Film Alert 101: April 2025

Russia: Mikhail Kalatozov b.03 Grigory Chukhrai b.21 Marlen Khutsiev b.25 Mikhail Kalik b.27 Vassili Shukshin b. 29 Andrei Tarkovsky (International Film Guide Director of the Year,1983) b.32 Andrei Konchalovsky b.37 Larisa Sheptiko* b.38 Georgia : Otar Iosseliani b.34 Giorgi Shengelaia b.37 Ukraine : Serge Paradjanov b.24 Kira Muratova* b.34 Yuri Ilienko b.36

The Thaw and the counter-offensive.

The Thaw was given its name in 1954 by a writer, Ilya Ehrenberg, applying equally to all the arts. While not rejecting Socialist Realism, writers began calling for ‘truth’ and ‘sincerity’ in art and a new focus on individual human beings in place of stereotyped heroes in simplistic monumental epics that rewrote history (Johnson 641). Following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’ at the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956, the Thaw took effect in all spheres of political and social life. Film critics considered that the following decade (1957-67) as the time in which the ‘liberal generation of the 60s’ held sway in the cinema. What was considered relevant was not the age of the film director but the designation of a new film style and thematics. Films directed by the ‘old guard’ such as Mikhail Kalatazov and Mikhail Romm or those whose debuts were delayed by the war like Grigory Chukhrai, were rapidly approved by an administration bent on changing the Stalinist system, along with projects directed by newcomers like Andrei Konchalovsky and Andrei Tarkovsky (ibid).

Grigory Chukhrai (1921-2001, above) was the director of two of the three films that brought Soviet cinema back onto the world's stage: The Forty First (1956) and The Ballad of a Soldier (1959). The first film's central focus on the emotional complexities in a relationship between a Red commissar and her White prisoner during the civil war of 1918-20 was taken to be an initial sign in Soviet cinema of the political and cultural Thaw following Stalin's death in 1953. This seemed to be confirmed by Chukhrai's second feature, the humanity in portraying the suffering inflicted on ordinary Russians by war taking precedence over ideologically driven heroics. Both films won the Cannes Palme D'or for their humanist expressiveness.

The Cranes are Flying (1957), directed by Georgian Mikhail Kalatozov (1903-73, above), attracted criticism at home for “formalism and naturalism” not for the first time in Kalatozov's career. In the early thirties his second film, a semi-documentary Salt for Svanetia (1930) was banned for its lyricism. The “formalist” shibboleth arose yet again when in the early sixties he made a Russo-Cuban tribute to the Cuban revolution, four stories illustrating pre-revolutionary inequalities , I am Cuba (1965), filmed on location from a script by two poets, Yevgeni Yevtushenko and Enrique Barnet. The resultant cine-poem in dazzling widescreen imagery, loosely inspired by Eisenstein, is a textbook of the formal possibilities of cinematography. It was poorly received both at home and in Cuba only to be revived and internationally rediscovered decades later.

Revisionist views of the war and youth coming of age films were major themes in the thaw period. Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-86, above) in his first feature, Ivan's Childhood (1962), merged the two in a completely original way. The potentially conventional heroics of a young scout's exploits in war normally required to meet the demands of social realism, Tarkovsky transforms by interspersing minimal action in an hallucinatory landscape merged with the boy's dreams of a tentatively happy childhood and of his mother and sister lost in the war. Central is a “finely placed profound relationship between the boy and a captain and a younger lieutenant in a paternal bond. “Tarkovsky’s visual and aural presentation, his stylized, often expressionistic camera work and sound [are] all used to present the sharp contrast between Ivan's two worlds... [he] is a man-child whose normal childhood is destroyed by war and his psyche warped by his desire to avenge his dead family.” (Johnson 643). Mark le Fanu finds Ivan’s Childhood “full of mysterious poetic assonances which seemingly come out of nowhere and can scarcely have been foreseen in the planning stage.” Le Fanu gives assurance that he uses the word ‘poetic’ with caution : “the assonances (internal rhymes) are indeed poetic, emotionally speaking, but translated out into meaning they can be grim and terrible” (28).

