When It’s Movie Time in Moscow, Weather Gets Better

“We had meant to show you the real Russian winter of 40 below zero,” the Soviet film maker Elem Klimov told his visitors through a translator, “but as you see we didn’t, because the atmosphere in the world has become warmer.”

All things are relative. The temperature outside was only a few degrees above zero Fahrenheit, and these Moscow winter days are bleak and short, the mornings still pitch dark at 8 o’clock, nightfall well advanced by 5.

But as Russian winters go this one has been surprisingly mild (except possibly to a delegation of thin-blooded Californians). And the political climate has unquestionably grown warmer in the time of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, no matter how many pairs of fingers are kept surreptitiously crossed by both of the superpowers.

Nowhere has the spirit of glasnost, or openness, been better demonstrated than in the world of Soviet cinema. In a dramatic but bloodless revolution in May, 1986, Klimov, whose films had been suppressed for years, was elected president of the Film Workers Union of the U.S.S.R.

Several old-line film bureaucrats, including Sergei Bondarchuk (“War and Peace”), lost their posts, with the implicit approval of the Gorbachev leadership.

In March, 1987, Klimov headed a delegation of Soviet film makers to Hollywood for what was called the Entertainment Summit. Just 10 months later, at an evening reception in Dom Kino (House of Film), the modern headquarters building of the union, Klimov was addressing Summit II, a delegation of visitors to the Soviet Union from Hollywood.

Mark Gerzon, the young writer-producer who had devised the first summit, now heads a permanent organization called the American-Soviet Film Initiative, which grew out of it. The initiative has a Soviet equivalent, the Amerikano-Sovietskaya Kinoinitiative (ASK), headed by Igor Kokaref, a Soviet critic and film historian. The 10-day visitation, which concluded over the weekend, was co-hosted by ASK and the Film Workers Union.

Accompanying Gerzon were actors Dennis Weaver and Keith Carradine; producer Carolyn Pfeiffer of Alive Films (“The Whales of August”); director Gilbert Cates (“Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams”); Jeff Berg, who heads the influential talent agency, International Creative Management; Bruce Ramer, an entertainment lawyer from the firm of Gang, Brown & Tyre, who represents Steven Spielberg among other show-business clients; David Puttnam, lately of Columbia and now again an independent producer, who flew in from Bangkok to join the delegation; producer Larry Schiller, who was in Moscow negotiating two co-production ventures, and two journalistic outriders, Jim Lardner of the New Yorker and myself.

Also on hand as adjunct members of the delegation were producers Bruce Graham and Ted Hartley, both exploring co-productions, and San Francisco philanthropist and film distributor George Gund.

The Soviet hosts laid on an exhausting schedule of business sessions and social events, including optional visits to the Bolshoi, the circus and the theater and a three-day excursion visit to Tbilisi, the capital of Soviet Georgia, to talk with local film makers and visit the Gruzia Studio where “Repentence,” the toughly outspoken new film about a Beria-like figure, was made.

What the schedule lacked was time enough to see even more of the glasnost -era films. Yet nothing was more impressive about the trip than the work, in whole or in part, that the delegation was shown.

A program of excerpts from documentaries included a piece of “More Light,” which demonstrates from newsreels the cult of personality that centered on Joseph Stalin. Stalin-bashing is now a national preoccupation, and the documentary has to be one of the more lethal assaults.

There was a film as well about the people who live on the fringes of Chernobyl and are trying to resume normal lives, netting river fish that may or may not be radioactive. The off-limits signs beside the highway are reminders that a large piece of geography is, for practical purposes, dead.

“Coming Home” is an angry piece about the Afghanistan war. A Soviet mother bemoans the son lost in the fighting there; a veteran who fought there and survived expresses his own bitterness. It is hard to imagine the documentary being made or shown a very few years earlier.

Among the other documentaries were a look at a prison for women whose alcoholism led them into crime, an emotional interview with a black marketeer on Death Row for murder (and subsequently executed), glimpses of a destructive past in the recollections of an old woman exploring the ruins of a church and an old man in another film pointing out where a political prison camp had stood.

A piece called “Rock” looked at the life of a popular Leningrad rock group as the music emerges from a clandestine existence to a rather gingerly official acceptance.

The Soviets turn out about 300 documentaries a year, although one film maker admitted candidly that, as elsewhere in the world, they command smaller audiences than escapist fiction fare. And while not all the new documentaries are controversial, it seems clear that the film makers are able to look at social problems and disputed viewpoints with a critical candor that reflects a personal rather than a collective or official point of view.

One of the most popular new feature films in Moscow is “A Forgotten Melody for the Flute” by the veteran Eldar Ryazanov, who has been making comedies since 1955.

It begins as a triangular love farce, the male an upper-level bureaucrat who lives by the truth that you can’t get into trouble saying “no.” Saying “yes” to a pretty co-worker incites no end of trouble.

In the end, the film turns darkly fantastic, without dulling the edge of its attack on the stifling stupidities of bureaucracy. Remarkably, given the rather strait-laced tradition of Soviet films, the love scenes in “Forgotten Melody” include flashes of nudity. Glasnost is everywhere.

It is his first film in 25 years, Ryazanov says, to go into release without a single cut made by the bureaucrats.

Even so, he said, “Freedom has come too late for me,” meaning that he was operating under constraints for the prime quarter-century of his career.

Better late than never, a friend said.

“Ah, yes,” Ryazanov said, touching the wood paneling behind him.

“Blue Mountains” is another delicious satire on bureaucracy, by the Georgian film maker Eldar Shengalaya, who is the son of one film maker, the late Nikolai Shengalaya, and the brother of another, Georgy.

The Shengalaya satire centers on the troubles of a young writer who is trying to get his manuscript read and approved at what must be the world’s most disastrously lackadaisical publishing house. The work uses a bladder rather than a stiletto for its effects, but its running gags and its gallery of faces have universal appeal.

The American visitation coincided with a 30th-anniversary observance of a Soviet-American pact on cultural exchanges. In the sumptuous and chandeliered Hall of Columns where Soviet leaders lie in state, a full house heard celebratory speeches by deputy ministers of foreign affairs and culture and by the U. S. ambassador, Jack F. Matlock Jr.

It appears a measure of the official Soviet interest in the film initiatives that Gerzon was also invited to speak. He drew a burst of applause when he called for an end to screen stereotypes and said, “For many years we’ve been telling lies about each other on the screen; it’s time to start telling the truth.”

The schedules included work sessions notable for their alternating doses of candor and rhetoric, building toward statements about future contacts and goals. Yet what seemed most impressive were the private conversations, the home visits (forbidden until relatively recently) and the guarded but earnest optimism voiced by the Soviet film makers that what they are now calling “the years of stagnation” are over for good.