The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw

Space, Materiality, Movement

Lida Oukaderova

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780253026354
• eBook ISBN: 9780253027085
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Russian History

Following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union experienced a dramatic resurgence in cinematic production. The period of the Soviet Thaw became known for its relative political and cultural liberalization; its films, formally innovative and socially engaged, were swept to the center of international cinematic discourse. In The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw, Lida Oukaderova provides an in-depth analysis of several Soviet films made between 1958 and 1967 to argue for the centrality of space—as both filmic trope and social concern—to Thaw-era cinema. Opening with a discussion of the USSR's little-examined late-fifties embrace of panoramic cinema, the book pursues close readings of films by Mikhail Kalatozov, Georgii Danelia, Larisa Shepitko and Kira Muratova, among others. It demonstrates that these directors' works were motivated by an urge to interrogate and reanimate spatial experience, and through this project to probe critical issues of ideology, social progress, and subjectivity within post–Stalinist culture.

1

THE PERSISTENCE OF PRESENCE: SOVIET PANORAMIC CINEMA

PERHAPS AS NO other place, first in the USSR and now Russia, Moscow’s Exhibition of Achievements of the People’s Economy, known widely as the VDNKh, has always operated as a sensitive seismograph of the country’s ambitions and failures. An expansive complex to the north of Moscow’s center, it has lived through several stages of construction throughout its history, each reflecting a particular moment in the developments of Soviet and post-Soviet economy, science, culture, and, most remarkably, ideology. The park opened in its initial form in 1939, with major additions during the first half of the 1950s.¹ In subsequent years the park’s palatial pavilions, monuments, and fountains, generously spaced among carefully organized promenades, offered visitors an immersive environment in which to celebrate the USSR’s power and accomplishments, its national unity, and its historical progress. While the concept of Soviet nationhood continued to be reworked and contested throughout the country’s history, the VDNKh provided a space that transcended ethnic autonomies and divisions: the pavilions of Kazakhstan and Georgia, and so forth, showed how each constituent republic contributed, through its specific cultural and economic developments, to the creation of the Soviet whole, which was to be experienced as more than a sum of its parts. It became a space in which the Soviet community could be not only imagined, but momentarily lived.² As visitors strolled past Vera Mukhina’s famous monument Worker and Peasant Woman (1937), were touched by the shiny drops of the Friendship of the Peoples Fountain, and contemplated the spectacular displays of immaculate collective farms and cosmic travels, they were meant to be overfilled with “energy,” with a “physiological joy” of experiencing here and now the imminent, perfect Soviet future.³

As hopes for this radiant future officially shattered with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the park’s architectural and symbolic unity began to break down as well, its carefully orchestrated manifestation of ideological enthusiasm becoming a pitiful collection of dilapidated and empty symbols. As the Friendship of the Peoples Fountain turned into an embodiment of failed Soviet ethnic policies, the previously splendid pavilions devoted to great national achievements transitioned into displays of disjointed stacks of imported commercial products, signifying the intensifying collapse of the post-Soviet economy. The park’s groomed architectural ensemble became filled with temporary kiosks of all styles, shapes, and colors, selling mostly grilled meats, pilafs, and Coca-Cola.⁴ A primary space of the Soviet utopian imagination fractured into pieces, its history and aspirations simply ignored or swallowed up by the emerging practices of nascent anything-goes capitalism.

In the last few years, however, calls to redevelop the exhibition complex have intensified. To prepare for the celebration of the park’s seventy-fifth anniversary in August 2014, the Moscow government began a “global reconstruction … that already considerably transformed the appearance of the exhibition,” restoring the pavilions, perfecting the promenades, and clearing the space of chaotic commercial traffic.⁵ The park received back its original, and familiar to all, name of the VDNKh (after having been called All-Russia Exhibition Center for most of the post-Soviet period), and its territory was considerably expanded and enhanced with spectacular cultural and sports amenities. Commentators hailed this process as the center’s chance for a “second youth,” “the return to its roots,” suggesting that it would very soon regain its past glory, become once more a place through which “paradise” could be imagined—now not only for the people of Russia, but, indeed, for the entire world.⁶ The plans for what the VDNKh will offer in the future are still in development; the suggestions include making it a global exhibition center, or a modern entertainment park, or even a theme park dedicated to the USSR. Despite the disparity of the proposals, the common understanding is that the original architectural and landscape frameworks are to be preserved, with the most grandiose Soviet spatial rhetoric forming a basis for the park’s operation within the culture of dynamic global capitalism. Soviet history will thus be neatly contained and yet functionally, and even glamorously, connected to the present, leaving behind the messiness in which it has been embedded, and lost, during the past two decades.

