Soviet Art House

This book examines cinema in the Brezhnev era from the perspective of one of the USSR's largest studios, Lenfilm. Producing around thirty feature films per year (approximately fifteen full-length), the studio had over 3000 employees working in every area of film production, from editorial to set-building. The discussion covers in detail the period from 1961 (when the studio was restructured to institute creative units," production centers that were responsible for commissioning films and seeing them through to release), to the collapse of centralized state facilities in 1986. The book focuses particularly on the younger directors at Lenfilm, those who joined the studio in the recruiting drive that followed Khrushchev's decision to expand film production nationwide from around a dozen films per year to 150 films. Drawing on documents from archives in St Petersburg and Moscow, the analysis portrays film production "in the round" and shows that the term "censorship" is less appropriate than the description preferred in the Soviet film industry itself, "control," which referred to a no less exigent but far more complex and sophisticated process. The book opens with four framing chapters that examine the overall context in which films were produced. The twoopening chapters trace the various crises that beset film production between 1961 and 1970 (Chapter 1) and 1970 and 1985 (Chapter 2). These are followed by a chapter on the working life of the studio and particularly the technical aspects of production (Chapter 3), and a chapter on the studio aesthetic (Chapter 4). The second part of the book comprises close analyses of fifteen films that are particularly typical of the studio's production and which had especial impact within the studio and beyond. The book concludes with a brief survey of Lenfilm's history after the Fifth Congress of the Filmmakers' Union in 1986, which swept away the old management structures and, in due course, the entire system of filmmaking in the USSR"--