In Russia, Hope Gets a Cameo Part

There’s no razzmatazz here: “Russia’s Hollywood” looks as if a storm had hit it. A damp set sags forlornly on an abandoned open-air lot. Mysterious heaps of rotting wood have gathered behind crumbling buildings. Weeds cling to mangled cars in the alleys.

But there’s an unfamiliar whiff of optimism in the air at Mosfilm, the damaged 15-acre studio complex that was once the huge Soviet movie industry’s showcase.

The post-Soviet fear that engulfed the industry in the early 1990s--that capitalism would destroy Russian cinema--is receding.

“We’ve lost a sail or two, but we’ve reached quiet waters and we’re ready to move on,” said Abdurakhman A. Mamilov, Mosfilm’s deputy director. He said the Russian movie business has weathered its first post-Cold War storm and is learning how to navigate the uncharted waters ahead.

The first glimmers of hope were the 1995 Oscar for Nikita Mikhalkov’s “Burnt by the Sun,” the story of a Stalin-era arrest, and the 1996 Cannes director’s award for Sergei Bodrov’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus.”

Now, the most adventurous of independent directors are also taking heart.

“The feeling is that the cinema is starting to reanimate itself. It’s still pretty scary, but what we have now is still significantly better than what used to exist,” said Ivan V. Dukhovichny, whose bittersweet movie “The Glutton” won a Russian award for most stylish film of the year in 1995.

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Stocky, energetic and mobile-featured, Dukhovichny believes that Russian society has stabilized enough for people to make sense of it. After six schizophrenic years--brute poverty on one hand, brute wealth and copying the West on the other--Russians are ripe for a renaissance of their own national culture.

“You can imagine what it will be like when a new film boom begins in a country of 150 million people,” he said with enthusiasm. “All those people who never think of the movies now will give up their gambling dens and the stores where they pay $5,000 for a pair of trousers, and creative life will resume.

“Some new rich are still lost in games they don’t understand, playing Barbie and Ken in their castles,” he added. “But others are beginning to remember their roots: the village they were born in, the street, the little apartment. Yesterday they were lapping up foreign oysters and snails, now they’re going back to the cucumber and sausage of their childhood. The process has begun.”

He argued that “an American filmmaker like Quentin Tarantino works by taking the recognized cliches of his society and playing with them to create something new. Our problem recently has been that new Russia had no common language and no recognizable cliches. But now we’re reanimating our understanding of our own lives and the specificity of our own Russian values.”

This optimism is tentative. The crisis is far from over, and many directors are still filled with regret for the passing of Soviet order. Lacking convincing creative images of the radically changed society they live in, they also cannot handle the financial and organizational chaos that has forced them to strike out alone--or go under.

The Soviet cinema once was the cosseted darling of the state. Leaders saw movie theaters then as the best place to get their ideology across to a huge, mostly illiterate population. They paid lavishly for an art form that V.I. Lenin said was “at the vanguard of change.” In return, directors had to portray society as political leaders chose to present it.

“We fretted at the censorship. We envied the West. When foreigners came here we used to say how lucky they were to be free. We didn’t understand how useful it was to get state money,” veteran director Viktor I. Merezhko said with regret in the cafeteria of the House of Filmmakers, where out-of-work directors still meet, smoke, drink strong coffee and worry.

Much of the huge Soviet output, when Mosfilm, Gorky and Lenfilm studios produced almost 200 movies a year, was trite, ideological and forgettable. But a few directors--the most celebrated of whom was Andrei Tarkovsky--still managed to produce elliptical masterpieces like “Stalker” and “Solaris.”

The mavericks created compelling images of tormented individuals, struggling to understand themselves and the ghosts of their past, alone in giant machines or in the wildernesses that represented society.

“It turned out that when a person thought about how to overcome the framework of ideology, he became an artist,” Merezhko observed.

Then came Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s glasnost, a new, golden age for the film tradition of such masters as directors Sergei Eisenstein and Tarkovsky. Huge state subsidies still rolled in, but the old taboos were lifted. Once-forbidden areas of history, politics and sex were explored in films like “Repentance,” “This Is No Way to Live” and “Little Vera.” Audiences hungry for innovation--and still unable to see Western films--flocked to watch.

It was only after the Soviet Union disintegrated that hard times began. The Russian government had no money and was uninterested in promoting a state ideology. State subsidies for the huge film studios dried up.

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The private businessmen who began to appear didn’t want to gamble their new wealth on Russian film projects. The state distribution network, which had once sent thousands of films 2to the outposts of empire, collapsed; this meant that filmmakers could no longer hope for big audiences, even if they scraped together the money to shoot. There was no way to get their money back.

Worse still, the borders had opened. Once-banned foreign films flooded Russia, with all the lure of forbidden fruit. Videos went on sale in every kiosk. Movie theaters started showing lurid sex-and-death films from the West--cheap, tasteless, usually pirated and running seemingly all the time.