For our discussion here, one structure at the VDNKh is of a particular interest: the Circular Panorama, a movie theater of sorts featuring a circular eleven-panel screen, whose opening in summer 1959 coincided with the inauguration of the famous American National Exhibition a few miles away, at Moscow’s Sokolniki Park (figure 1.1).⁷ Throughout the Soviet period, the Circular Panorama operated as a mise en abîme of the park’s own aspirations, offering an extraordinary space for immersion into the happy Soviet life displayed on screen: the country’s spectacular landscapes and urban promenades, the enthusiastic labor of factory workers, and the leisurely strolls of vacationers (figure 1.2). Today, the theater shows a modest repertoire of nine twenty-minute-long Soviet films made between 1967 and 1987, though their numbers are dwindling as film stock continues to deteriorate. As is the case of the exhibition center as a whole, the theater struggles to find its place in contemporary Russia, but the task here is particularly difficult. The Circular Panorama’s cylindrical structure, designed for only one kind of moving image, which is no longer produced, cannot be easily adapted to other cinematic technologies.

Fig. 1.1 Moscow Circular Panorama. Photograph by the author, 2011.

To enter the space of the Circular Panorama today is like walking into an orchestrated historical installation: The entire structure and its function are arrested in time. Through its surround of images, the panorama transports visitors to a gauzy world of Soviet utopias, in which people and places of a bygone world appear in the present again. We are invited to take rides on the road, in the air, and on water; walk through well-known Moscow streets and through the centers of provincial towns on the Soviet periphery; visit the oldest architectural sites in Uzbekistan and stroll along the beaches of the Black Sea; and simply encounter, “face to face,” the people of the Soviet republics in the final two decades of the USSR’s existence. These encounters, rides, and visits are effected through a nearly perpetual movement of the camera, meant to sweep spectators right into the center of brightly lit and joyful scenes.

Fig. 1.2 Strolling on a Soviet beach. From the Circular panorama film Let’s Go! (V dorogu, v dorogu!), 1967.

In the 1950s, the Moscow panorama’s primary draw was just this sense of spatial immersion: its elimination of the physical distance, and with it the ontological difference, between real and screen space. Today, the thrill appears to be gone, or at least substantially faded, comparing feebly with more recent cinematic technologies. Most often attended by no more than a dozen people, the worn-out and empty space of the theater is at the forefront of any spectator’s gaze. But for these few visitors, the panorama’s irresistible attraction lies in the material encounter it thus establishes with history itself: not just the images and sounds it presents, but also its own timeworn apparatus, space, and organization, not to mention its awkward place within the imminently expanding VDNKh. In contrast with the heavy-handed optimism and ostensibly timeless message of the original films, the theater imparts today a sense of impending disappearance. Rather than experiencing the intended physical sensation of being in another—invariably happy—place in which material present and utopian future are fused, contemporary panorama visitors are made acutely aware of the here and now of this place, of its uncomfortable position between an all-too-familiar (and un-utopian) past and an utterly unknown future.

Lacking financial and popular support, the theater has no clear path forward. At the same time, it displays a palpable unease with how it might relate to what came before. Its two small exhibition tables are covered with dusty Soviet paraphernalia that appear random and lost, inviting neither nostalgia nor any particular historical interpretation. They are accompanied by amateurishly typed paper signs that read “We don’t try to return to the past, we are just remembering it,” as if apologizing for the theater’s very existence.⁸ There is no trace in this arbitrary presentation of the “marketing of memory”—what cultural critic Andreas Huyssen has discussed in relation to the global, often media-driven proliferation of memory narratives.⁹ Rather, the display betrays a profound uncertainty about what should be remembered and how, if at all.