In the mid-60s Tarkovsky and scenarist Andrei Konchalovsky “found a hero who seemed to personify all the important themes of their own time” : Andrei Roublev, a monk who in the early 15th century had brought the Russian school of icon painting to its peak “appeared to them to embody the struggle between Russian backwardness, barbarism, and Asiaticism, and the effort to confront all this with an ideal” (Liehm 308). The film is structured in 7 episodes beginning in 1400 with Roublev travelling from the monastery, where he had been installed in the 1390s, a proponent of brotherly love, beauty, and goodness. He leaves the seclusion of his religious order and finds a chaotic world ruled by the invading Tartars, the film finishing in1423 with the 7th episode: the great scene of the casting of the bell. His art served the ideal that was not subservient to the powerful. The monk found faith in his mission “by merging with the creative forces of the ordinary man who was disdained and unseen by the powerful.” For Le Fanu “what makes Andrei Roublev so powerful is the film’s “uncompromising spiritual authenticity“ that at the deepest level, “culture and religion belong to each other […], indeed are each other, the single most daring proposition in Andrei Roublev,” Le Fanu suggests (45).

In making the film Tarkovsky combined with his cameraman Vadim Yusov, “the inspirations of Eisenstein with a modern cinematic view of history as the real present” (ibid). After a memorable showing at Moscow’s Dom (House of Film) surrounded by police, Andrei Roublev was shelved because of the portrayal of conflict between the artist and the political power structure. Tarkovsky refused to accept numerous editing changes suggested by the censor. It was finally given limited distribution in the Soviet Union in 1971 and after further cuts broader international distribution in 1973.

In the five films he directed between 1962-86, Paul Schrader identifies Tarkovsky as a pivotal figure in the evolution of time in the cinema. While acknowledging that Tarkovsky was not interested in the religious per se, Schrader notes that “he often spoke of the spiritual nature of film art and employed religious imagery“ (6). Schrader continues that Tarkovsky’s “primary interest was in cinema’s ability to evoke poetry and memory that is ‘more pantheistic than theistic’, a disputable opinion, Schrader notes, quoting theological film scholar Joseph Kickasola who in his book on Kieslowski’s films described Tarkovsky as “one of the most directly religious filmmakers ever.“ Schrader concludes that “Tarkovsky was more interested in passing through the portal [into transcendental film] himself than he was in escorting his viewer“ (23). Standing in a long line of documentary observers of life and more particularly contemplative stylists - Ophuls, Mizoguchi, Rossellini, Resnais, Dreyer, Bergman and Bresson - Tarkovsky embraced Andre Bazin’s ontology of cinema (“the photographic image is the object itself”) while turning it on its head in asserting “that the image of things is the image of their duration.” What distinguishes Tarkovsky in his interest in Bergson’s durée - time itself - Schrader suggests - is that he used film techniques to study time “as the vital force governing and meditating on all organic life” (ibid 7). Like Pasolini, Tarkovsky believed that “modern mass culture aimed at the consumer, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being”(42). He believed that “through the image is sustained an awareness of the infinite, the spiritual within matter, the limitless given form”(37).

A key to Tarkovsky’s cinema is what critic J. Hoberman calls his “profound immersion in the image.” Graham Petrie sees in Tarkovsky’s films “the creation of a filmic world that has the power, mystery, ambiguity and essential reality of a dream.” The way time and space can be modulated within the individual shot is suggested by the evocative title of Tarkovsky’s book, ‘Sculpting in Time’. In his writing this is expressed as an antagonism to Eisenstein’s immersion in the juxtaposing of shots (montage). It is this immersion in the image (and the resultant preference for long takes) that gives Tarkovsky’s images the hallucinatory quality that increasingly pervaded his work. Andrei Konchalovsky’s (pictured above) first independent production The First Teacher (1965), centred on the post-revolutionary conflict between the values of a young teacher and the ancient traditions of the Kirghiz mountains filmed on location, marked by the then unorthodox development in Soviet cinema of “a poetic yet gritty neo-realism.” Soon after the completion of the script for Andrei Roublev, Konchalovsky made The Story of Asya Klyachina (1966) in which a crippled village girl refuses to accept her conventional fate as an unmarried mother. In documenting the hard life of a typical Soviet collective farm made with barely concealed anger on location with farmers playing all but the major roles Kochalovsky’s film was damned and banned outright without appeal in 1967 for showing clear economic failures of communism. He turned to adaptation of Russian classics filmed impressively in colour visually following in the tradition of Russian painting: an adaptation of Turgenev’s Nest of Gentry (1969) and Uncle Vanya (1970) widely considered the best adaptation of a Chekov play.

