The Soviet Cine-Underground: Lenfil'm (the Leningrad State Film Studio) and the Transformation of Late Soviet Culture, 1956-1991

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Soviet cinema rightly has a world-wide reputation as one of the world's leading film traditions. It is above all, however, the works of the early Soviet period (early 1920s-late 1930s) that are familiar to non-specialists. Less well-known are the excellent films made in the late Soviet period; and particularly, not many discussions have dealt with the mechanisms of film production and reception. The project that I intend to research focuses on the post-Stalin decades, a period that saw perhaps the greatest flowering of the Leningrad State Film Studio, Lenfil'm. Its output was extremely varied, including, for instance, fantasy/science fiction (Amphibian Man, 1962), Cold War thrillers (Dead Season, 1968), a TV adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, Soviet romcoms (The Blonde Round the Corner, 1984, and Winter Cherries, 1985, with sequels dating from 1990 and 1995), family dramas (Blame Klava K. for my Death, 1979). Many of these films were among the most successful produced in the Soviet Union at the period, in terms of numbers of viewers and lasting appeal (all are now available on the Russian internet). Alongside this, Lenfil'm had a remarkable art film tradition, with directors such as Grigory Kozintsev, Il'ya Averbakh, Dinara Asanova, Aleksei German, Vitaly Mel'nikov and others creating a distinctive house style that - in the case of the younger directors - was characterised by its documentary feel paradoxically allied with a strong sense of self-conscious awareness of film as art. Frequently, films were shot so that the viewer was aware of the process by which the film was created; notable was Averbakh's The Voice (1982), whose central figure is an actress engaged in making a film, who herself appears in-shot with a still camera. Also striking, particularly in German's work, is creative scrutiny of the Soviet past, above all the Stalin era (Ivan Lapshin, 1984, and Khrustalyov, My Car, 1998). As the period when this extraordinary creativity took place recedes into the past, and with the future of the studio itself uncertain, it is important to collect documents, photographs, and oral history before they vanish for good. Research on Lenfil'm will also give a sense of the geographical spread of outstanding film production (commonly, work focuses on Moscow - as in the constant citation of Vladimir Mel'nikov's Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears (1980), often presented as the most significant film produced immediately before glasnost). This study dedicated to one important aspect of late Soviet public art, drawing on oral history and archive work in, for example, the studio's own archives as well as state archives in St Petersburg and Moscow, will make a significant contribution to the understanding of change in so-called 'official' art forms at a period when some of what they produced could be as scandalous as actual 'underground' art. (Some films, such as Leave in September (1979) remained 'on the shelf' for years after they were produced.) Alongside this case study with broad implications, I intend to initiate a wide-ranging discussion of late socialist culture through the organisation of two international workshops in which leading scholars, especially younger scholars, who have done cutting-edge research on the last decades of Soviet power will be able to discuss key issues of social, cultural, and economic change in an imaginative yet focussed way. My position as President of the Association for the Advancement of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (the first not based at a US university) will allow me to showcase key debates on late Soviet culture at the ASEEES annual convention, where I plan to organise two panels. Seasons of films showing major masterpieces of Lenfil'm, which I hope to organise with the co-operation of the BFI and Russkyi Mir, will make this corpus of outstanding material available to the broader public, and help to strengthen the interest in the Soviet cinema of this era that is now starting to emerge