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Studies in Eastern European Cinema

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Scientists, punks, engineers and gurus: Sovietexperimental film culture in the 1960s–1980s

Maria Vinogradova

To cite this article: Maria Vinogradova (2016) Scientists, punks, engineers and gurus: Sovietexperimental film culture in the 1960s–1980s, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 7:1, 39-52,DOI: 10.1080/2040350X.2016.1112502

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2016.1112502

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Scientists, punks, engineers and gurus: Soviet experimentalfilm culture in the 1960s�1980s

Maria Vinogradova

Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

ABSTRACTThis essay discusses the most popular but least understood modesof experimental cinema that developed in the Soviet Union in theperiod between the late 1950s and early 1990s. It focuses on twoofficially sanctioned types of film production, popular science andamateur cinema, each produced within specially designated filmstudios. My paper discusses the ways in which these studios couldact as creative environments that nurtured experimental filmculture. The paper argues that in the Soviet context, visual artscommunity and the unofficial art circles were not the only domainof experimental art and filmmaking and highlights the role ofscience-technological intelligentsia in artistic experimentation.

KEYWORDSAmateur film; experimentalfilm; media infrastructure;nontheatrical film; sciencefilm; Soviet parallel cinema

Introduction: poets of court-m�etrage � where were they?

Experimental cinema in the Soviet Union is discussed very little outside of the films madeby a few underground art groups that were active in the 1980s, a movement known collec-tively as Parallel Cinema.1 While it is still possible that other significant films made byunderground artists may eventually surface, in this paper, I will look for traces of Sovietexperimental film culture elsewhere, namely within the officially sanctioned types of filmproduction that fell into the more marginal segment of the Soviet state film studio system.Focusing on two types of film studios, popular science and amateur, my paper discussesthe ways in which these studios could act as creative environments that nurtured theexperimental film culture. In particular, my account of this culture highlights the role ofscience-technological intelligentsia in artistic experimentation. This is not accidental,since this group’s cultural influence was a distinct feature of the Soviet socialist society, inwhich the prestige of science was a complex phenomenon rooted, first of all, in the Marx-ist historic materialist interpretation of the world, which emphasises the deep connectionbetween nature and humanity, calling for a unified scientific explanation of both. In Sovietsociety, science played a role of a secular religion, especially for the 1960s Thaw genera-tion. In the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations of the atrocities of Stalin’s totalitarianregime, ‘precise knowledge seemed like an equivalent of moral truth’ (Genis and Vail’1988, 100, my translation).

CONTACT Maria Vinogradova mv930@nyu.edu

© 2016 Taylor & Francis

STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA, 2016VOL. 7, NO. 1, 39�52http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2016.1112502

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This status of science made it a frequent subject for artistic works, while at the sametime, officially recognised ‘contemporary’ or experimental art (especially the few instancesof officially endorsed abstraction) almost inevitably had a scientific component. Forinstance, kinetic art, represented by the Dvizhenie (Movement) group led by Lev Nusberg,was prominent in the 1960s and 1970s.2 In kinetic art, the balance and harmony based onunderstanding of the laws of physics appeared as an antithesis to the chaos and cacophonythat the official rhetoric ascribed to abstract painting. A few experimental art groups alsogrew directly out of first informal and then officially recognised associations within sci-ence and engineering research institutes. Examples include the SKB (spetsial’noe konstruk-torskoe biuro, or special construction bureau) ‘Prometei’, founded by the physicist BulatGaleyev at the Kazan’ Aviation Institute, and the Moscow Electronic Music Studio, organ-ised by the engineer Ievgenii Murzin, the inventor of the ANS synthesiser, at the secretmilitary research institute NII-5.3 Moreover, in the 1960s, scientists became prominent asprotagonists in popular films, such as Mikhail Romm’s Deviat dnei odnogo goda/NineDays of One Year (1962), while discussions at the Union of Filmmakers4 and multiplearticles in Iskusstvo kino also indicate the renewed interest in popular science film amongfilm critics and professional filmmakers who encouraged formal experimentation in sci-ence films.5

