Women in Soviet Film

The Thaw and Post-Thaw Periods

Marina Rojavin, Tim Harte, Marina Rojavin, Tim Harte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315409832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book illuminates and explores the representation of women in Soviet cinema from the late 1950s, through the 1960s, and into the 1970s, a period when Soviet culture shifted away, to varying degrees, from the well-established conventions of socialist realism. Covering films about working class women, rural and urban women, and women from the intelligentsia, it probes various cinematic genres and approaches to film aesthetics, while it also highlights how Soviet cinema depicted the ambiguity of emerging gender roles, pressing social issues, and evolving relationships between men and women. It thereby casts a penetrating light on society and culture in this crucial period of the Soviet Union's development.

Part I

Actresses, onscreen personas, and their evolution through the years

1Tatiana Samoilova and the search for a new Soviet woman

Anthony Anemone

By the end of the 1950s, Tatiana Samoilova’s star burned more brightly than any other Soviet film actress of her generation. Featured in two of the greatest Soviet movies of the post-Stalin years, the Mikhail Kalatozov–Sergei Urusevskii collaborations The Cranes Are Flying (Letiat zhuravli, 1957) and The Letter Never Sent (Neotpravlennoe pis’mo, 1959), she seemed poised to become the Soviet Union’s first truly international star. Basking in the glory of the success of Cranes at the Cannes film festival in 1958 (Woll 75), she was offered leading roles by major American and European movie producers, including the chance to play Anna Karenina alongside the great French actor Gérard Philipe (Treneva 25; Iaroshevskaia 85–86).¹ Her remarkable ascent—she was barely twenty-four years old at the time—however, was interrupted when the Soviet government refused to grant her permission to work abroad. Although she would eventually go on to play Anna Karenina in Soviet director Aleksandr Zarkhi’s memorable 1967 adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel (Mosfilm), her career had stalled, and she would never make good on the promise of her early success. This brief period of fame was followed by small roles in obscure and forgettable movies, years of unemployment, a slow decline into obscurity and poverty, and, finally, a tragic and lonely old age.² And yet, in these three great movies, Samoilova made a significant contribution to the creation of a new and more complex female protagonist in Soviet cinema of the Khrushchev period. Beautiful, independent, intelligent, professionally competent, equally attractive to men and women, Russians and foreigners, Samoilova’s onscreen persona seemed to signal the beginning of a new era for Soviet women, on and, perhaps, off the screen. Yet the tragic lives of the women she portrayed on screen and her abortive career suggest that the path forward for Soviet women would be more difficult than it seemed in the late 1950s.

Born in Leningrad on May 4, 1934, to Soviet theatrical and cinema royalty—her great uncle was Konstantin Stanislavsky, one of the central figures in the development of the modern theatre, and her father was a successful actor in the theatre who also appeared in dozens of popular movies—Samoilova’s future career was never in doubt. After studying ballet at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich–Danchenko Music Theatre in Moscow, she turned down a job offer from the Bol’shoi Ballet to continue her studies at the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute. In her second year at the “Shchuka,” she was cast in her first movie, The Mexican (1955), directed by Vladimir Kaplunovskii. Based on Jack London’s 1911 story, in which a young Mexican takes up prizefighting to help finance an uprising against the repressive and corrupt Diaz government, Kaplunovskii’s version is a plodding and predictable Soviet revolutionary drama, interesting today because it marked the beginning of Samoilova’s cinematic career.³ While faithfully conveying the central episodes of London’s story, the movie fills out a rather spare plot by the invention of additional scenes and characters: the most significant is Rivera’s clandestine trip to Mexico, where he meets Maria, a beautiful young Mexican woman played by Samoilova, with whom he instantly falls in love. Although she does not appear until almost halfway into the movie, and her time on screen is extremely limited, Samoilova brings the movie to a halt with a steamy song and dance number. Although her character completely lacks an inner life and is transparently used by the filmmaker to humanize London’s otherwise cold and obsessive hero, Samoilova impresses the viewer with a powerful self-confidence that is more than a little surprising in a twenty-year-old performing in front of the camera for the first time.⁴ Despite the director’s feeble attempt to integrate Maria into the main story, Samoilova’s real purpose in the film was to be seen by the hero and, of course, the audience. But the most important result of her debut performance was to bring her to the attention of the then fifty-two-year-old Soviet-Georgian director Mikhail Kalatozov (Freilikh 27; Iaroshevskaia 65–66), who, after one audition, decided to cast her alongside a rising star in Soviet cinema, Aleksei Batalov, in The Cranes Are Flying, the film that would change her life and inaugurate a new period in Soviet cinema (Samoilova 1993, 39–41).⁵