Vida Johnson makes the point that while western sources on the cinema of the Thaw tended to focus on the ‘serious films’ that garnered festival attention and art house release, it was comedies like the 1956 hit with comedy-starved Russian audiences (comedies had disappeared after the war), Carnival Night (Karnavalnaya) satirising bureaucracy, the debut of the prolific comedy director Elder Ryazanov, that even had Party leaders calling for revivals (641).

Spring on Zarechna Street (1956), was co-directed by Marlen Khutsiev (1925-2019, above) “one of the most talented of the middle generation,” co-directed with Felix Mironer the first of a number of films directed by Khutsiev on the life and loves of young adults. In Khusiev’s solo debut, Two Fedors (Eva Fedora 1959), a friendship between a demobilised soldier and a small homeless boy is set against the backdrop of the everyday reality of postwar Soviet life. In 1962 film culture came under attack from Khrushchev with Khutsiev's controversial. Lenin’s Guard (Zastava Ilyicha ) and Mikhail Romm's Nine Days of One Year (1961) which raised contemporary issues and problems as the main targets. “Romm both accurately captured the mood of Soviet society and strove for a new, contemporary approach to its problems […] that could no longer be shelved” (Liehm 212).

Lenin’s Guard “presented an almost plotless flow of narration that showed the everyday life of three young people of Moscow seeking desperately for a moral ideal. “The past of the fathers, who had an ideal to live and to die for, is mute, the present empty.” (ibid 216). The Liehm's comment on the film's stylistic authenticity is consistent with Khutsiev's belief that he was presenting an ”ordinary” view of the world but his portrait of the city and its inhabitants “was then unique in Soviet cinema.” Khrushchev attacked the then unfinished work's view of the older generation. Shelved, then re-edited, partly reshot, and re-titled as I’m Twenty (Mnye dvadsat let) re-released in 1964 stripped of the chance to establish what should have been a new trend in Soviet cinema. The Liehms add that its gifted scriptwriter, Gennadi Shipalikov, killed himself 10 years later “when he saw no hope for independent work.”

Kalatozov, Kalik, Tarkovsky Mikael Kalik et al, directly challenged the doctrinaire realism imposed by the social realist formula, others were attempting to find a path to a new realism in an understated, sparer style. Films about children, partly inspired by Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon (1956) were quite popular, opening up the possibility for the fresh perspective offered by children not burdened by life's experiences, politics and ideology. The Thaw did allow for a variety of styles to emerge, the lyrical side by side with more prosaic narratives. Suggested better examples of the genre are Khutsiev's Two Fedors (1959) q.v., Igor Talankin's Seriozha (1962) and “probably the best of them,” Mikhail Kalik's (1927-2017, above) first feature, Man Follows the Sun (1962) which “follows a boy's lyrical, fable-like journey through the city to face a number of […] vignettes of good and evil” (Johnson 644) further described by the Liehms as “a truly revolutionary attempt to return to the inspiration of the avant garde and its concept of the film as visual art” (212). Kalik’s short but significant career of five features continued in the Moldavian film studios with Journey Into April / Puteshestviye v aprel (1963) followed by The Last Month of Autumn / Prosledniy mesiats aseni (1965) “a mature lyrical film about the yearnings, dreams and disappointments of old age - above all a poem about [his cameraman Vadim] Derbena’s native land” (Liehm 311). Kalik’s 4th feature Goodbye Boys / Do svidanya malchiki (1966), based on a popular book for young readers, presents an ironical picture of the manner in which its empty, superficial “young heroes” were raised and educated. After much hesitation it was given a limited release and never shown abroad. Kalik made one further feature, To Love / Lyubit (1968), and then emigrated from the Soviet Union (ibid 312).

