the documents in his new book “Behind the Soviet Screen,” was the abolition of Lenfilm’s artistic council, “the dismissal of (Lenfilm) General Director Viktor Blinov, the banning of several feature films and the wholesale firing of numerous other Lenfilm administrators and filmmakers.”

Attempts at Profit Sharing

Another long-buried controversy--a nearly forgotten flirtation with capitalist production methods--has been revived. That experiment, set up in 1965, was simple: If the pictures made by a special production unit did well at the box office, everyone received a percentage of the profit. If it bombed, they lost money. Party control was limited to declaring films unacceptable or, if the movie was merely tolerable, reducing the group’s profits 30%.

The group produced 34 films during its 10-year existence and was a commercial and artistic success, according to its chief, Grigory Chukrai. But the experimental unit’s victories may have been its undoing.

“For many, our successes were both a reproach and a threat to their well-being,” Chukrai wrote recently. Goskino dismantled the experiment in 1975 without bothering to analyze a report on the unit’s work.

Klimov said in an interview that the experiment will serve as a key element in plans to restructure the economics of Soviet filmmaking.

Film Institute Criticized

Among the targets in the current campaign is the prestigious National Film Institute, the training ground for generations of Soviet movie artists, directors, screenwriters, set designers and financial experts. It has been criticized for teaching timidity to budding filmmakers, for admitting unqualified students because of family pull, for inflating grades and for permitting often-absent professors to teach classes by telephone.

Students organized something of a rebellion at the end of October by holding a 10-day conference on future directions at the institute. Top directors, including Klimov, and leading stars came to the workshop sessions.

The students “were not polite,” said Tatiana Storchak, deputy director of the film institute’s international department. But they were listened to.

Curriculum Changes Planned

As a result, curriculum changes will be made, the administration’s plans have been speeded up and two old-fashioned teachers have been told to retire, Storchak said.

“We should have done it long ago,” she said of the forced retirements.

Whether the filmmakers’ revolt will achieve its artistic aims--let alone Gorbachev’s grand goal of social tonic--remains uncertain.

Films created under the new regime have yet to be completed. And foreign adventure and romance movies are likely to continue to outdraw most Soviet films, as suggested by the long lines of Soviet citizens waiting to see the Polish film “New Amazons” outside the Rossia in Moscow’s Pushkin Square or “The Three Musketeers” on Rustaveli Boulevard in Tbilisi.

Dom Kino, (the House of Cinema), the headquarters of the filmmakers association, is where the cinema revolt was launched. It was here that members of the Moscow chapter stayed until 1:30 a.m. last spring to elect Young Turks as delegates to the national conference that eventually unseated the Old Guard.

And it is here today that the excitement is almost palpable as members--gesticulating, arguing, laughing--crowd in for evening previews.

The push for advertising remains little more than a concept. Yet new and more attractive billboards are sprouting in and around Moscow.

“You have the turf prepared for some very creative work in film--along with films on the American threat and pot boilers,” said a Western cultural attache. “They are letting their creative juices flow.”

And Klimov, the symbol of the new spirit, last fall toured the United States to spread the new gospel. In New York, he met with top directors. In Denver, he was entertained by Richard D. Lamm, Colorado’s Democratic governor. In Hollywood, he sipped Chivas Regal and ate lobster with producers planning co-productions in the Soviet Union.

Though the new group is riding high, it remains mindful that the last cultural thaw occurred during Nikita Khrushchev’s reign and it did not survive his tenure.

And so with the arts being viewed as the servant of the party, few doubt that a shift to chillier political winds could bring about a freeze again, as Klimov acknowledged during a recent interview.

Asked if he had opponents, Klimov replied, “Many.”

Where are they?

“Everywhere.”