Then the theaters emptied. The new Russia suddenly offered other entertainments for the young: racy bars, casinos and nightclubs. The traditional audience here for movies--middle-class intellectuals--expressed their dislike of the bad films showing by skipping them. They also were suddenly too poor to afford the rocketing ticket prices; they also were scared off by the post-Soviet crime wave that kept them from theaters, many in run-down areas.

In despair, many thousands of professionals employed in film left to try to make a living elsewhere. Other piqued young directors, out of money and luck, retreated into the twilight zone of the avant-garde.

By 1995, Mosfilm, which had put out more than 60 films a year in Soviet days--one-third of the country’s total--found itself with just two movies in the works. Directors who had always judged the health of their industry by the quantity of its output pronounced it dead.

“Unfortunately, nothing is happening in cinema,” said Karen G. Shakhnazarov, who directed “The Murder of the Czar,” a 1992 film. “And I think we can now say for sure that our national cinema no longer exists.”

Nostalgia for the security of the old days is strong. Some directors still plead with the state to remember the importance of ideology--a word with fewer negative connotations here than abroad--and to pay for films giving a sense of collective direction.

“Every state needs ideology, something laying out what people should aim for. Trying to live without ideas makes no sense,” Shakhnazarov said. “However paradoxical it seems, where there’s ideology, there’s culture.”

But other filmmakers are beginning to understand that the state no longer plays the all-powerful role in Russian society that it did in Soviet days. To survive, they must stop expecting help from on high. “Our strategy now is to rely only on ourselves and not to have any illusions about the government or the state coming to the rescue,” Mosfilm’s Mamilov said. “And I don’t want to wring my hands about this.”

Mamilov’s recipe for success is to keep the giant studios of the Soviet state-run industry going, as centers of excellence from which a new industry can emerge. He rents space and technical expertise to the many small private firms, both Russian and foreign, which have set up in the last few years.

The total number of Russian films made at Mosfilm last year rose to 26, although only six of these were Mosfilm’s own projects. Mamilov says with quiet satisfaction that the surge has allowed him to keep on at least a few hundred of the 5,000 staffers who once crowded the premises.

Because even the tiny allocations of state money promised in the budget--the equivalent of $1.5 million this year--materialize late, if at all, Mosfilm has found private backers to pay for nine “quality popular” films this year. It is setting up a distribution company to sell the film to theaters all over Russia.

The pilot was the lighthearted 1995 movie by Vladimir Menshov, “Shirley-Mirley,” a thriller-cum-farce packed with James Bond-like villains, giant diamonds and car chases--but also with more familiar Russian generals, bungling cops, tony classical music and a family of quadruplets separated by the Soviet state and reunited through the theft of the diamond.

Energetically distributed, it recouped Mosfilm’s investment.

Mosfilm is also hoping that several long-delayed pieces of legislation to encourage private investment in movies will soon be enacted; these include a law giving tax breaks to businesses that put money in films and a law allowing Mosfilm to be privatized.

As for the truly adventurous movie-makers here, they have raced so far toward the millennium that they have no desire to see big Soviet studios back. Dukhovichny, who has broken new ground by getting private backing for his efforts, sneers at the leftovers of the Soviet film apparatus. “The idea of bringing back those dinosaurs is complete nonsense,” he said, adding, “Mosfilm today is a cheap dump full of crooks wholesaling tea and furniture. They hardly make any films of their own.”

He is equally dismissive of GosKino, the ministry of filmmaking, which he says wastes whatever odds and ends of state aid do still trickle down. “Lots of people,” he said, “work at this enormous ministry: a huge staff that gets money to sit in offices talking on the phone. They have security guards, grand reception rooms, offices and halls, but they do nothing and they know nothing. After paying their salaries, all that’s left of the miserable $6 million allocated to the movie business is perhaps $3 million.”

But Dukhovichny, working with the private sector, noted that he already has his next screenplay written: a series of sketches about people who buy and sell a single Soviet car during its 20 years on the road. It is a parable about how society has changed in those years.

His creative financing is all worked out, too. He plans to approach the cash-strapped factory at Tolyatti, where the tinny Zhiguli car is produced. “They’ll have to pay,” he said. “Not to prove it’s the best car in the world--it’s the worst!--but just because it’s our Russian heritage and their only chance of getting good publicity.”

But such positive thinking is worlds away from the anxious atmosphere at Moscow’s half-empty theaters. They are still scraping along, leasing bits of their property to private firms and sleuthing for good films at moderate prices from shady small-time distributors.

At the Moskva theater, which has given up on a long post-Soviet run of erotic movies and is trying to again attract its old audience of intellectuals, tickets now cost the equivalent of between $2 and $5. But half the dusty foyer still is given over to a cat show. Maria N. Vorobyova, the deputy boss, put her head in her hands when asked if the theater ever made a profit.

“Profit?” she answered. “No, that was in Soviet times.”