Johnson notes that the Moscow International Film Festival was founded in 1959 to provide a showcase for Soviet films, and reestablish contact with western cinema which had been cut-off under Stalinism. In the mid-60s “a number of clearly formulated cinematic attempts were made to show the difficulties of communication within the structure of modern urban life which did not stabilise in the Soviet Union until the sixties” (ibid 319). The Liehms nominate the most interesting of these films as Ukrainian Larisa Shepitko’s (1938-79, above) The Wings / Krilya (1966), the portrait of a famous woman pilot unable to spend the rest of her life living on her past reputation and experiencing great difficulties coming to terms with her surroundings. Shepitko’s “almost Antonionian” portrait, in You and I / Ty i ya (1971), is of a successful man in his thirties, in a desperate attempt to recover his identity, flees from the city to the natural surroundings of Siberia. Both in the choice of subject and Sheptiko’s attempt to move away from descriptive social realism to a more interior style in all three features completed prior to her award winning breakthrough with The Ascent (1977), ran into censorship problems. The Liehms praise writer Vassili Shukshin (1929-74 ) for having the courage to show on the screen the “real Russian peasant” and his inner world, not just as a dressed-up image. His great success on film was The Red Snowball Bush (1973), the tragic and off-beat story of an ex-convict showing urban life as a corrupting source from which it was possible to rebuild one’s morality by returning to roots in the ethically pure countryside.

The Thaw came to an end in 1967 with the banning of The Story of Asya, along with Tarkovsky's second feature Andrei Roublev and Alexandr Askoldov's (1932 -2018, above) The Commissar (1967). Askoldov's film was banned because it offered an uncomfortably ruthless portrait of a female commissar during the Civil War in 1920 but it was also seen to present the Jewish family she is billeted with more sympathetically than the commissar, despite their reconciliation at the end. Askoldov was officially stripped of his profession and was never allowed to make a film again. Johnson adds that not even Paradjanov, who was jailed for 4 years in 1974 (on trumped-up charges of homosexuality and inciting nationalism), was not prevented from making films upon his release.

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The Soviet film industry would continue to increase output to 140-150 features per year in the 1970s and 1980s, the vast majority produced in the studios of the Russian republic, mainly in Moscow and Leningrad. However, the 1960s saw the reopening of of regional studios and the revival of national film traditions which had been suppressed under Stalin. This was particularly evident in Lithuania where the talented director Vitautus Zhalakevichius worked and in the Ukraine, where the tradition of Dovzenko productions was carried on by Sergei Paradjanov and his cameraman, Yuri Ilienko (1936-2010), ‘the surrealist from Zaporozhye’, who directed the ‘extraordinarily beautiful’ White Bird with a Black Spot(Belaya ptitsa s chernoy oymetinoy 1971) (Johnson 641). Paradoxically the authorities in Moscow created exceptional circumstances for film production in the republics only to restrict production and especially distribution with the ‘yoke of finicky ideology’ (Radvanyi 652).

Sergei Paradjanov (1924-90, above) was born of Armenian parents in Georgia. An adolescent passion for music shifted to cinema. He graduated from the Moscow film school VGIK in 1952. He began directing features for the Dovzhenko Film Studios in the Ukraine and achieved an artistic breakthrough, together with cameraman Yuri Ilyenko, with his fifth feature, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964), a film poem inspired by the writings of Ukrainian impressionist author Mykhailo Kotsyubinsky and Western Ukrainian folklore. The theme is a Romeo and Juliet love story set against the background of warring families in 19th-century Carpathia. There are tensions in the culture where Christianity is the main religion yet pagan practices remain. “Paradjanov was the first to indicate the degree to which folklore and local artistic tradition could once again become a source of visual wealth in Soviet national cinema. Dovzhenko seemed to live again on the screen - though not through imitation.” (Liehm 218)

