When I was an undergrad in film school, one of the pillar courses was a two-semester film history class that would act as a broad survey to give us a foundation as aspiring filmmakers and workers. Naturally, this course was also about its own limitations—the final project was arguing for movements or moments that were left out of the course, and why they should be included in the future. My interest at the time was in “Slow” (also known as “Contemplative”) Cinema, but in my investigation into the roots of that aesthetic development I ran into a curious gap in the way film history is taught, at least in the Western canon. When we got around to post-war Soviet cinema, it was largely framed as “there was Andrei Tarkovsky, and there was everything else.” To a certain extent, as far as the canon is concerned, this is true: After the innovations of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Oleksandr Dovzhenko in the silent era, the work coming out of the Soviet Union (so far as it affected film on the other side of the wall) was mostly just the works of Tarkovsky, who himself tried to separate his art from the state he was born into.
But when one looks at the works of world cinema after the end of the Cold War, it is clear that an aesthetic language had been developed on the other side of the Curtain, one with its own inclinations and conversations in film form and culture that we in the West had previously only seen glimpses of. My curiosity eventually led me to dedicating my senior year to writing a thesis on the developments of post-war film aesthetics in the Soviet film industry, in part just to figure out what was going on in this oddly understudied area of cinema history. What I found coming out of the largest and third-most populous country in the world was a world of populist musicals, understated melodramas, kooky science fiction, and youth romance amongst the developments in what we now think of as arthouse aesthetics.
Compiled below is a list of Soviet films that I wish I had when I was an undergrad, a guide to scratching the surface of Soviet film that goes beyond just the staples—early filmmaker-theorists like Eisenstein, Vertov, and Dovzhenko; Criterion darlings Tarkovsky or Mikhail Kalatozov; auteurs who found even more recognition after the collapse like Alexander Sokurov or Nikita Mikhalkov; or even more recent rediscoveries like Sergei Parajanov, Sergei Bondarchuk, Larissa Shepitko, or Elem Klimov. This list is not necessarily a counter-canon, but an expansion, a map to fill in the common gaps in cinephiles’ understanding of film in the U.S.S.R.
The Silent Era
In 1919, the world’s first film school was founded in a newly communist Moscow. The Moscow Film School (better known at VGIK for the majority of the Soviet Union’s history) was a cultural hub as revolutionary as anything else in the early days of Bolshevik rule. When the U.S.S.R. was founded after the Red victory in the Russian Civil War, it helped establish the Union as a germination point for radical cinema.
Aelita: Queen Of Mars (1924)
Yakov Protazanov was the most commercially successful filmmaker of the Soviet silent era, and notably, one of the few mainstream filmmakers from before the Revolution to continue to find work in the new order of things. While Protazanov directed a host of comedies and dramas through the 1920s, he’s most remembered for his science fiction epic Aelita: Queen Of Mars. Aelita is a strange product of early Soviet society—while the images often recalled are the ones of Martian society with expressionistic sets and costumes, the bulk of the narrative takes place on Earth in early ‘20s Moscow. And while they the characters do eventually travel to Mars, where they launch an uprising to overthrow the ruling class, it starts with the main character imagining the Martians, imagining their society, and imagining that the Martian queen has a telescope and can see the Earth and learn from their follies. Aelita is a prime example of early Soviet sci-fi as a metaphor for the Bolshevik Revolution, and the use of genre as a space to dream up the brave new world they were carving.
The Extraordinary Adventures Of Mr. West In The Land Of The Bolsheviks (1924)
Lev Kuleshov is perhaps the most famous of the silent Soviets, not because of his cinema but his most quoted experiment in editing. The “Kuleshov effect”—wherein Kuleshov pieced together old pre-war footage of Ivan Mozzhukhin with various cutaways to make a point about how editing construction affects our understanding of images—is an concept that has reached far beyond people interested in film history. However, even highly involved cinephiles seem to miss that Kuleshov was also highly successful at applying his own techniques, and proved quite popular with early Soviet audiences. The Extraordinary Adventures Of Mr. West In The Land Of The Bolsheviks is a comedic adventure where wealthy American J.S. West and his bodyguard travel to the newly formed Soviet Union, which they believe is going to be a land of barbarism. When locals get wind of West’s preconceived notions and his wealth, they build an elaborate scam to steal his money. It all goes according to plan, until the Soviet police pull West out of the farce, and show him the beauty of the new Soviet state. The Extraordinary Adventures Of Mr. West In The Land Of The Bolsheviks works not just as a demonstration of theory by Kuleshov, but also reveals a broad self-awareness within Soviet culture that is often lost by outside observers.
