Released date: 1994
Directed By: Nikita Mikhalkov

The main emotional draw in this film is familial love. Since this film is so recent and well decorated, comparatively to others we have seen, the internet is littered with reviews, interviews, and other resources. The most remarkable thing that I learned from those resources is that Nadia was played by Mikhalkov's daughter, and that Mikhalkov himself played Kotov. Nadia is priceless and natural. Her character is unforced and remarkably touching.

One of the film's most important themes is that forgetting is dangerous. The last scene, with poor Mitya dying in a tub of his own blood, calls the most strongly to that. In addition, the past haunts Kotov's wife when Mitya arrives and that past is what eventually steals Kotov's faith in the motherland.

"With this film, I am not looking to judge an era, I am only trying to show through a tragic perspective, the charm of a simple existence: of children continuing to be born, of people loving each other, living their life's moments, and having faith that all that was happening around them was for the best. People cannot be blamed for believing, but one can blame those who misled them. How can one accuse someone of stealing his own life? These are the reasons I have tried to understand this era. I am trying to say that we have all been victims and actors of what has happened, victims of what we created."

Mikhalkov's words speak to Russian spirit after the fall of the USSR. This is a film that would have been much more remarkable to see when it came out, with the context of the time period. The context itself can be viewed from an outside prospective, but just not as much as other films we've watched.

Stites, Chapter 7

Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900
Richard Stites
Chapter 7: Perestroika and the People's Taste 1985-


Perestroika was a political movement within the USSR during the 1980s under Gorbachev, which was introduced known as glasnost, meaning "openness." It's literal meaning is "restructuring," referring to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system. 


This was marked by unprecedented freedom of expression and a legitimation by the authorities of spontaneously generated culture from below. The new popular culture that developed from this change contained strong currents of iconoclasm, demythologizing, and open irreverence. 


The "people's tastes" were on full display. 


Most remarkable for this course, the filmmakers' union was reorganized in 1986. This moved the movie world into a whirlpool of change. Filmmakers were finally free to place once taboo political, social, and sexual themes on screen.


A new version of a recurrent debate surfaced. Many critics continued to scorn commercially successful films and wished to sustain the distance between filmmaker and mass audience. Other's openly recognized the people's taste and made movies to address them. New popular kinds of films addressed problems of alienated you, sexual tension, and hooliganism. 


This new openness in film, and culture itself, helped to close a huge gap in Soviet life between the public and the private. 

Little Vera

Director: Vasili Pichul
Release Date: February 11, 1989

The title of the film, Little Vera, is ambiguous and can also mean "Little Faith." The was the leader of ticket sales in the Soviet Union in 1988. Part of its popularity was probably due to it being one of the first Soviet movies with explicit sex scenes.

Vera, the film's main character, is a teenage girl just out of high school. She feels trapped in her provincial town. The film has a cynical and pessimistic view of Soviet society, which was typical of the period.

This film was remarkably watchable and audience friendly.

Solaris

Director: Tarkovsky

Release Date: 1972

The scientific mission on planet Solaris has stalled because the crew has fallen into emotional distress. A psychologist, and our main character, Kris Kelvin, travels to the space station to evaluated the situation, only to encounter the same phenomenon as the others. 

The Polish science fiction novel, written by Stanislaw Lem, is adapted by Tarkovsky as a drama of grief with a little bit of recovery. The concentration of the film is on the thoughts and the consciences of the scientists study the alien life on Solaris. The film has an incredibly slow pace. While watching it, I often which I had the novel; I felt like it went slow enough to read along. Western science fiction films are often fast paced, with lots of special effects. Solaris could be easily contrasted with them.

Stites, Chapter 6

Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900
Richard Stites
Chapter 6

The Brezhnev period was stable and for the most part peaceful. "This was the peace of the graveyard: a graveyard of ideas, openness, and free expression" (148). Brezhnev succumbed to stagnation after he reached the apex of power and allowed a huge cult of personality to arise around him, not as sickly as that of Stalin but constricting none the less. Brezhnev and his colleagues delivered impressive results in material growth, full employments, and peace. A second economy of black and gray markets, a dissident intellectual and political underground, and various countercultures arose to parallel the rigid economic, political, and cultural systems. Many retreated into religion, nationalism, cultural preservation, questing for a lost yesterday, and exaltation of the rural way of life in a continuous and growing divergence between urban dynamic and rural nostalgic mentalities.

Soviet people were still reading much more per person than many other nations. The modern crime novel came into its own in the USSR, and science fiction grew in popularity. Rock and roll became popular through the production of rock operas. Cultural authorities could not always distinguish rock from pop and they were reluctant to prohibit rock outright because of its immense popularity. The circus, in all of its soviet glory, remained popular. Brezhnev's daughter married an acrobat twice her age and traveled with the Moscow circus.

Films gradually drifted away form politics, towards the realities of Soviet life and personal destinies. An American sociologist of wrote that movies "generally documented Soviet life better than social scientists" (169). [This could be a paper topic that was less focused on identity!]

Commissar

Director: Aleksandr Askoldov
"Release" Date: 1967

After making the movie, Askoldov lost his job, was expelled from the Communist Party, exiled from Moscow, and banned from working on feature films for life. His survival shows us the nature of the post-thaw period. The film was shelved for twenty years. Upon its unveiling in the late 1980s, it won multiple awards.

The plot of the film is focused on a female commissar, Klavdia Vavilova, in the Red Army during the Civil War. We meet her when she discovers a deserter; she is a hardened, experienced military leader. She's pregnant and is forced to stay with the family of a poor Jewish blacksmith. At first, the family and Vavilova are not happy living together, but they soon grow to become friends. Once her baby is born, Vavilova embraces civilian life. BUT, the frontline advances closer to the town. Vavilova attempts to console the fearful Jewish family with a Communist dream ("One day people will work in peace and harmony"), but her propaganda is interrupted with a vision of the fate of the Jews in WWII. She rushes to the front to rejoin her army regiment, leaving her child behind with the family.

The Jewish blacksmith, Yefim, danced and sang his fears of poverty and death away. He continually calls Vavilova a "Russian," considering himself an outsider in the very country he inhabits. His fears of being an outsider are hardened when his children commit was he compares to a pogrom to their older sister.

I found this film oddly harsh. I think it was mostly the sound that affected my opinion in that way. The camera angles were also remarkably sharp, and with the sound created a film that was not easy or enjoyable to watch. I often found myself looking away, in the way that happens with thrillers and the like,  so that I wouldn't have to be a part of what was happening on the screen.

The Flying Carpet

Director: Gennadiy Kazansky
Year Released: 1958

The Flying Carpet, also known as Old Man Khottobych, was based on a children's book written by Lazar Lagin. It is absolutely full of propaganda, humor, and special effects.

The film begins with a Young Pioneer, Volka, discovers an old vessel at the bottom of a river. A genie emerges when he opens it. The genie is ready to fulfill any of Volka's wishes, but it becomes clear that in a perfect Soviet state, there is nothing that a young boy like Volka would ever want to change.

Khottobych constantly makes mistakes about what to give the Volka. For instance, when there is a long line at the phone booth, Khottobych makes a new phone booth for Volka to use. Not knowing what the booth is used for, he mistakenly creates a phone of pure marble. Later, when the genie is trying to give Volka gifts, Volka continually refuses (first a palace and then tons of slaves and animals). In the end, Khottobych is taught the real way of the world by two young pioneers,  eventually joining the ever-popular circus.

I absolutely adored this film.