Of Pizza Commercials and Cinema Myths

Of Pizza Commercials and Cinema Myths

Eleven years ago, Russian – well, Soviet – filmmakers held the infamous Fifth Congress of Filmmakers, where they lambasted the bigwigs of Soviet cinema, including Soviet megastar Sergei Bondarchuk (War and Peace, Waterloo, to name just two of his masterpieces). Bondarchuk’s defense by Nikita Mikhalkov (who subsequently won an Oscar for his film, Burnt by the Sun) cost the latter dearly – he was excommunicated from all leading bodies of Soviet cinema.

That was in 1986, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was moving ahead under full steam. Old values and myths were destined for the trash heap of history, some thought for ever; film critics sought to outdo each other in criticizing Ivan Pyryev’s upbeat Kubanskiye Kazaki, a “cinema-fete amidst the plague of ostentatious, fake exuberance and on-screen merriment, while the whole country was in dire straits.”

But now the tide has turned. Nikita Mikhalkov, Bondarchuk’s defender, is savoring sweet revenge. He has just won a landslide victory in the election for president of the Union of Russian Filmmakers, replacing Sergei Solovyev, whose much-talked-about, surrealistic essay Assa, with its famous soundtrack, “We Want Changes,” by the rock group Kino, was the rage in the late 1980s.

So much for experimental cinema, local filmmakers seem to be saying: the heroes of the Fifth Congress, directors Elem Klimov and Andrei Smirnov, reported Izvestia sarcastically, “have become as well-known as Mikhail Gorbachev, but on another scale and level.” In fact, Elem Klimov and Andrei Smirnov are nowhere to be seen these days. As for Mikhail Gorbachev, he is starring in a Pizza Hut commercial, which was supposed to help his foundation make ends meet ... “The dazzling moment,” Izvestia wrote, “when these figures symbolized the New Russia, has rushed precipitously into the past, leaving the sad impression of a farce ...”

Farce it is. For glasnost’s offspring of new creative freedom joined up with the our relentless Russian tradition of “cutting out the mother-truth.” And yet, this opportunism ended up doing a bear’s favor for Russian cinema: the new breed of filmmakers and their union religiously followed the fluctuations of Russian  reforms, swinging from one extreme to another. And the conclusion Russia has of late come to in other spheres – from foreign policy to food imports – also seems to apply to Russian cinema: the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.

After some indisputable successes in the 1980s, like Tenguiz Abuladze’s anti-Stalinist Repentance, Vasily Pichul’s Little Vera or Pavel Lungin’s Cannes Film Festival winner Taxi Blues (to name three very different creations), domestic cinema petered out in the 1990s. The denunciation of Stalin’s crimes and screen versions of emigre prose now cause the same nauseating malaise as mafia showdowns and Little Vera-style erotica.

It was in this context that Nikita Mikhalkov, at the recent Congress of Filmmakers which elected him president, said that, “if I lived in emigration and judged Russia by its movies, I would never be tempted to come back.” Mikhalkov savored a sweet revenge by scolding his former rivals like errant schoolboys. Yet, the “students” donned humility and even bowed their heads to acclaim what Izvestia called the new “barin,” (noble master) who, as the Russian saying goes, “will come and decide everything.”

Barin Mikhalkov’s program? To hold an immediate audit of the Congress of Filmmakers’ activities and then, in four months, to prepare an urgent Congress to pass a concrete, anti-crisis program.

Time and again, Russia has been caught up in a debate between Westernizers or zapadniki (e.g. ex-president Solovyev) and Slavophiles (Mikhalkov). The new barin, apart from being an internationally renowned director, is seen by local critics as an astute marketer with an innate  flair for the local ideological market, which now calls for exactly what he advocates in public: Orthodox obedience and derzhavnost (i.e., strong Russian ideals inherited from the times of a strong Russia).

Which is not to say that Mikhalkov’s artistic credo and values are not occasionally marked by a certain Westernizing style. His Oscar-winning Burnt by the Sun had the stylistics of a Western-style movie, but with a Russian flavor (based on an anti-Stalinist theme, by the way). For it was meant to sell well in the West. Which it did. After an unexpected defeat at Cannes, which vexed Mikhalkov into promising never again to participate in a foreign film festival, he nevertheless went on to conquer Hollywood critics.

So, luckily for Mikhalkov, a gifted organizer, versed in the art of subtle compromise (and in business: he owns a successful studio and travel agency and found a venture capitalist form Nizhny Novgorod to back Burnt by the Sun), he does not need to star in pizza commercials to find money for his undertakings. But can he help Russia find its bearings in the stormy weather of market reforms? “America walked out of its crisis thanks to its cinema,” Mikhalkov said in his inauguration speech. In his view, Hollywood helped to create a national myth which the country followed. “This was also the case with our Soviet cinema,” he continued. “You may or may not like the ideology, but we created the image of a Soviet man and stuck to it.”

The redress for the wrongs done to actors and filmmakers of the past – who were Soviet artists, but still great ones – seems justified. And so is the aspiration to help Russians find new, positive spiritual values among the debris of the old Soviet ones. But there is still a danger of throwing a new “baby out with the bathwater.” For how can one put an end to cheap experimentalism, vacuous platitudes and scabrous cynicism without sinking into old, Soviet-style mysticism? After all, the “revolutionary ire” of the filmmakers who dethroned Bondarchuk in 1986 may have been somewhat excessive, but it was not groundless. It was a protest and revenge against Soviet cinema apparatchiks who divided and ruled by bestowing awards and funding on politically correct filmmakers, while relegating the films of others to the shelves. (According to a common legend, Bondarchuk’s career skyrocketed after Stalin saw him in the famous Soviet film The Destiny of Man: “Who is that actor?” Stalin reportedly asked a cinema general. “Young actor Sergei Bondarchuk,” came the response. “People’s Actor Sergei Bondarchuk,” corrected Stalin, and Bondarchuk received the title virtually the next day.)

But it is not Bondarchuk’s fault that Stalin liked his acting. A talent admired by a dictator is still a talent. Just as it was not the fault of Sergei Eisenstein – whose centennial Russia celebrated last month (see p. 37) – that Stalin did not like his interpretation of Ivan the Terrible. In both cases, viewers should be given the opportunity to appreciate the art, regardless of the preferences of political leaders. The culprit is the old system, which allowed incompetent state figures to interfere in the arts instead of giving the final say to the only legitimate critics  – the viewers.

Similarly, the new democratic filmmakers are at fault for failing to replace the old myths with lasting and meaningful values. And they are to be faulted for falling victim to the tendency in the Russian character to savagely dethrone old leaders, be they Sergei Bondarchuk or Mikhail Gorbachev, ignoring altogether what good they did for their country.

But today’s viewers are issuing their judgment; empty cinema halls call for changes in the domestic film repertoire. Which is Mikhalkov’s task. May he help his colleagues find funding without having to sell out, so that they can combine newly-gained creative freedoms with the responsible approach of a true artist, offering inspiration and faith to the devastated soul of our country. May someone create a professional, balanced film about recent Russian history. And may the script contain a small positive role for Gorbachev (after all, he did star in a German film). This would be a big relief for those Russian intellectuals with long memories. For seeing Gorbachev in a pizza commercial really hurts. The father of glasnost deserves better than that. And may Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin, when he is out of office, refrain from appearing in commercials. For the leaders of our country, call it Russia or the USSR, don’t belong in a commercial, do they?

– Mikhail Ivanov