Bed And Sofa (1927)
The quintessential romantic comedy of early Soviet cinema, Abram Room’s Bed And Sofa is love triangle between two men and a modernly independent woman (a recurring theme, as we will see). Apparently based on a love affair between futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and Osip Brik’s wife Lilya, Bed And Sofa is a constant inversion of feelings and relations between a wife bored by her imposed domesticity, her husband, and the friend they let drift into their house. Bed And Sofa was highly controversial at the time of its release, even being banned in multiple countries outside the Soviet Union for its frank portrayal of open infidelity and abortion. While the film tosses its plot from side to side like a tennis volley, there is a fascinating independence at the center of it embodied by Lyuda (Lyudmila Semyonova), who turns the constantly sordid, scandalous, and hilarious love affair into a bold feminist statement.
The Fall Of The Romanov Dynasty (1927)
Of the famed group of filmmaker-theorists that emerged in the early days of Soviet cinema, Esfir Shub is one of the most important that has largely been left to obscurity. In a profile of her work in the Summer 2024 issue of Cineaste, Stuart Liebman points out that while she’s had some recent re-evaluation in post-Soviet Russia (particularly for her views being “inconsistent with Soviet orthodoxy”), few of her writings have ever been made available in English and The Fall Of The Romanov Dynasty is still her only feature that has been released on physical media. The Fall Of The Romanov Dynasty is a masterpiece in archival cinema, a pioneering work of repurposing available material to create polemical narratives about the drive of history. Unlike Eisenstein, whom she criticized for inauthenticity because of his use of recreation, and unlike Vertov, whom she attacked for being too obtuse, Shub was a stringent adherent to a kind of documentary truth that was only in its primordial stages.
The New Babylon (1929)
If all of silent Soviet cinema was to be lost in a fire, and only one example could survive to be exemplary of its fiction filmmaking style, I would save Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg’s last silent film, The New Babylon. Set amidst the famed Paris Commune, where in the crushing defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war, communards in the city declared themselves independent from the rest of the nation, seeking instead to govern themselves by a radical democracy. Kozintsev and Trauberg’s film acts as a similar kind of coda to silent cinema as F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans or Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, with a congregation of pioneering techniques shown in full force. The New Babylon combines the montage styles of Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin with the elliptical poetry of Dovzhenko to make a constantly stirring, punchy, and impactful cry for freedom by way of revolution, even if it is ultimately doomed. It is a stunning work of internationalism in the dwindling days of the early Soviet Union trying to spread its reach to all corners of the earth—a last cry to the world from a country that would briefly become a hermit nation.
Sound and High-Stalinism
The introduction of sound not only stifled the creativity with which a camera could be thrown around, but also came in tandem with Stalin’s idea of “Socialism in One Country,” which turned the U.S.S.R. away from internationalism and towards building a strong society in and of itself. This came with a homogenization of culture, which implemented a broad Russian hegemony over Soviet society, and films being spoken in Russian helped aid this much more than localized intertitles in silent films ever could. Also with this came the mandate of “Socialist Realism,” a vaguely fluid term that broadly meant that art was to present the proletarian and revolutionary values of the state, but with much more stylistic conservatism than what was exploding out of the creative minds of the ‘20s. Even despite this rigidity (within an period of time that would end up being the most repressive era in Soviet history), some high art was still able to find its way to the surface.
Chapayev (1934)
The Vasilyev Brothers’ film Chapayev is a film with staying power—one needs to look no further than Tarkovsky’s thesis film The Steamroller And The Violin, wherein the artistic young boy and industrial laborer who form an unlikely friendship go and see the film together over 25 years after its initial release. It’s also apparently Vladimir Putin’s favorite movie of all time. A Civil War adventure film, Chapayev is based on the real Red Army hero Vasily Chapayev, a man with a mustache as legendary as his military exploits and sacrifices for the Revolution. While so much of early sound Soviet film feels like a regression to almost pre-Revolution levels of film grammar, the location-shot sequences of Chapayev imbue Socialist Realism with a similar dynamism to the silent era.
