East Meets West : Movies: For the first time, two Soviet film firms are taking part in American Film Market, hawking titles they feel have international appeal.

Hollywood has long issued warnings--silly as well as serious--that the Russians were coming.

Well, the Russians are here. And they’re targeting Hollywood. Their purpose: cinematic glasnost --not to mention commercial gain. The battlefield: the American Film Market, the world’s largest motion-picture trade event that opened Thursday and continues through Friday at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. (The market is not open to the public.)

Representatives of more than 115 U.S. and 85 foreign companies that license motion pictures are in attendance. So are about 20 firms that sell entertainment-related products/services. Plus, 685 prospective film buyers.

For the first time in the 10-year history of the film market, two Soviet companies are vying for the attention of those buyers--as well as American film makers interested in co-ventures. Also on hand from Eastern Europe: Film Polski and Czechoslovak/lfex Films.

From their respective suites, situated at opposite ends of the Hilton, Mosfilm and Sovexportfilm are each hawking Soviet-made titles that they believe have appeal for American and international moviegoers. While here, both companies also plan to do some buying of their own.

Until this year, the Moscow-based Sovexportfilm was the only Soviet representative at the market--a status that officially began in 1987. (In 1986, Sovexportfilm sent representatives to observe the proceedings.) Founded more than 60 years ago, Sovexportfilm is the country’s biggest importer/exporter of films. Until recently, it was the country’s only such firm. But in the spirit of perestroika (and with lessening restrictions on foreign-trade activities), there is now competition--namely, the powerful Mosfilm. The biggest studio in the Soviet Union, Mosfilm makes about 50 films a year--roughly half the country’s film output--plus about a dozen TV movies.

To sell their films, both Mosfilm and Sovexportfilm are touting the newly liberated Soviet cinema.

“We have nudity,” smiles Sovexportfilm public relations representative Oleg M. Sulkin. “Our film makers are now exploring narcotics, prostitution and crime,” exclaims Vladimir N. Dostal, general director of Mosfilm. Dostal also happens to serve as deputy chairman of the State Committee on Cinematography of the U.S.S.R.--also known as Goskino--an irony, since Goskino once kept tight control over the country’s film makers.

Based in Moscow, Goskino used to oversee the scripts from the country’s 15 republics. Censorship was common. But as new freedoms have swept the country, Goskino’s role has changed. It now acts as more of a coordinator of various film activities.

Today, pornography remains prohibited. But just about everything else seems to go--judging from the promotional materials in the Mosfilm and Sovexportfilm suites.

A promotional trailer for Sovexportfilm’s “Zero City,” a surrealistic social satire from Soviet film maker Karen Shakhnazarov, includes female frontal nudity--and bizarre Daliesque sights, such as a sequence in which the main character sees an exact likeness of his head on a platter. A knife then cuts into the head, extracting a piece of it (it has a cake-like texture) and carefully placing it on a serving plate.

A company promotional catalogue, which solemnly acknowledges Russian classics available on videocassette such as “Battleship Potemkin” and “October,” includes plenty of nudity to hype its contemporary product. Then there’s the large-format Sovexportfilm calendar (a giveaway to some lucky film market visitors), which is a virtual pin-up parade of Soviet screen actresses.

This particular exercise in glasnost ranges from a California girl-ish Anna Tikhonova in blue jeans and jean jacket, posing with posies, to a shot of Yelena Sotnikova, wearing a smile and some strategically draped 35-millimeter film. She’s biting suggestively into an apple.

Mosfilm’s most highly touted product, the contemporary romantic tragicomedy “Black Rose, Red Rose,” is being hyped with promotional materials that include nude photos of an androgynous character known as “Homo Sovieticus.”

Mosfilm is also selling the taboo-shattering “Up to the Limit.” “It deals with a subject that couldn’t have been done before,” says Dostal. The story line: A rebel within a modern-day Soviet prison-camp leads his fellow prisoners in an uprising against “the ruthless camp’s system.”

A Mosfilm “proclamation of independence” hand-out stresses that the studio has come to the market “free of government control.” The proclamation goes on to sing the praises of seven films it is selling, as well as film services including “13 sound stages, 5,000 highly qualified professionals and resources that include anything from tanks and airplanes to a 3,000-horse cavalry unit.” Western producers are further promised “fantastic deals at extremely competitive prices.”

Still another sign of burgeoning Soviet competition: a film on the boards at Mosfilm will be shot simultaneously in both English and Russian. According to Dostal, the Soviet actors who will star in the tentatively titled “Cossacks,” an epic about a real life 15th-Century Cossack hero who united the tribes of Siberia, are currently studying English. (Shooting is scheduled to begin late this year.)

With a nod to the oft-troublesome translation and dubbing problems of Soviet-to-English films (the languages are so different that dialogue almost never seems in sync with the characters), Dostal admits, “If Americans will not come to our movies, we will bring our movies to them.”

Meanwhile, there’s another Soviet presence among the AFM crowd: the U.S.S.R. Film Service, a division of Soyuzkinoservice, which was formed 20-years ago to assist Western film makers in the Soviet Union. But where the company used to wait for film makers to come to them, it now courts them. A Los Angeles office was opened in June, 1989. By June of this year, a New York office is expected to be in operation, said president Yuri Spilny, who is attending the film market along with chief executive officer David Gamburg.

Unlike Mosfilm and Sovexportfilm, Spilny’s U.S.S.R. Film Service doesn’t have films to sell. What it hawks is access--and attitudes.

Consider: an American film maker in search of a Siberian village location recently approached U.S.S.R. Film Service. They suggested Seerdlovsk, in the Ural Mountains of Southern Siberia, not too far from a film studio in Novosibirsk, where there are the necessary accommodations. (A deal is now pending.) When Carolco Pictures and Turner Entertainment went in search of locations for their upcoming TV production “Last Warning,” about the Chernobyl disaster, U.S.S.R. Film Service found a Chernobyl look-alike power station in Kurchatuv.

Along with rounding up facilities and locations, U.S.S.R. Film Service provides location consultants to counter any problems with language/customs. “In a way, we are selling confidence to Americans,” says Spilny, adding, “And at the same time, we are educating the Soviet side.”

Spilny believes that because of recent changes in Eastern Europe, there will be a new hunger to see movies filmed in, and about, the Soviet Union. Says Spilny: “The doors are now wide open--and the world is peering in.”