This renewed interest in popular science film among filmmakers and critics during the1960s reflects their increasing attention to various kinds of short and nontheatrical forms,such as educational, popular science, industrial, tourist, or amateur films. Having wit-nessed the boom in the production of these kinds of film in the world since the 1950s,propelled by the emergence of popular television and availability of substandard filmgauges, many Soviet filmmakers were enthusiastic about developing a greater scope offilmmaking at home. Around the same time, the Union of Filmmakers began to paygreater attention to the activities of amateur film clubs, or ‘studios’ that existed at facto-ries, houses of culture (organisations that housed amateur activities), and tourist clubs. Inthe 1950s, some of the larger amateur studios in Moscow counted 80 or more members(RGALI, F. 2936, Op. 1, Ed. hr. 2296, 1-2��). In 1957, amateur cinema came officiallyunder the patronage of the film industry through the creation of the Section for Workwith Amateur Filmmakers at the newly founded Union of Filmmakers. The section playedan important role in consolidating the clubs into a movement: it organised national ama-teur film festivals, published articles on amateur filmmaking in its journal Iskusstvo kino,assigned professional filmmakers to teach workshops and consult amateurs, and advo-cated for the technological needs of amateur cinema. Neither the film industry nor theMinistry of Culture funded amateur film works, however, nor did they create new clubs.Clubs were usually established by film enthusiasts at their workplaces, universities orhouses of culture, and were funded by trade unions that supported a variety of amateuractivities, or by the organisations where the clubs were based, and often by both. Thusofficially, amateur filmmaking was recognised not as cultural production, but as a usefulleisure activity, which meant that state institutions would support the production, but notthe dissemination of these films. Amateur films could mostly be seen at amateur film festi-vals and a few television programmes, such as the weekly Objektiv, that showed suchworks; these films, however, were never distributed theatrically.

Popular science and amateur film studios in the Soviet Union created vibrant environ-ments for experimentation in cinema. There was a degree of fluidity between these

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studios: prominent amateurs who made a transition into professional film world were fre-quently employed at popular science film studios. On the other hand, filmmakers andtechnicians that worked at popular science film studios could participate in amateur filmstudios if they wanted to make more personal films that they could not produce as part oftheir professional work. What helped to ensure creative freedom was the low prestige ofthese types of productions. Vladimir Kobrin, one of the most original Soviet popular sci-ence filmmakers (his work is discussed later in this essay), explained his choice to work inpopular science film:

Having gotten my education at VGIK, I understood all too well that, in order to work withinthe regular film assembly line, my courage and my energy were not enough. That is why Ideliberately decided to choose a… niche for myself in cinema, the exact one that had the low-est prestige at the time, and for that reason… the most free from the state’s paternalizing(Hanegen and Kobrin 2005, 84, my translation).

Experimentation in these types of filmmaking featured a strong component of inven-tion and technological imagination. Amateur film festivals frequently included exhibitionsof handmade filmmaking devices, add-ons and other inventions. Popular science film stu-dios, even the best ones, were often poorly equipped, and their members, likewise, had tolearn to work with little means. Some of them achieved as a result impressive results withanimation and special effects.6 These filmmakers cultivated film as a means of poeticexpression in which technology was conceived as techne, rather than as a tool or craft,and was inseparable from their art. The short film form that they worked with thus cameto emphasise poetry over drama.

The art of the popular science film

In their 1963 article in Iskusstvo kino, script writer German Nifontov and filmmaker GlebFradkin ask directly: ‘Where are the poets of science in cinema?’ (Fradkin and Nifontov1963, 91). Acknowledging the generally low quality of Soviet science films, the authorsparticularly criticised their didacticism and unimaginative, ‘illustrative’ approach to sci-ence filmmaking, stressing the importance of developing a new film form appropriate forscientific subjects. They observed that the situation with films on biological subjects, i.e.wildlife and plants, was generally better, but explaining more abstract, theoretical science,such as nuclear physics and cybernetics, remained difficult. Fradkin and Nifontov, as wellas many other enthusiasts of popular science films, argued that this type of filmmakingrequired talented and skilled artists who possessed a deep understanding of science. Sci-ence films had to appeal to a broad audience without oversimplifying the subject or adopt-ing condescending approaches.