By The Bluest Of Seas (1936)
The Georgian director Otar Iosseliani once (likely drunkenly) conjectured that of the great early Soviet directors “Boris Barnet is the only one of them who was not a liar.” While Barnet’s contemporary Dovzhenko is often held up as a pillar of humanist cinema within the early days of Soviet film, his works are still quite obviously imbued with the ideological content of a Party Man (his most famous film, Earth, is as much populist peasant film about farmers in rural Ukraine as it is a polemic for Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan). Barnet, on the other hand, feels almost completely out of place amongst his peers, with his cinema taking on a poetic naturalism that feels so far away from the concerns of statebuilding that it would be just as at home in the bucolic France of Jean Renoir’s A Day In The Country as it would off an island in Soviet Azerbaijan. By The Bluest Of Seas is one of the most beautiful films ever made, a stunning drama where a pair of castaways drift onto the shores of a collective farm in the Caspian Sea. A love triangle ensues, but unlike what a more Socialist Realist film might do and use the romance as a metaphor for building communism, instead Barnet’s story uses the kolkhoz as a societal texture within a bigger natural world, one where emotions turn to storms brewing on the seas.
Volga-Volga (1938)
A personal favorite of Stalin, Volga-Volga practically became a joke in the Soviet film industry for how often it was played and promoted. Grigori Aleksandrov’s musical-comedy is described by Peter Rollberg in his Historical Dictionary Of Russian And Soviet Cinema as having a “crude populism,” wherein groups of peasants from the fictional rural town of Melkovodsk show-up more elitist-minded musicians with their rousing folk tunes while sailing up the Volga river to a musical talent contest in Moscow. Volga-Volga affirms a folksy culture underpinning the ostensibly science-based and industrious Soviet Union, one which helped plant the seeds for a kind of nationalism that was bubbling under the communist project.
The Fall Of Berlin (1950)
Made as a gift for Stalin’s birthday, The Fall Of Berlin is the first of a few “full force of Soviet manpower to make a movie” movies (Sergei Bondarchuk’s seven-and-a-half-hour War And Peace is another great example). Mikheil Chiaureli was handpicked by Stalin because Chiaureli’s Georgian epic Georgi Saakadze was a favorite. The Fall Of Berlin follows a pair of exemplary Soviet citizens and their romance torn apart by the Great Patriotic War, with German bombs literally crashing into their moment of romantic unity. While Aleksei (Boris Andreyev) goes to fight on the front and liberate the world from fascism, Natasha (Marina Kovalyova) ultimately gets captured by the Nazis and thrown in a concentration camp. The film ends with the pair being gloriously reunited by Joseph Stalin himself (played by regular Stalin-portrayer Mikheil Gelovani). Stylistically bombastic, without a touch of narrative subtlety, and still strangely stirring (no doubt in part because of Dmitri Shostakovich’s score which, it is fabled, kept the light dissident out of jail), The Fall Of Berlin is truly the Stalinist film par excellence.
The Thaw
In 1953, Stalin died. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, the new premier, denounced Stalin’s cult of personality and ushered in a short-lived era of loosening the state’s grip an art—this brief window was an explosion of creativity that saw many of the best filmmakers in Soviet history emerge out of the film school scene. While criticism of the past was encouraged, talking about the present in anything but effusive terms was still largely off limits.
Clear Skies (1959)
While his film Ballad Of A Soldier is considered an arthouse classic, not much thought is given within the broader European canon to Grigori Chukhrai, yet at home he was a cornerstone in a transitional moment in the U.S.S.R.’s history. Clear Skies is an interesting film, as it is aesthetically classical (i.e. Stalinist style of Socialist Realism), but its propagandistic aspirations are of a newly reformed society. Clear Skies is a post-war reckoning, following the young Sasha Lvova (Nina Drobysheva) and her romance with the war hero pilot Aleksei Astakhov (Yevgeny Urbansky, one of the great Soviet actors who died tragically young). When Astakhov goes down and is presumed dead, Sasha has to go on forging a new life for herself in a world hollowed out by war. But when Astakhov returns from capture, Sasha has to deal with something even harder than just a generation destroyed: one that returns home broken. Unlike The Fall Of Berlin, the end of the war does not bring joyous unification, but a world left in ruins (similar to that after the Russian Civil War), in need of more hardship to rebuild, and reckon.
