1 of 3
Soviet Sixties" sounds like an oxymoron: Brezhnev in lovebeads. But Russia experienced a period of cultural ferment analogous in certain ways to the transformations that roiled America in the Age of Aquarius. The Soviet Sixties began earlier than the American version and ended sooner, though equally abruptly.
Change was set in motion by Stalin's death in 1953 and Khrushchev's famous denunciation of the "cult of personality" at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in 1956. What followed was a period known as "the Thaw." While artists and thinkers were still subject to a grab bag of ideological constraints, there was an explosion of long-suppressed freedom in all of the arts. These were the years in which the charismatic poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko declaimed his verses to enormous audiences, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's landmark novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published.
The Soviet film industry was also revitalized during this period. While the works of Yevtushenko, Solzhenitsyn, and other leading writers of the Thaw were widely read in the United States, few Americans are acquainted with the films of that era. "Soviet Sixties," a traveling show that played recently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, has introduced some of the best of these movies to an American audience.
After Stalin's death in 1953, the first efforts to escape the constraints of socialist realism mimicked documentaries, seeking an authenticity that most Soviet-era films lacked. In these pseudo-documentaries, filmmakers rejected color—which had become synonymous with ideologically perfect socialist realism—and consciously chose black-and-white instead. By the Sixties, black-and-white had become a less politically laden choice. As Josephine Woll observes, "directors [in the 1960s] embraced black-and-white not in order to represent reality truthfully, as their predecessors had done ten years earlier, but to generate their own singular vision and version of it."1 This singular vision became the hallmark of the "Soviet Sixties."
During the Thaw, the themes that had been enshrined in Stalin-era cinema—the heroic Soviet citizen, "the dream of progress, the sanctity of labor, the wisdom of the people, and the strength of the collective will"—were undercut, satirized, and in many cases altogether ignored. This period saw filmmakers probe individuals' emotions and private lives without constantly relating the personal to the collective good. The new breed of humanist heroes inhabited their own moral universe, rather than the universe of the state.
Mikhail Romm's Nine Days of One Year (1961) is typical of this new style: a dark film dealing with a previously forbidden subject, atomic research. The two main characters are scientists. Gusev (Aleksei Batalov) is driven and idealistic. He dreams of creating energy from his atomic experiments and sacrifices himself to his work. In contrast, Kulikov (played by Innokentii Smoktunovski) is a jaded nihilist who ridicules the notion that mankind is advancing inexorably toward a more perfect existence. Throughout the film, he mocks science, society, and the rhetoric of progress; he refers to the diners at an elegant Moscow cafeteria as "Neanderthals."
Made without a musical score and filmed with foreshortened shots inside an anonymous science institute, Nine Days of One Year creates a disorienting atmosphere reminiscent of the 1919 silent classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. In one shot, Gusev, returning to work though ill from excessive exposure to radiation, is shown as a tiny figure walking at the base of a huge cement wall, the outer wall of the institute. Beginning with the accident that exposes Gusev to the radiation, the film evokes a feeling of anxiety. Gusev is desperate to finish his experiment and prove that he has built a functioning thermonuclear reactor, but a new accident causes him to deteriorate even more. As the movie ends, he realizes that his discovery has nothing to do with thermonuclear reactions, and he will probably die. In the Soviet press the film was criticized for "objectivity" and pessimism (not appropriate for a movie that young Soviets would watch), for Kulikov's ironic view of the world, and for the abandonment of the genuine hero. Even so, it was a smash hit with Soviet audiences.
share this page
RSS Feed
