Cinema of the Soviet Union

The cinema of the Soviet Union includes films produced by the constituent republics of the Soviet Union reflecting elements of their pre-Soviet culture, language and history, albeit they were all regulated by the central government in Moscow. Most prolific in their republican films, after the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, and, to a lesser degree, Lithuania, Belarus and Moldavia. At the same time, the nation's film industry, which was fully nationalized throughout most of the country's history, was guided by philosophies and laws propounded by the monopoly Soviet Communist Party which introduced a new view on the cinema, socialist realism, which was different from the one before or after the existence of the Soviet Union.

Historical outline

Upon the establishment of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic on November 7, 1917, what had formerly been the Russian Empire began quickly to come under the domination of a Soviet reorganization of all its institutions. From the outset, the leaders of this new state held that film would be the most ideal propaganda tool for the Soviet Union because of its widespread popularity among the established citizenry of the new land. Vladimir Lenin viewed film as the most important medium for educating the masses in the ways, means and successes of communism. As a consequence Lenin issued the "Directives on the Film Business" on January 17, 1922, which instructed the People's Commissariat for Education to systemise the film business, registering and numbering all films shown in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, extracting rent from all privately owned cinemas and subject them to censorship.
However, between World War I and the Russian Revolution, the Russian film industry and the infrastructure needed to support it had deteriorated to the point of unworkability. The majority of cinemas had been in the corridor between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and most were out of commission. Additionally, many of the performers, producers, directors and other artists of pre-Soviet Russia had fled the country or were moving ahead of Red Army forces as they pushed further and further south into what remained of the Russian Empire. Furthermore, the new government did not have the funds to spare for an extensive reworking of the system of filmmaking. Thus, they initially opted for project approval and censorship guidelines while leaving what remained of the industry in private hands. As this amounted mostly to cinema houses, the first Soviet films consisted of recycled films of the Russian Empire and its imports, to the extent that these were not determined to be offensive to the new Soviet ideology. Ironically, the first new film released in Soviet Russia did not exactly fit this mold: this was Father Sergius, a religious film completed during the last weeks of the Russian Empire but not yet exhibited. It appeared on Soviet screens in 1918.
Beyond this, the government was principally able to fund only short, educational films, the most famous of which were the agitki – educational films intended to agitate, or energize and enthuse, the masses to participate fully in approved Soviet activities, and deal effectively with those who remained in opposition to the new order. These short films were often simple visual aids and accompaniments to live lectures and speeches, and were carried from city to city, town to town, village to village to educate the entire countryside, even reaching areas where film had not been previously seen.
Newsreels, as documentaries, were the other major form of earliest Soviet cinema. Dziga Vertov's newsreel series Kino-Pravda, the best known of these, lasted from 1922 to 1925 and had a propagandistic bent; Vertov used the series to promote socialist realism but also to experiment with cinema.
Still, in 1921, there was not one functioning cinema in Moscow until late in the year. Its rapid success, using old Russian and imported feature films, jumpstarted the industry significantly, especially insofar as the government did not heavily or directly regulate what was shown, and by 1923 an additional 89 cinemas had opened. Despite extremely high taxation of ticket sales and film rentals, there was an incentive for individuals to begin making feature film product again – there were places to show the films – albeit they now had to conform their subject matter to a Soviet world view. In this context, the directors and writers who were in support of the objectives of communism assumed quick dominance in the industry, as they were the ones who could most reliably and convincingly turn out films that would satisfy government censors.
File:Ballada2.jpg|thumb|Still from Grigory Chukhray's Ballad of a Soldier
New talent joined the experienced remainder, and an artistic community assembled with the goal of defining "Soviet film" as something distinct and better from the output of "decadent capitalism". The leaders of this community viewed it essential to this goal to be free to experiment with the entire nature of film, a position which would result in several well-known creative efforts but would also result in an unforeseen counter-reaction by the increasingly solidifying administrators of the government-controlled society.