Walking The Streets Of Moscow (1964)
Georgiy Daneliya’s Walking The Streets Of Moscow is probably the most indicative of the attitude that was being put forward in the Khrushchev era: youthful optimism. Daneliya’s charming romp around the beautifully modern city feels as much like a tourist ad as it does a film for teenagers to catch on dates. The widescreen cinematography and cheeky camerawork brings to mind the early films of François Truffaut. In Daneliya’s film, Moscow is no longer a city wracked with war and obsessed with industriousness; its shiny subway tunnels are now home to optimistic young adults singing twee songs. Walking The Streets Of Moscow’s stylistic playfulness is a trend that was largely snuffed out after the Khrushchev era, just as much soas the optimism the movie presented.
Ordinary Fascism (a.k.a. Triumph Over Violence) (1965)
Mikhail Romm, in many ways, was the father of the Thaw-era cinema. At VGIK, he taught the likes of Chukhrai, Daneliya, Andrei Konchalovsky and his brother Nikita Mikhalkov, Larissa Shepitko and her husband Elem Klimov, writer Gennady Shpalikov, the great Georgian filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze, and, most famously, Andrei Tarkovsky. While an active film director since the 1930s, Romm struggled to find his voice amidst the conservative formal obligations of Stalin’s Socialist Realism. It wasn’t until the tail end of his career, when his protegees were just starting to introduce their visions, that Romm was able to realize his. Often a fiction filmmaker, Romm found surprising freedom to say what he wanted in the form of archival documentary. Taking cues from Shub’s The Fall Of The Romanov Dynasty, Romm compiled footage from the archives of the Nazis to depict the rise and fall of fascism in Germany. Ordinary Fascism has become a classic in left-wing, anti-fascist film history, and its cult-like status amongst modern pro-Soviet nostalgics is ironic considering that many contemporaries of Romm considered it to also be his thinly veiled statement against the authoritarianism within the Soviet Union’s own bureaucracy.
Operation Y And Other Shurik’s Adventures (1965)
Leonid Gaidai was one of the most popular comedy directors in the post-war Soviet Union. He had an oddball and inventive style that featured aggressive camera techniques and pinchy editing to heighten his humor at every turn. This is matched by Aleksandr Demyanenko’s performance as the highly popular Shurik character. Of the three of Gaidai and Demyanenko’s Shurik films, none is a better showcase for Demyanenko’s bumbling nerdiness and Gaidai’s dynamic filmmaking than Operation Y, a rip-roaring comedy made up of three shorts. While Soviet popular entertainment is often thought of as rather dry, Demyanenko’s Jerry Lewis-like Shurik and Gaidai’s vigorous camera is a strong rebuke.
I Am Twenty (1965)
Originally titled Ilyich’s Gate (named after the neighborhood it takes place in in Moscow), I Am Twenty was a film directly targeted by Khrushchev as they started to crack back down on the arts. Even after extensive cuts and reshoots that dulled some of the sharper edges, Marlen Khutsiev’s film still stands as one of the greatest works about generational divides and the illogic of ideology. I Am Twenty follows a group of three friends—Sergei (Valentin Popov), Kolya (Nikolay Gubenko), and Slava (Stanislav Lyubshin)—as they navigate young adulthood as a fatherless generation in post-war Moscow. To them, the war is but a distant childhood memory, practically forgotten amongst the new possibilities of the Khrushchev era. There is a deep irony to I Am Twenty that is likely what made it so unacceptable to the authorities: The old generation had become conservative, and the new crop of bright young socialists had to make their own ways in the world against their parents’ wishes. The metaphor for the relationship to the state is clear, and despite being easily seen as anti-Stalinist, it can also be read as anti top-down rule, something which the dismantling of Stalin’s cult of personality did not change within the Soviet system. I Am Twenty was designed to be the film of a generation, even going as far as to throw a real symposium of the day’s top writers, poets, thinkers, and musicians in Moscow just to film scenes where the characters could be there. While the film did not make the waves it wanted to at the time, it did give a glimpse into the future of Soviet cinema, not just in its form, but with cameos by the young film students Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky.
