A new season at the Barbican tells the story of the USSRs final generation through the lens of its pioneering film-makers
” Young people are our big hope, but they spell trouble for us too .” In 1965, an administrator at the Leningrad film studio, Lenfilm, summed up an suffering dilemma for Soviet official culture. How could the Young Communist League( on paper a” public organisation “, in practice solely subordinate to the party leadership) mobilise the younger generation without promoting political exuberances of the wrong kind? Soviet cinema- a young art sort with particular appeal to the country's youth- was, throughout its existence, a showcase for conflicted positions of young person. Its own fate, too, altered as positions to them changed.
In the first years after the October revolution, youth activism was strongly encouraged in life and on movie. Sergei Eisenstein was just 27 when Battleship Potemkin, with its martyred young leader of a naval mutiny, constructed him world famous. But views of political participation by children and young people changed abruptly under Stalin. Eisenstein's Bezhin Meadow, in which a tow-haired son leads the assault on traditional village life, ran into trouble in August 1936. This came a month after a crackdown on child psychology, which was considered “perverted”, and at the phase when patriotic values were returning to the school syllabus.
Soviet film studios altered, too, turning into showcases for mature artists: the masters. In the late 1940 s, film production stalled- a mere eight titles for the whole USSR were produced under 1951. Almost none of the state film school, VGIK's graduates will continue to construct features. They toiled away directing documentaries, public interest movies and films for schools. Most are still not even allowed to shoot footage while in college. Instead, graduating students sketched proposed shots and wrote pitchings for movies they would never be able to make.
This changed dramatically under Nikita Khrushchev. The leader's main goal was to remobilise socialist values. But the political and social reforms of the working day transformed the lives of young people and gave prominence to subcultures as well as sanctioning forms of collective activity. Expansion of the film industry brought hundreds of new movie artists- screenwriters, camera and sound operators, designers as well as directors- into Soviet studios.
Many cinema novices were young in an approximate sense- around 40. That still made them at least 20 years younger than the surviving masters from the Stalin era. Yet, cinematic youth was in no sense overawed by the generational gulf. Some had served at the front in the second world war. A good many had lost mothers to political terror. Accelerated maturity and new expectations were the texture of the times. Movies about young people became central to the thaw and shifted the cinematic language- new body types and gestures, new kinds of emotional rhetoric, and dynamic, mobile styles of camerawork- went with the youth focus.
The Brezhnev era was, in Mikhail Gorbachev‘s words,” the period of stagnation “. However, the new emphasis on stability gave a paradoxical prominence to youth unrest as a symptom and cause of social anomie. Social deviance was far more prominent in 1970 s and early 80 s cinema than during the course of its 50 s and 60 s. In this sense, glasnost under Gorbachev accelerated, rather than initiated, a stark view of Soviet reality.
Until recently, the cinemas of the USSR's last decades were mainly a specialist interest. But that is starting to change. Earlier this year, London's Regent Street Cinema presented the season Youth on the March! in association with the Russian film foundation Kino Klassika. This dedicated an exhilarating introduction to nine major movies by young Soviet directors from the past 50 years, including Otar Ioseliani's Falling Leaves, Kira Muratova's Brief Encounters and Juris Podnieks' Is it Easy to be Young ?. This week, the Barbican's Generations: Russian Cinema of Change in collaboration with New East Cinema demonstrate six more youth films.
Half the movies in the Barbican season date from the post-Stalin era, underlining its transformational important. There is Mikhail Kalik's luminous testament to teenage friendship, Goodbye, Boys. And there is Dinara Asanova's harsh yet lyrical 1983 portrait of a work camp for young offenders, Tough Kids.
Asanova's movie is particularly interesting. She was, like the young people she portrayed, a marginal figure, first as a woman director( one of only three in the new generation, alongside Muratova and Larisa Shepitko, to achieve renown ). Her Kyrghyz origins- merely two directors permanently based in Leningrad came from central Asia- also contributed to her foreigner status. She had close ties with the cultural underground and shared its intense fear with the abject and the overlooked.
Asanova disliked the category of” children's cinema “.” I want to show that there are no different truths for different age groups ,” she wrote in her notebooks. This determination to avoid patronising young person on screen went with working methods that were, in Soviet terms, unique.
All Asanova's movies, beginning with her first full-length feature, Woodpeckers Don't Get Headaches, were filmed utilizing improvisation- a considerable feat in a culture where scripts went through at the least seven clearance reads and divergence from agreed texts could provoke uproar. Asanova treated each shoot as a style of establishing human and intellectual contact with everyone on decide. She was deeply interested in western youth films and asked the country cinema board, Goskino, for permission( which was refused) to present the crew If …~ ATAGEND and A Clockwork Orange during the pre-production stage of Woodpeckers.
At the start of her career, Asanova faced accusations of unprofessionalism and chaotic new method. When complete- after extensive edits -Woodpeckers was placed in the third quality category, a” soft ban” that restricted screenings to cinema clubs and venues in distant provinces. But by the early 1980 s, five films on, Asanova had convinced her colleagues of her work methods as well as her talent, which helps explain why Lenfilm took the risk of inducing Tough Kids embarking upon.” We know this film is going to be tricky at the start, and later on, too ,” said Asanova's editor, Frizhetta Gukasyan. With” eyes open to the inevitable”, the studio's artistic management backed the director all the way.
When Tough Kids was show to Asanova's close colleagues, there was silence. People were so moved they couldn't set their reactions into words. A screening at Lenfilm's chief vetting body, the Artistic Council, though, brought indignant objections on the grounds that the cinema was ” too soft” on young felons. Two recent high-profile street attacks by Moscow and Leningrad adolescents, leaving victims for dead, had constructed the guardians of morality nervous. Goskino insisted on edits which took 100 extra days of filming. Eventually, Tough Kids cleared the country and party approval process. In 1985- a sign of changing days- it was awarded a nation prize.
By then, Asanova was dead, at the age of 42. The human cost was high , not just for her.” Cinema is the blood that I suck from other people's lives ,” she wrote in her notebooks. Some of the young people she worked with, including her son Anvar, ended up shipwrecked, caught in the gulf between Asanova's utopian view of the creative process and the rigidity of late Soviet social norms. But Tough Kids asks questions that were too often ignored in Russia and, indeed, in any society today.
Tough Kids has explicit and subversive echoes of the most famous Soviet cinema about young delinquents, Nikolai Ekk's 1931 classic Road Into Life, shown on Tv while Asanova's movie was in production. Yet, with its documentary-style talking heads and delicate balance between nihilism and hope, “its more” post-Soviet than Soviet.
The resulting directors of the past 30 years, including Aleksei Balabanov, also showcased by Generations, and Andrey Zvyagintsev, have dwelt extensively on violence by and to young people. But of all film-makers, Asanova had the closest contact with young people themselves. Tough Kids was their film, as well as hers. No wonder that after it came out, Asanova got a telephone call from a young woman she had never met.” Induce a follow-up to Tough Kids. Please. But this time, call it Tough Girls .”
Generations: Russian Cinema of Change is at the Barbican, London, 26 -3 0 September