In a number of popular science films from the 1960s onwards, filmmakers looked forcreative and engaging ways to explain complex subjects, making them accessible to thegeneral audience. Thus, Semion Raitburt, in films such as Chto takoe teoriiaotnositel’nosti?/What is the Theory of Relativity? (1964) and Kvantovaiia fizika v polovinedesiatogo/Quantum Physics at Half Past Nine (1971) worked in the short narrative form,where he opted to convey explanations through casual conversation between fictionalcharacters, instead of using voiceover narration that was a clich�ed but essential part ofeducational and science films.

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Formal experimentation became more visible in the 1970s science films that tended tonot only explain science, but also visualise the abstract world of scientific concepts. Geom-etry and theoretical mechanics provided an especially fruitful field, particularly for thosefilmmakers whose primary training was in animation. The film Geometricheskie fantazii/Geometric Fantasies (1979), directed by Sviatoslav Valov, is an example of such a film.Explaining theories of warped space in geometry, the film uses computer animation and avariety of live action shots, from close-ups of transparent three-dimensional objects tourban landscapes distorted by a fish eye lens. Objects are frequently placed against abrightly lit screen or light box, creating simple shapes and smooth surfaces reminiscent ofsurrealist imagery. The narrator’s voice, constantly stressing the possibility of a reasonableexplanation for every spatial aberration, imbues these images with a sense of delirium, fur-ther intensified by the use of atonal electronic music. The perfectly aligned pas de deux ofa pair of ballet dancers on a large stage further illustrate spatial geometry and reappear afew times during the film. Through the use of special effects, the image of the stage isencapsulated into a cube placed on a human hand lit from underneath (Figure 1). At onemoment, the female dancer, in a few suivi steps, separates from her partner and unexpect-edly disappears into a parallel dimension � but that, too, has an explanation in geometry,according to the film’s narration. The last minute of this 17-minute film proclaims the tri-umph of human reason: even though some phenomena appear to defy rational explana-tion, there is nothing about them that science cannot explain. In another shot of the stage,the camera moves to reveal theatrical lighting fixtures (‘baring the device’), while themusic switches into a major key, with clear melodic and rhythmic accents. A quarter hourof audiovisual surrealism is thus counter-balanced by a rather conventional narrativecoda at the end, a common device of science films.

Figure 1. Ballet dancers illustrate spatial geometry in Sviatoslav Valov’s Geometricheskie fantazii. Illus-tration 1. Geometricheskie fantazii/Geometric fantasies (1979), directed by Sviatoslav Valov,Tsentrnauchfilm.

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Working within a studio system, Soviet science film directors rarely wrote the scriptsfor their films,7 the majority of which relied on a narrator (always male) to convey thenarrative/work’s central idea. On one hand, this approach was quite outdated in docu-mentary cinema by the 1970s, which is evident in the way in which Semion Raitburt, inthe aforementioned examples, took great care to avoid it. However, in films such as Geo-metric Fantasies, it becomes apparent that the heavy reliance on voiceover narration couldalso diminish the burden of function from the rest of the film, providing greater creativefreedom to the director. This style of narration was so recognisable that many under-ground filmmakers in the mid- to late 1980s, preoccupied with deconstructing Soviet real-ity and aesthetics, ironically employed voiceover narration in their films, such asTraktora/Tractors (1987) by Gleb and Igor Aleinikov.