Brezhnev Conservatism and Concealed Classics
Late into Khrushchev’s years he started cracking down again on art, and once Leonid Brezhnev had deposed him in a palace coup in 1964, all of Soviet culture returned to a kind of Stalinist conservatism—this era is marked by much less innovation, a sort of culture stagnation even though the standard of living was generally quite comfortable, and the most popular movies were as aesthetically drab in their Socialist Realism as ever before. Still, a number of masterpieces were trying to slip through the cracks. Not all got seen at the time, but many were made despite the increase in censorship.
The Story Of Asya’s Klyachina, Who Loved But Never Married (a.k.a. Asya’s Happiness) (1966)
Andrei Konchalovsky is one of the most peculiar filmmakers from the Soviet Union to try to place because of his stylistic plasticity, yet this also makes him one of the most exemplary of all Soviet directors. Born into an artistically (and therefore, politically) privileged family (his father wrote the lyrics to the Soviet National Anthem), Konchalovsky would initially be known as the right hand to the Union’s greatest up-and-comer, as he was Andrei Tarkovsky’s co-writer. It was never his aspiration to be just that, and soon enough he was directing his own films as well—then the two had a contentious and final split during the making of Andrei Rublev. While Rublev would get shelved by Soviet authorities for a handful of years, only getting shown in a smattering of theaters in Moscow and Leningrad along with international festivals, Konchalovsky’s sophomore feature from the same year was outright banned. Asya’s Happiness is a masterpiece of a new form that Konchalovsky was pioneering, one I would call Socialist Neorealism, wherein he blended a cast of professional actors for the central love triangle, and then surrounded them with non-actors from a real rural kolkhoz farm playing versions of themselves, often giving testimonies about their lives. This blend of documentary and fiction recalls the romances of Room and Barnet, the hybrid filmmaking of Khutsiev, and plays like Dovzhenko’s Earth in reverse, where the land is not rejuvenated by socialism but has fallen into stagnation because of it. Konchalovsky’s films would never again be quite as innovative as Asya’s Happiness (although he has tried to atavistically revisit the form time and time again, like with 2014’s The Postman’s White Nights), and the film stands as much as an achievement in and of itself as it does a “What could have been?” for Soviet film had it not been banned.
The Commissar (1967)
Another one of the only films banned in the U.S.S.R., but unlike Konchalovsky’s criticism of the present in Asya’s Happiness, The Commissar was banned for its criticism of antisemitism in the Soviet Union, a lingering cultural discrimination that goes back centuries. Unfortunately for filmmaker Aleksandr Aksoldov, he did not have the same kind of privileged position within Soviet society as Konchalovsky did, and Aksoldov’s career was ruined by the ban. Taking place in a village in central Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, a Red Army commissar, Klavdia (Nonna Mordyukova) finds herself pregnant and has to be relieved from duty until she gives birth and is fit again for combat, taking shelter with a Jewish family. The Commissar spends most of its runtime investigating the deep cultural divide between Jews and the broader public of the former Russian Empire, and gets at the irony of a solidarity movement which is quick to promise liberation but in a practical sense is ready to tactically retreat, even if it means a pogrom by the White Army. It was unfortunate timing that got Aksoldov and his inquisitive, sensitive camera a ban: The release aligned with a staunchly anti-Israel Soviet foreign policy, which also proved the point of The Commissar—by conflating Jewish identity with the state of Israel, the Soviets willingly backpedaled on their solidarity towards one of their minorities for political gain.
The Glass Harmonica (1968)
Penned by probably the most important screenwriter in the post-Stalinist U.S.S.R., Gennady Shpalikov (who also wrote the Walking the Streets of Moscow and I Am Twenty), Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s The Glass Harmonica is one of the strangest artifacts of Soviet animation. With a surreal hand-drawn style reminiscent of René Magritte’s bowler hat paintings, The Glass Harmonica is a nightmarish fable set in a town run by seedy bureaucracy which is upset by the music of the titular instrument. It is obvious why this metaphorical film about the power of art against the state would garner the negative gaze of the censors, but the banning of The Glass Harmonica led to increased interest in the film and ultimately benefited its mythos.
