Mikhail Romm’s THE RUSSIAN QUESTION (1948; September 5 at 6 pm) is another story — a fascinating piece of inaugural Cold War agitprop that’s set entirely in the US and has as its protagonist a hard-boiled American journalist who’s been to Russia and knows “the truth” (that Russia is a country of ordinary people “who do not want war”) but is seduced into writing a book demonizing the Soviets and providing the rabid US power interests with classic Cold War ammo. The film is all contrived moral agony, but it’s also an ostensibly realistic vision of how mid-century Soviets saw American life through Hollywood movies, all hard-drinking newspapermen and New York wise-assness and a starry-eyed hunger for spacious post-war opulence. (When the hero is threatened by his employers, it’s his posh, garden-cosseted suburban home that he’s at risk of losing.) Judging smart anti-American propaganda can be a sticky business, because often, like The Russian Question, the films are devastatingly accurate about American corruption, economic injustice, and middle-class indulgence. (“America’s not Wall Street!” the hero declaims.) The whiskey-pounding interpretation we get of the Lee Tracy–style tabloid wordsmith is just the cherry on the meringue.
But the Khrushchev thaw further muddied the state-message waters, and though films remained nationalist, they began to take serious flight. Together, director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky raised the bar for an entire generation of Soviet filmmakers with a clutch of masterpieces, here the wartime romance THE CRANES ARE FLYING (1957; September 11 at 3:15 pm + September 13 at 2 pm) and the shot-on-location lost-in-Siberia saga THE LETTER NEVER SENT (1959; September 13 at 3:45 pm). Although the filmmakers never lose sight of their young, modern characters (in particular the lovely Tatyana Samojlova), the superhuman cinematographic stuntwork familiar to anyone who’s seen Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba launches a fusillade of movement, shadow, light, vertigo, and landscape on the viewer’s tender optic nerves. This was the match that lit the rocket of Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Miklós Jancsó, Theo Angelopoulos, and Béla Tarr.
The Soviet New Wave was just gaining steam, and gathering influence from the Czechs and the French. Marlen Khutsiev’s JULY RAIN (1966; September 20 at 4 pm) was in many ways the generational touchstone college-age Soviets were waiting for, a flirty, casually Godardian cha-cha through Moscow café life and young romance and walking in the rain, rich with pop music (including jazz standards Woody Allen would later claim as his own) and free of Stalinist dread and dizzy with liberating hormones. Khutsiev’s hang-out narrative pegs the moment, but imagining how July Rain magically answered the frustrated hipness of Soviet kids in 1966 almost overshadows the film itself. The thaw did end, but even the government-sponsored projects got challenging. Sergei Bondarchuk’s seven-hour monster WAR AND PEACE (1968; multiple screenings September 3-6) remains the biggest, most expensive, most astonishingly profligate movie ever made, involving more than a quarter-million extras and eating up resources enough to support a small nation. (Today, it would cost close to $1 billion.) Forget its nationalist-elephant rep: the unwavering fidelity to Tolstoy is superbly served by a constantly roving camera, complex mise-en-scène, and baroque compositions. The chakras of Ophuls and Eisenstein are as palpable as the startling sense of the entire republic’s having been placed at the camera’s disposal.