Iskusstvo kino occasionally criticised popular science films whose artistic merit wasmore obvious than their function, but the reason that we know these films today is thatthey were approved for use and circulated in schools, universities and vocational schoolsas a study aid. We are left to speculate that in some cases, the director, script writer, cam-eramen (at science film studios there were also a lot of camerawomen), music editors, ani-mation artists and other creative staff may have acted in accord to deliberately createslightly absurd films that only made a nod to the film’s primary, educational function. Bythe 1970s, the idea of scientific methods applied to artistic expression no longer seemedcaptivating. During the Brezhnev era, enthusiasm about socialist ideals � and scientificpositivism was undoubtedly one of them � was met with much greater skepticism withinthe intelligentsia than a decade before. If science still held a lot of excitement, enthusiasticdiscussions of its ability to transform nearly every sphere of life largely became part of theideological facade. However, working behind this facade still left room for experimenta-tion, and, importantly, popular science film studios sustained an environment for thedevelopment of short film culture, providing jobs to filmmakers that had no interest orambition to work in the more prestigious, but also significantly more competitive andmore heavily controlled feature film production.

One true avant-garde auteur who evolved within this system was Vladimir Kobrin(1942�1999), who worked at the Tsentrnauchfilm popular science film studio in Moscowsince the late 1970s. Unlike most science filmmakers, he wrote his own scripts, usually incollaboration with the biophysicist Galina Riznichenko, and developed a few other steadycollaborations with creative staff members at the studio. His films bearing straightforwardtitles such as Iavlenie radioaktivnosti/The Phenomenon of Radioactivity (1977), Fizicheskieosnovy kvantovoi teorii/Physical Foundations of Quantum Theory (1980), Osobennostikinetiki biologicheskih protsessov/Kinetics of Biological Processes (1983), Molekuliarnaiiabiofizika/Molecular Biophysics (1986), or Samoorganizatsiia biologicheskikh system/Self-Organisation of Biological Systems (1989) present complex philosophical statements ontheir subjects, often with a dark sense of humour that becomes more explicit towards themid-1980s.

Like many other Soviet science filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s, Kobrin conve-niently used the genre for experimentation in the audiovisual form. Rather than hidingthese experiments behind the subject matter, he embraced it in a profound, but also avery ambiguous and ironic way. He always tied scientific subjects to the grand story ofhuman development, but instead of praising the greatness of the human spirit, he accen-tuated our likeness to the world of primates or to the world of machines. In the spirit of

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Soviet science film iconography, Kobrin’s films made extensive allusions to the Renais-sance and to classical Greek history, with the classical statue as a quintessential image. Inthe opening sequence of Kinetics of Biological Processes (1983), set in a dark interior of anold mansion, the camera, moving along the floor, follows the movement of a smallmechanical toy robot, whereupon the sequence cuts to a shot of an antique statue of afemale body (Figure 2). The narrator asks, ‘What resembles the human more � a classicalstatue or a mechanical toy?’ While comparisons with a classical statue would traditionallyspeak to the beauty of the human body and the nobility of the human spirit, accentuatingthe harmony between the two, the narrator in Kobrin’s film states that the statue is ‘kinet-ically dead,’ thus favouring associations with the machine, albeit strictly within the frame-work of kinetics. To illustrate kinetics (and, of course, for purely aesthetic purposes), thefilm presents movement of various kinds, both in live action and animation: three shinyballs flying across the room on one occasion and a pair of scissors on another; a game ofTetris illustrating kinetics of biological cells; a pendulum; and an image of a room pulsat-ing in stroboscopic light. As in all of Kobrin’s films, the soundtrack is an elaborate elec-tronic music composition, at times experimental, at times more rhythmic and dancefloor-friendly, drawing on classical, baroque and popular music influences.

Mikhail Iampolskii, in his analysis of the symbolism in Kobrin’s films, views these ele-ments as a part of a complex symbolic system evolving around the idea of scientificknowledge:

[F]rom the every beginning, Kobrin constructs his films not as figurative illustrations for the-ories, but as sets of symbolic conglomerations, those very irrational ruins that science leaves

Figure 2. In Vladimir Kobrin’s film Osobennosti kinetiki biologicheskih protsessov the statue, unlike therobot that it holds, is ‘kinetically dead’. Illustration 2: Osobennosti kinetiki biologicheskih protsessov/Kinetics of Biological Processes (1983), Vladimir Kobrin, Tsentrnauchfilm.