The Red Snowball Tree (1974)
There are three people statued in bronze outside VGIK: Andrei Tarkovsky, Gennady Shpalikov, and Vasily Shukshin. Shukshin was a prolific writer, actor, and film director in the Soviet Union up through his untimely death in 1974, and to this day is highly revered in modern Russia, although for interesting reasons. Shukshin’s final directorial effort, The Red Snowball Tree, has a classic set-up: A convict is released from prison and goes off to find a girl and a new life, although the ghosts of the old one keep creeping back in. There is an unpretentiousness to Shukshin’s filmmaking, one that he carried in his own persona, often portraying himself not as an intellectual artist but a simple man. This image, paired with the gentle pastoralism of The Red Snowball Tree, has made him a rather nostalgic figure in post-Soviet Russia, not a communist hero but a nationalist one who represents the basic values that the current culture likes to hold up.
The Irony of Fate, Or Enjoy Your Bath (1975)
Not unlike the self-awareness of The Extraordinary Adventures Of Mr. West In The Land Of The Bolsheviks, The Irony Of Fate is playing a uniquely Soviet joke: Aman gets too drunk and accidentally ends up on a flight from Moscow to Leningrad—unaware he has changed cities, he gives a cab his address and winds up in an identical apartment building on an identical block to his one at home, and to top it all off his apartment key works for the door with the same number as his. There is only one problem: a woman lives here, and her boyfriend is on the way to celebrate New Years Eve together. Eldar Ryazanov’s holiday classic is played annually to this day on New Years Eve, making it the prime example of the many two-part comedy films that were a staple of Soviet TV schedules (which Ryazanov was the master of).
Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears (1979)
If there was ever a Boomer nostalgia film for post-Soviet Russia, it is Vladimir Menshov’s Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears. Following Katerina (Vera Alentova), at two points in her life—first in 1958, when she’s full of youthful aspiration, then again in 1978, when she has become ostensibly successful but doesn’t feel personal fulfillment in her love life—Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears is a quintessentially Brezhnevian melodrama about settling, both for what you have and the times you live in. Early in the film, Katarina and her friend find themselves housesitting in one of the famous Stalinist skyscrapers of Moscow. They throw a dinner party pretending it’s their own, and that it’s their life. Later, Katarina lives in a dull Brezhnevka, a classic commie-bloc high-rise that was meant to be the symbol of efficient communist housing but became the image of how dull the world had become. Here, Katarina has to give up the dreams of what a perfect life looked like in her youth, and learn to accept the one she’s been bestowed.
Glasnost and Collapse
After Brezhnev died in ‘82 and he was replaced by a quick succession of other old communists who also promptly died, the young Mikhail Gorbachev started running the country and introduced liberalizing reforms in all sectors of Soviet society. While the cultural effects of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring) were invigorating to Soviet culture, they led to the economic collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the Eastern Bloc as whole. For cinema, 1986 is the most important year, where Elem Klimov (begrudgingly) became the head of Filmmaker’s Union, replacing the conservative order at its center (led by Sergei Bondarchuk) with a more open one, and films that had been shelved or banned (like Asya’s Happiness and The Commissar) were finally out for the public to see.
Blue Mountains, Or The Unbelievable Story (1983)
One of the greatest films ever made about art crashing up against bureaucracy, Eldar Shengelaia’s masterpiece Blue Mountains, Or The Unbelievable Story is portrait of systems failure. Taking place in a crumbling office building in the historic part of Tbilisi, Georgia, a writer tries to get his manuscript read by the censors so that it can be published. What he’s met with is people yo-yoing him from room to room, office workers sitting around playing chess instead of whatever else they were supposed to be doing, and banal platitudes delivered by bureaucrats. This isn’t a Kafkaesque nightmare, but a basically light comedy of compounding inefficiency as the seasons slowly change around them, with nobody paying too much mind to how the building is literally falling apart around them.
Our Century (1983)
Artavazd Peleshian is one of the most important figures in Soviet and Armenian avant-garde, and Our Century is his opus. Borrowing a polemical archival approach from Shub, Peleshian adds his own poetic flair, as spaceship launches give way to men trying to climb up on hot air balloons, with the beeps of computers overtaken by stirring choral music. In a moment of national stagnation and decline, Our Century steps back and looks at awe with what has been achieved through collective will over what is, cosmically, a very short span of time.