Samoilova’s first major success as Veronika in The Cranes Are Flying was a breath of fresh air in Soviet cinema: neither glamorous woman from another world nor intellectual, neither peasant nor worker intended to embody the Russian soul and lacking all interest in politics, she was the down-to-earth girl-next-door who was also an exotic beauty.⁶ At the film’s beginning Veronika is a beautiful and free-spirited young woman looking for happiness and fulfillment in her private life, but over the course of the film she suffers one emotional shock after another: her fiancé Boris (Aleksei Batalov) disappears at the front, her parents are killed in an air raid, and she is raped by Boris’s cousin (Aleksandr Shvorin), whom she then marries in a loveless match.⁷ Emotionally dead and intensely vulnerable, she is driven to the point of suicide before being brought back to life by a chance encounter with a young orphan in need of a mother named Bor’ka (i.e. Boris). By the film’s end, having found the strength to accept the fact of her fiancé’s death, she finds the courage to face an uncertain future. Throughout, Samoilova brilliantly conveys the changing moods and aspects of the most complex female character yet seen in Soviet cinema. By turns playful, loving, sensual, fragile, vulnerable, despondent, suicidal, and resigned to her fate, she experiences the worst that life can deal out, yet resolves to live on.⁸ Samoilova’s Veronika transcends all the clichéd and threadbare notions of femininity that had become commonplace in Stalinist cinema to become that rarest of things: a fully realized, complex, and recognizable modern woman (Shilova 48). Next to her, the heroes and heroines of most Soviet films look like cardboard characters whose only purpose is to act out predetermined and outmoded ideological scenarios (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1Young lovers Boris (Aleksei Batalov) and Veronika (Tatiana Samoilova) in The Cranes Are Flying.

As many critics have noted, Samoilova’s Veronika is a new character in Soviet cinema precisely because she lives for love and love alone: the author of the best monograph on Cranes goes so far as to write that “she has no identity except as an incarnation of love” (Woll 38). Lacking a profession, and with no interest in politics or the larger world, her existence in the film is completely bound up with her personal relationships and her emotions. Like the heroines of melodrama, Veronika puts love and emotion at the center of her life. Indeed, one of the most shocking aspects of the movie was that “individualist” behavior that had routinely been condemned in Soviet culture as selfish and philistine is now presented as natural, obvious and absolutely modern. Although this may seem strange or even paradoxical today, the film’s rejection of the notion that work, service, or political commitment are the only possible sources of meaning in a woman’s life is what made the film exciting, and even liberating, to Soviet women of the late 1950s (Shilova 48–49). For women raised on the notion that work for the collective good was the only source of meaning in the lives of all Soviet citizens, the suggestion that love and family could be the source of genuine personal fulfillment was little short of revolutionary: as the critic V. Troianovskii writes: “It is a revolution when millions of people in the land of Pavlik Morozov admit that the feelings of two people in love can be stronger than all other feelings, even stronger than reality itself” (1993, 52). And if Veronika’s independence is hardly absolute—she is also a dutiful daughter and, after her parents’ deaths, she lives with the family of her fiancé Boris—she makes her own decisions, takes responsibility for her mistakes, and eventually finds her own accommodation to the tragic circumstances of her life. Veronika was instantly recognized by millions of Soviet women who needed a better reason than the one provided by official communist ideology to continue to live after the catastrophic losses of the war.