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behind… Scientific thought always abstracts, generalises, and, consequently, trims the worldon all sides, cutting off all that is unique and accidental, which does not fit into the frame-work of rationality. These fragments, outtakes left behind from the scientific rationalisationof the world, exist in all spheres.' (Iampolskii 2001, my translation)

Kobrin maintained this interest in that which transcends the framework of rationalperception of the world throughout his entire career, but the films that he made after1989 no longer fit into the popular science film genre. In the 1990s, he founded his ownstudio and became an influential teacher, committed to his philosophy of the unity ofhumanities and science.

Experimental amateur films

To begin the discussion of Soviet amateur film culture and experimental films createdwithin it, let us consider one specific example, the film Budnii vecher/A Weeknight madein 1964 by MIIT-Film, the amateur film studio of the Moscow Institute of Transport Engi-neers.8 In this 10-minute black-and-white film, shot in 35 mm, shots of a suburban traincarrying passengers in the evening are intercut with the scenes at the train traffic controlcentre where a voice on the radio warns of an emergency on the tracks that could poten-tially result in a fatal crash. A crew of engineers is urgently sent to the tracks to manipulatethe switch manually and divert the train to a different, safe track. They succeed, and theunsuspecting passengers continue on their way. The engineers have just saved dozens oflives, but the action is not publicised: for them, it is just a weeknight at work. This is arather conventional Soviet story about the heroism of ordinary people in their workplace,an appropriate subject for any socialist realist art work. The style of this film, however, isfar from the conventional socialist realist aesthetic. The scenes are darkly lit, with trainheadlights piercing the dark of the night, reminiscent of film noir. Inside the train, smallceiling lamps are glimmering menacingly over the sleepy passengers, with the cameraplaying the role of a silent omniscient narrator. The control centre appears as a fantasticmachine, complete with indicators, switches and levers controlled by a woman in a blackrobe. There is no dialogue in the film, except for a machine-like voice on the radio thatwarns about an aberration. Diegetic ambient noises are carefully orchestrated to create anenergetic rhythmic unity of sound and image. The engineers who arrive to switch thetracks and the overhead power wires are shown swiftly climbing the poles: black, two-dimensional figures against a grey background framed in diagonal compositions, instantlyrecalling Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kinoapparatom/Man With A Movie Camera (1929)who is fast, agile and always there at the right moment (Figure 3). In their everyday work,these engineers are masters of arcane technological devices, but in emergency situations,they also know how to fix them manually. Just as Vertov in Man With A Movie Camera,moreover, filmmakers at the MIIT-Film studio made this film about themselves, as mostof them were railroad engineers by occupation. Their shared work experience was a read-ily available and mutually relatable subject for their film, through which they alsoexpressed pride in their profession.

Joining a club, or founding a club at a workplace was a frequent choice for those Sovietamateurs who wanted to move beyond making family films, especially if they aimed towork on 16- or 35 mm. Not only was it a cost-effective solution, and a way to obtain film

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stock for free, it also provided easy access to equipment, which was in short supply at theretail stores, just as many other things in the shortage economy.

Some of the best amateur film studios in the Soviet Union additionally played the roleof informal film schools. The only school that prepared film directors and cameramen forthe industry was VGIK in Moscow, with highly competitive admission. The lesser-knownInstitute for Film Engineers in Leningrad, as well as a few vocational schools, preparedfilm technicians and projectionists but did not provide classical training in filmmaking.Some of the most prominent amateur film studios tried to fill this gap by inviting profes-sional directors, cameramen, script writers and editors to lecture to amateurs. In theEastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov, the studio of the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute wasfrequently called ‘the VGIK of Kharkov,’ and many of its participants eventually transi-tioned into professional work in film and television. In general, amateur film clubs andstudios varied greatly in the number of participants, their organisational culture and thedegree of sophistication of technical equipment available to filmmakers, and many clubsowed their success to an open-minded and resourceful leader who could skillfully managethe club’s connections with amateur networks, state institutions and professionalfilmmakers.