In 1924 wrote a book on the history of film he says is "the first Soviet attempt at systematization of the meager available sources for the general reader". Along with other articles written by Lebedev and published by Pravda, Izvestia and Kino. In the book he draws attention to the funding challenges that follow nationalization of Soviet cinema. In 1925 all film organizations merged to form Sovkino. Under Sovkino the film industry was given a tax-free benefit and held a monopoly on all film-related exports and imports.
Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin was released to wide acclaim in 1925; the film was heavily fictionalized and also propagandistic, giving the party line about the virtues of the proletariat. The kinokomitet or "Film Committee" established that same year published translations of important books about film theory by Béla Balázs, Rudolf Harms and Léon Moussinac.
One of the most popular films released in the 1930s was Circus. Immediately after the end of World War II, color movies such as The Stone Flower, Ballad of Siberia, and Cossacks of the Kuban were released. Other notable films from the 1940s include Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible.
The late 1950s and early 1960s marked changes in Soviet cinema. The period of de-Stalinization resulted in artists who had been purged being "rehabilitated" and their artistic credits being restored. This period marked a greater variety of topics depicted, decreasing censorship, and the development of more genre films in contrast to the socialist realism style prevalent under Stalin. The number of tickets sold was the primary way a film was deemed successful, but film professionals proposed considering other measures, such as financial success and relative popularity within less-popular genres. The Experimental Studio opened in 1965 as an experiment in film production. The studio would rent sets as needed and would not have a permanent creative staff, but would instead employ artists by the project. The studio would not receive artistic and efficiency bonuses as its method of payment, but would instead receive a percentage of the distribution of the film after it became profitable. This system was part of an increasing interest in developing individual artistic visions in film, along with the belief that different films would appeal to different subsets of the population rather than all films appealing to all moviegoers. This period produced Ballad of a Soldier, which won the 1961 BAFTA Award for Best Film, and The Cranes Are Flying.
The number of films produced in the USSR increased during this period, from six fiction films in 1951 to 125 fiction films in 1965. New graduates from the Film Institute resulted in more new directors, with a goal set for 30% of new films in 1967 to be directed by new filmmakers. Approximately 100 foreign films were released in the USSR in 1965 and 1966. Between 1945 and 1965, 71 movie theaters were built in Moscow, and 7 more were set to open in 1966. The total number of film-showing facilities in the USSR rose from 78,000 seats in 1959 to 145,300 in 1965, with 10,400 widescreen theaters and 87 "wide format". Theaters were mostly concentrated in urban areas, such that annual film attendance rates in 1964 were 20.6 films for city-dwellers and only 15.7 films for country-dwellers. To address this disparity, an experimental filmobile program was devised and tested in Belarus. The filmobile was a bus outfitted with 35-60 seats and the ability to show a film. The bus drove in a radius of six to ten miles collecting audience-members until it was full, at which point it stopped, showed the film, and drove the attendees back to their villages. The efforts to increase film-going were successful, with theater attendances rising from 3,611,00,000 in 1960 to 4,112,000,000 in 1964. According to Soviet statisticians, the average theater visits per person per year in the USSR was 18.3 in 1964 versus 12 in the USA and 8 in England and France.
The Height is considered to be one of the best films of the 1950s.
In the 1980s there was a diversification of subject matter. Touchy issues could now be discussed openly. The results were films like Repentance, which dealt with repression in Georgia, and the allegorical science fiction movie Kin-dza-dza!.

Censorship

After the death of Stalin, Soviet filmmakers were given a freer hand to film what they believed audiences wanted to see in their film's characters and stories. The industry remained a part of the government and any material that was found politically offensive or undesirable, was either removed, edited, reshot, or shelved. The definition of "socialist realism" was liberalized to allow development of more human characters, but communism still had to remain uncriticized in its fundamentals. Additionally, the degree of relative artistic liberality was changed from administration to administration.
Examples created by censorship include:

Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible Part II was completed in 1946 but was not released until 1958; 5 years after Stalin's death.
Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky was censored before the German invasion of the Soviet Union due to its depiction of a strong Russian leader defying an invading army of German Teutonic Knights. After the invasion, the film was released for propaganda purposes to considerable critical acclaim.