VIEW FROM FILMLAND SUMMIT : Commentary

The American and Soviet image makers who met in Los Angeles this week parted as neighbors who, while maybe not altogether liking each other, found they had more in common than just governments with ICBMs aimed at each other.

Their so-called “Entertainment Summit” also reaffirmed some profound political and historical differences between the United States and the Soviet Union that the week’s public expressions of good will, cooperation and friendship will be hard to overcome.

A hastily prepared 20-point plan for cooperation between the leading film makers of the two superpowers called for exchanges of ideas and personnel and suggested a number of co-production projects. But the end result--something that shows up on the movie screens of Leningrad and Los Angeles--clearly is still a long way away.

Summit organizer Mark Gerzon, a young and heretofore unknown Malibu producer who is likely to reap personal rewards from the publicity surrounding the summit, said the talks in large part met the announced goals. It introduced the Soviet and American film communities and illuminated the ugly stereotypes that Soviets and Americans have of each other--stereotypes that are both created and nurtured by film and television.

As summit participants, Gerzon said, “we committed ourselves to a process by which each of our people will learn more about the other through cinema.”

Soviet delegation head Elem Klimov--who has prospered from the political and social reforms of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and is the new head of the powerful Soviet Film Workers Union--said what happened in Los Angeles this week “was just incredible.”

The international medium of film, Klimov said, can foster “mutual cooperation and peace in the world. We have to continue this process.”

That’s not a bad start, of course, for the image makers of two nations that hold the fate of humanity in their arsenals. One of the basic rules for defusing tense, potentially violent confrontations is to build personal bonds between the adversaries.

So what’s next? What can the image factories of Hollywood or Moscow do about reducing tensions? What do they want to do?

Among the top Hollywood commissars of American filmdom, only David Puttnam, the British subject who now heads Columbia Pictures (the film-making subsidiary of that stereotype of American economic imperialism, the Coca-Cola Co.), stepped out from behind the studio gates to address the public about the summit.

“We’ll do everything we can to further the aims of the summit and to make the next one a success,” Puttnam said Wednesday, adding that he “might like” to send some Columbia personnel to work for a while in the Soviet Union, to invite Soviets to work in the United States and to “aggressively pursue possibilities for student exchanges.”

The new political situation in the Soviet Union, Puttnam said, has “created the air and the room into which we should move.”

But how and where can such moves take place in an atmosphere that has known four decades of competition, distrust and isolation that are not likely to disappear in the last reel? Americans and Soviets do view the world differently and their differences go far deeper than just the foreign policies of their respective governments.

Within the American film industry are plenty of men and women who know Russia because they, their parents or their grandparents fled persecution there. To them, the iron boot of the Soviet or Russian military is no groundless stereotype. The Soviet tanks in Budapest, Prague or Kabul were not invented by American propagandists doing the bidding of their capitalist masters.

A number of the Soviet film makers who visited here talked of the friendship they felt for Americans during and immediately after World War II. Some also asked pointed, knowledgeable questions about Americans wresting California and the Southwest from Mexico, racism and commercial considerations that invariably overrule desires to create great art. They brought with them two docudramas--”We Accuse” and “Victory”--about, respectively, the 1960 Francis Gary Powers U-2 spying incident and the Truman Administration’s postwar reversals of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s foreign policy that, in the Soviets’ eyes, started the Cold War.

Stereotypes exist because they are partly true. The Soviet automaton of “Rocky IV” and the highball swilling, war plotting captains of the military-industrial complex in “Solo Voyage”--the so-called “Russian Rambo”--are cartoon characters, to be sure. But like most stereotypes, they are grounded in the experience and perceptions of their creators.

The Soviets do produce finely crafted, driven, professional athletes who pose as amateurs. America’s defense industry does have a financial stake in maintaining the U.S-Soviet conflict.

American film writer Fay Kanin appeared at a summit session at the American Film Institute. She perceptively noted that both sides’ ugliest stereotypes invariably resulted in movies with militaristic or violent themes.

“The enemies of both countries,” she said, “are violence and militarism.”

Unfortunately, since before World War II those have been the principal themes of intercourse between the two countries, and that situation is not likely to change in the near future.

Unfortunately, too, violence and militarism do very well at the American box office, that ultimate measure of American success that the Soviets with their own kinds of arbiters do not have to consider.

An image-making system that by its nature conjures and profits from the stereotypes of the mass audience will certainly be hard-pressed to devise art in which peace is as dramatic, appealing and remunerative as war.

Then again, as Kirghizian director Tolomush Okeyev, an Asian and the only non-Caucasian to participate in the summit, noted: “It is more difficult to create a beautiful work of art than to push a button.”