Collective work was encouraged, but not required at amateur film studios. The morecommitted film amateurs could work individually within their studios, although they fre-quently assisted with each other’s projects. This model was more common at the centralamateur film clubs that were not attached to any factory, institute or house of culture,instead playing the role of a networking agent for smaller clubs in the area and workingwith individual filmmakers. Since these filmmakers came from a greater variety of back-grounds than that of a unified workplace, they chose more abstract subjects than thosedrawn from everyday life, and created films that were on the artistic side. One such

Figure 3. In Budnii vecher by MIIT-film, transport engineers are fast, agile, and always there at the rightmoment. Illustration 3: Budnii vecher/A Weeknight (1964), MIIT-Film.

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filmmaker was Iakov Smorgonskii who was a prominent participant of Moscow AmateurFilm Club in the 1970s and 1980s.

Smorgonskii was officially employed as a director of the amateur film studio at the'Krasnaiia kommuna’ shoe factory. He made a wide variety of films working within hisfactory studio collective, but went to Moscow Amateur Film Club to work on those thathe called ‘experimental’. His three-minute untitled city film made in the mid-1970s is astudy in rhythm and colour, with shots of Moscow at night filmed in time-lapse. Brightand saturated colours of the city lights sometimes turn into pure abstraction, and thewhole sequence plays to Vivaldi’s Summer. At times, the camera is fixed in one positionto record the rapid bi-directional flow of traffic. At other times, the camera is mobile andhand-held, with lights turning into colourful zigzag patterns, knots and scratches. Filmedas live action, this film could equally be regarded as animation. Smorgonskii’s city film isindicative of the interest in animation characteristic among film amateurs who gravitatedtowards a more experimental style in the 1960s and 1970s.

Ievgenii Notkin was another filmmaker working at the Moscow Amateur Film Club atthe time. An engineer by profession, he worked in an animation and collage technique,frequently recycling readily available still images cut out of newspapers and magazines.Notkin’s black-and-white film Prikosnoveniie/Touch (1977) is comprised of about 1200images (Il’ichev and Nashchekin 1986, 59) and centres around the image of the MonaLisa (often referred to in Russian as the Gioconda) juxtaposed with images of fast-pacedmodern life, both Soviet and foreign, as if to contrast the fascination with modernity witha longing for something timeless. La Gioconda is universally recognised as the quintessen-tial symbol of the Renaissance, a period that greatly interested the Soviet intelligentsia asan era in which art and technology coexisted in harmony.9 In Notkin’s film, however, theMona Lisa is present as a pop cultural character. In the first half of the film, her image,crudely cut out of a magazine, is placed in a variety of unexpected contexts: it is glued onthe picture of a portable radio, placed next to a truck driver on the passenger seat, insertedinside a phone booth, combined with cutouts of images of photojournalists as if she were amodern celebrity (Figure 4), or placed on a banner in a crowd of street protesters. In a fewshots, her figure is cut out of the painting, with different faces, or sometimes a group ofpeople, inserted in the gap as if to see whether she can be replaced. A collage of electronicmusic and noises is used in the soundtrack, further removing La Gioconda from her ‘time-less’ context.