My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985)
There’s an apocryphal epigraph for this movie that I’ve never been able to source where people claim that Tarkovsky calls it the greatest Russian movie of all time, but I don’t see that as too far-fetched. (Tarkovsky is on the record admiring many of Aleksei German’s earlier films). German today is best known for his final feature, Hard To Be A God, but I’d still consider Ivan Lapshin to be his greatest achievement. Based on the novel Lapshin by Aleksei’s father, Yuri German (one of the most popular novelists in his time in the Soviet Union, who was best known for his detective stories), My Friend Ivan Lapshin is a flowing, atemporal, and textured trip following a group of police detectives in the fictional provincial town of Unchansk as they attempt to track down and capture a brutal local gang. German’s ghostly camerawork aided by his deeply researched and dense texture aid German’s dreamily flowing mise-en-scene to create some of the most beautiful, hypnotic, and enigmatic sequences in the history of cinema.
Dead Man’s Letters (1986)
The directorial debut of Konstantin Lopushanskhy, Dead Man’s Letters takes place underground after a nuclear war, where an old Nobel laureate living in the basement of a museum posits that there must be more human life beyond their subterranean safe havens. An assistant to Tarkovsky on Stalker, Lopushansky and the co-writer of Stalker’s source novel Roadside Picnic, Boris Stragatsky, create a thinly veiled metaphor for life in a crumbling U.S.S.R.—no nuclear war is necessary to reveal the suffocating reality of being trapped in a dying society that seems inescapable. Full of flooded libraries, dusty and sparsely decorated homes built into tunnels, and wind-swept destroyed cities rife with gas-mask clad travelers, Dead Man’s Letters feels as much a metaphor for the present as it does a ghastly look into the future, as the Soviet Union would collapse and lead to decades of brutal war and instability in its former borders.
Repentance (1987)
It is often said that glasnost first reached the public when Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance got widely distributed after being put on the shelf in 1984. Set in a small Georgian village, Repentance is a surreal story of the past haunting the present: when the mayor is laid to rest, his corpse keeps showing up, mysteriously exhumed after reburial after reburial. A film not just about reckoning with the legacy of Stalinism, Repentance is about trying to bring that reckoning to a world constructed around suppressing what people know, in order to create a narrative about what they are supposed to think.
Assa (1987)
Assa is the film meant to introduce the broader Soviet public to the emerging punk movements from big cities like Leningrad and Moscow. “Punk” in the U.S.S.R. wasn’t exactly what it is understood to be in the West; it was effectively any type of pop, rock, new wave, or even disco-esque music. Anything but the kind of folksy stuff that had been pushed for decades, or the croony old-person music approved by state censors. Sergei Solyovov designed Assa’s narrative like a Bollywood romance in order to give it the most mass appeal, following a love triangle between a young musician in Yalta, a nurse, and her older gangster boyfriend. Amidst this youthful affair and crime drama is a banging set of performances by the U.S.S.R.’s best underground musicians, showcasing the new music scene being brought to the masses by Glasnost and Perestroika. Assa ends with a performance by Viktor Tsoi, the frontman of Kino (who would be considered something of a Soviet Bob Dylan for his political music, and also tragically a James Dean-like figure of lost youth after he was killed in a car accident at 28), of the band’s crucial Gorbachev-era song “Peremen!” (“Changes!”), a rallying cry for a new world.
The Asthenic Syndrome (1989)
Kira Muritova struggled for a long time under the Soviet production system. Her first two solo features, Brief Encounters (1967) and The Long Farewell (1971), were banned and shelved, respectively, and not seen in the U.S.S.R. until the late ‘80s. She had a much more prolific directing career after the collapse, but her most important work came right on the cusp: 1989’s The Asthenic Syndrome. A film within a film, where partway through the real main character wakes up and realizes that what we had previously seen was a film he had fallen asleep during, The Asthenic Syndrome is a movie where falling asleep at inappropriate times starts to reveal the degradation of the world around the protagonist. The narcoleptic Nikolai (Sergei Popov) eventually finds himself in a mental hospital for his frequent and uncontrolled drifts into slumber, but here he realizes that those considered mad aren’t psychologically much different than those living outside. Everyone in the late Soviet Union seems to be trapped in some kind of decaying, insane world. Where that society goes next, though, is unclear.