Veronika was shocked to contemporary audiences in other ways as well. Only a few years earlier, a woman who “betrayed” her beloved while he was fighting at the front by marrying another man would have been roundly condemned as a “faithless heroine” (Woll 37–40; Freilikh 27–30; Razzakov 300).⁹ The correct and only acceptable behavior for Soviet women whose men were fighting the Nazis was indicated by the title of Konstantin Simonov’s poem “Wait for Me,” which became one of the most beloved songs of the war years.¹⁰ Yet, although she married Boris’s cousin Mark while Boris was at the front, the film makes absolutely clear that Veronika is, like Boris, a victim of the war: indeed, she is victimized twice, first by Boris’s disappearance at the front and then by Mark who takes advantage of her when she is at her most emotionally vulnerable.¹¹ Although some critics have described Veronika’s life as a quasi-Christian allegory of guilt, suffering, and atonement (Groshev 21; Zorkaya 212), and she herself is convinced of her guilt, most viewers today see her as more sinned against than sinning. Samoilova’s ability to project beauty, strength, self-reliance, and vulnerability in her performance would become an ideal for an entire generation of Soviet women (Figure 1.2).¹²

Figure 1.2Dramatic lighting highlights Veronika’s (Tatiana Samoilova) shock at the deaths of her parents in a German air raid in The Cranes Are Flying.

Although the tragic sufferings of women had been a staple of war movies from the beginning of the genre, Kalatozov and Urusevskii were onto something quite new and different in Cranes.¹³ If a typical war film, for example, No Greater Love (Ona zashchishchaet rodinu, dir. Fridrikh Ermler, 1943) or Zoia (dir. Leo Arnshtam, 1944), uses the threat to women to reinforce men’s resolve to fight the enemy, Cranes focuses almost exclusively on the emotional drama of Veronika’s inner life. This motif comes to a climax in the film’s final sequence, the celebration of the victorious Soviet soldiers’ return to Moscow, when Boris’s comrade Stepan (Valentin Zubkov) finally convinces Veronika that Boris is indeed dead. As she turns away from him in despair, Stepan addresses the crowd, telling them in familiar Soviet language that the way to redeem the sufferings of the war is by building a better future without war. Ending a film with a valedictory speech in which the film’s implied ideological meaning is expressed directly to the audience was, in fact, a tradition with Soviet war movies (Woll 59–60).¹⁴ But as Stepan speaks, Urusevskii’s camera focuses on Samoilova’s face, which slowly changes from despair and overwhelming grief to an acceptance of a future without her beloved. While Veronika’s recognition of little Bor’ka’s need for a mother is, presumably, an important motivation for her decision to live on, the scene suggests a larger point: that the needs of the individual and of society as a whole may, in fact, coincide. In this way, Cranes undoes a generation of socialist-realist Soviet films (and novels) in which society’s demands are always privileged over the emotional needs of the individual. But beyond simply undoing a familiar dichotomy, Cranes, in fact, rejects all ideological certainties, political and generic. As she listens to Stepan’s speech, Veronika is moved less by its familiar political and utopian sentiments and its typically masculine logic than by the truth of her own emotions: scarred profoundly by Boris’s death, yet also older, wiser, and stronger, Veronika remains as free from the political as ever. As movie viewers gaze at the shifting emotions on Samoilova’s remarkably expressive face, they understand that, rather than simply signaling her acceptance of the traditional priority of public needs over private grief, Veronika’s decision to live on suggested a central dream of the culture of the thaw: the elusive belief that the very conflict between private and public could indeed be transcended. The moment when the opposition between private and public is transcended is powerfully symbolized when she distributes the flowers she had brought for Boris to random members of the rejoicing crowd.

Samoilova followed the runaway international success of Cranes with another high-profile collaboration with Kalatozov and Urusevskii, the...