In 1968 Paradjanov returned to Armenia to continue his efforts to break the convention of narrative film by speaking a purely pictorial language unheard of in Soviet cinema since the liquidation of the avant garde. Based on episodes from the life of 18th century Armenian poet-troubadour Sayat Nova, the film is also a paean to Armenian history and culture. The Colour of Pomegranates (1969) was accused of formalism and other sins, meeting the same fate as Andrei Roublev, screening briefly in cut and re-structured form only in Armenia, blocked from wider release. A print of the original version was rediscovered and restored to be released on Blu-ray in 2018.

“If The Colour of Pomegranates was a building it would be a world heritage site. Paradjanov's masterpiece stands as a monument of 'poetic cinema', an edifice composed of tableaux in the vein of Persian and Armenian miniatures. Its images are finely balanced between exquisite spirituality and gleeful vulgarity […] The film is more profane than sacred, in fact, and all the more magical for it” (Tony Rayns). Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is as chaotic as Pomegranates is formalised, confirming Parajanov was 'dangerous' because of the strength of his commitment to artifice – and imagination.

Pirosmani (1971) is an effectively restrained portrait by Georgian filmmaker Giorgi Shengelaia (1937-2020) of the tragic life of the great Georgian primitive artist’s forsaking all security in order to paint. Based on the artist’s perception of reality - the subjects are composed on the screen as the artistwould have seen them - Shengelaia’s film, like those of Paradjanov, Muratova et al, “reaffirmed the importance of the national element and its autonomous artistic perception in the cinema of the Soviet republics.” Shengelaia’s film musical about the inhabitants of an old district in Tbilisi, Melodii Veriyskogo kvartala / Melodies of an Old Quarter (1973) revealed the same characteristics (Liehm 331).

Kira Muratova (1934-2018, above) born in Soroca Romania (now Moldavia), made most of her films at the Odessa Film Studio in the Ukraine. She was largely unknown outside the Soviet Union until 1987 when, with the advent of glasnost, her films were released from censorship and screened at film festivals. Idiosyncratiic and totally independent, her vision has remained uncompromised. Neither seeking political interpretations nor moralising, Muratova presents an uncensored, often nihilistic, take on everyday life complete with its ugliness and cruelty. Breaking away from conventions and using experimental techniques such as punctuating fragmented storylines with absurdism, nonsensical behaviour and bizarre montages Muratova often assaults audiences with manically repeated dialogue or sudden shifts in editing. Her films focus on strong female characters, deconstructing gender roles and relations in a society in moral decay.

Muratova's first solo feature Brief Encounters (1967) breaks most of the narrative conventions in its documentary-like portrayal of Soviet life in a portrait of two women - one a village girl the other a head manager in love with the same man - highlighting the urban intelligentsia/peasant underprivileged divide. In Long Farewells (1971) strained relationships in a family scripted by feminist Natalya Ryazantseva, are explored “with almost unbearable tension in a series of fluid inventive sequences.” Her glasnost tragi-comedy The Asthenic Syndrome (1989) puts the audience through it in creating a window into the future of post-communist Russia through the lens of affliction known as hypochondria. Source: Melbourne Cinematheque 2020 program.

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Vida Johnson, “Russia After the Thaw” essay, Oxford History of World Cinema Nowell-Smith ed.1996

Jean Radvanyi “Cinema in the Soviet Republics”; Graham Petrie “Andrei Tarkovsky” (ibid)

Mark Le Fanu The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky 1987

Mira & Antonin Liehm The Most Important Art East European Film After 1945 1977

Andrei Tarkovsky Sculpting in Time : Reflections on the Cinema 1986

Mark Cousins The Story of Film 2004

Paul Schrader Transcendental Style in Film 2018 with a new introduction

Maxmilian le Cain, Great Directors: Andrei Tarkovsky Senses of Cinema May 2002

Rusian Janumyan, Great Directors: Kira Muratova Senses of Cinema October 2003

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links