In its aching material obsolescence and problematic historical presentation, the Circular Panorama constitutes an exceptional display within the VDNKh. While the exhibition center seeks to move adamantly forward, the theater cannot leave behind its past. This past, however, unfolds as an experience of the present, effectively activating Soviet history and placing visitors within it. But in the process, the panorama also generates an awkward sense of distance, an awareness that we look at these moving images and inhabit the structure itself from a perspective that was hardly foreseen in their production. Experiencing the immersion, one cannot help feeling out of place within the panorama’s represented world, because the future of these films’ imagination stands at absolute odds with the future that has in fact arrived. Nowhere does this become more pronounced than in the rare moments when one of the filmed Soviet citizens gazes directly into the camera, looking trustfully at the viewer, initiating direct contact and encouraging a sense of seamless transition between the historical past and the viewing present. Whom are these people from the film looking at? Is it their own contemporaries, reincarnated in the bodies of today’s spectators with help of the panorama’s immersive forms? Or is it viewers from a post-Soviet future of whose existence they likely never imagined? Past, present, and future unfold here in multiple forms, layered one over another, impossible to separate. The result is a simultaneous production and disturbance of just the sort of historical contiguity the VDNKh as a whole seeks: both the seamless integration and the uneasy separation of past image and present circumstance.

The ambiguity and contradiction at the core of our present-day experience of the Circular Panorama invite us to look back at the early years of Soviet panoramic cinema—to reexamine its aspirations and assumed modes of operation in the 1950s and 1960s. As the panorama’s immersive quality today suggests, and as many original critical discussions confirm, the spatial dynamics of panoramic films were well suited to the Soviet ideological landscape of the period. Projected within new, notably modern, theatrical spaces, of the kind that became popular all over the world at the time, these films seemed capable of advancing the aesthetic premise of socialist realism to a new level.¹⁰ They not only depicted “reality in its revolutionary development” and displayed “revolutionary romanticism”—to quote from Andrei Zhdanov’s original 1934 definition of socialist realism—but they also made visitors experience the “glimpse of tomorrow” as an immediate, enveloping, and physiologically sensed present, in which the tangible seamlessness of the grandiose Soviet space united the country into a great socialist nation.¹¹ But, as this chapter will further demonstrate, the same spatial organization of the theater that made this explicitly Soviet experience possible also appeared to work against its goal and logic. The rapidly multiplying critical voices of the time raised objections that the expansion of the screen and viewing space available to viewers would result in an increase of their real—not just imagined—mobility, thus allowing visitors to explore the theater itself as a contingently inhabited space. The outcome of such a mobile form of viewing would contradict what panoramas were meant to do: Rather than totalizing Soviet nationhood and subjectivity within the walls of the theater, it would fracture them and undermine the very idea of an integrated and perfectly unified consciousness of the country’s history, time, and spaces.

Transcending the Attraction

When Moscow’s Circular Panorama opened its doors in summer 1959, discussions and demonstrations of panoramic cinema in the USSR had already been around for a couple of years.¹² The first so-called kinopanorama film, Wide Is My Country (Shiroka strana moia, directed by Roman Karmen), had opened in winter 1958 utilizing technology developed at the Moscow Research Institute for Cinema and Photography (NIKFI) under the leadership of Evsei Goldovskii and closely resembling in its form US Cinerama, which had been developed in the United States by Fred Waller in 1952.¹³ Although Goldovskii (who became one of the most vociferous advocates of panorama’s use in the USSR) and others insisted on the superiority of the Soviet model, the difference between Cinerama and kinopanorama was negligible. The working parts of the two systems were largely interchangeable; the only notable difference between them was in their stereophonic sound systems, the Soviet version of which recorded and reproduced sound through nine channels, whereas the US version used seven. Otherwise, both used a three-panel, deeply curved screen with an aspect ratio of approximately 21.6 to 8.5, which extended the projected image far to the sides of the theatrical space, aiding in the creation of the panorama’s celebrated effect of participatory presence.¹⁴ Stereophonic technology, which distributed speakers throughout the space of the theater to create a more totalizing and organic correspondence between sound and image, substantially contributed to these effects.¹⁵ And although Cinerama enjoyed great popular success at the Bangkok Constitution Fair in 1954, kinopanorama quickly caught up at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, with Wide Is My Country receiving the exhibition’s grand prize. It was in Brussels, too, that the US Circarama, on which the construction of Moscow’s Circular Panorama was based, made its international debut.

Kinopanorama’s perceptual struc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Persistence of Presence: Soviet Panoramic Cinema
• 2. Mimetic Passages: The Cinema of Mikhail Kalatozov and Sergei Urusevskii
• 3. The Architecture of Movement: Georgii Danelia’s I Walk the Streets of Moscow
• 4. A Walk through the Ruins: Larisa Shepitko’s Wings
• 5. The Obdurate Matter of Space: Kira Muratova’s Brief Encounters
• Conclusion: The Otherness of Space
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index