The image thus created opens up a multitude of simultaneous interpretations. It can beread as a criticism of inauthenticity in the contemporary world, both through mechani-cally reproduced art that loses the aura of the original, as well as through people’s constantstruggle to fit into existing ideals instead of looking for their own individuality. At thesame time, the inclusion of the Mona Lisa into the context of popular culture could beviewed as a refusal to fetishise the work of art, as in Andy Warhol’s deliberate aestheticegalitarianism, or in Marcel Duchamp’s more radical iconoclastic treatment of the image.For a moment, Notkin’s film appears as an attempt to treat Mona Lisa as a human ratherthan an icon, removing her from the pedestal and bringing her into the crowd. However,the second part of the film eliminates this polysemy, channelling its different meaningstowards one unambiguous interpretation. Prikosnoveniie ultimately reaffirms the tradi-tional role of the Gioconda as a symbol of eternal values, which is especially evidenttowards the end of the film, when the soundtrack switches to lyrical music, the editing

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slows down, and human figures are arranged to recreate a sense of togetherness: figurescrudely cut out of group shots are placed back to ‘glue’ the image together; anothersequence is made of a series of collages of human hands, cut out of different pictures andextended towards one another. The film suggests that the chaos and sensationalism of theeveryday are passing as long as there are symbols of eternal beauty, such as the MonaLisa, to guard the harmony of the human world. In other words, the Mona Lisa is reaf-firmed as an icon of a secular deity.

One notable feature of Prikosnoveniie’s criticism of consumerism, sensationalism andsuperficiality, mixed with a fascination with the complexity of modern world, is that it isdirected towards all of humanity, not targeting domestic politics specifically. This is evi-dent in the mixture of the images that Notkin uses, some of which show Soviet subjects,while others clearly depict foreign (usually Western) countries. This invites a number ofsimultaneously possible readings. Directing criticism towards the people of the world,rather than Soviet society specifically, could be read as a way to avoid controversy withthe club and festival authorities. At the same time, dealing with universal concerns thattranscend national borders is characteristic for many amateur films from the late 1970s.For instance, the widely publicised Byt’ li XXI-mu?/Will There Be a XXI? (1981) made byIgor’ and Oleg Plaksin at the People’s Film Studio of DK Proftekhobrazovania in Lenin-grad reflects on the global threat of nuclear annihilation, while Vid iz okna/A View Fromthe Window,made around the same time by the People’s Film Studio Start-Film in Lenin-grad (the exact year is not stated in the titles), is a look at modernity as a source of immi-nent ecological disaster. Both of these films use a collage technique similar to that inPrikosnoveniie.

In Will There Be a XXI? the camera slowly pans over and zooms in on still images,sometimes in a double exposure, of magnificent landscapes, animals and children, among

Figure 4. The Mona Lisa appears as a popular culture character in Yevgenii Notkin’s Prikosnoveniie.Illustration 4: Prikosnoveniie/Touch (1977), Yevgenii Notkin, Moscow Amateur Film Club.

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them the famous photograph Le Petit Parisien by Wily Ronis (1952), lamenting not onlythe future of the world and its creatures, but also of the shared heritage of human civilisa-tion. The possibility of a nuclear apocalypse is unambiguously blamed on America, asquotes from conversations between the crew members of the Enola Gay appear in thetitles: ‘Yes, we knew that we were opening a new age…’ A View From the Window placesits accents differently. The narration in it is based on a similar principle of juxtapositionof images of pristine nature with images of technological progress and its impact on theenvironment. Many images of progress and civilisation are from the United States, Europeand Japan: a still of a shiny Amtrak train, a lavish reception in a splendid restaurant, Japa-nese girls inside a sunlit light rail train car, a scene of youth dancing to ‘Mississippi Queen’by the American band Mountain. Images of destruction, however, mostly come from theSoviet Union and, unlike the images of civilisation, are shot by the amateurs themselves:seagulls flying over a vast dumping ground, a close-up of a broken toy car lying inside acar tire, an abandoned railroad track covered with sand, and bunches of tall grass growingfrom beneath the rails.

Films such as these echo the concerns of the environmental movement that were strongamong the Soviet intelligentsia at the time.10 At the same time, we can speculate that inPrikosnoveniie, Will There Be a XXI? and A View From the Window, addressing an issueof universal importance, whether ecological or some other, was a way for the filmmakersto place themselves and their experience into an international context. In addressing theuniversal themes, it seems that what mattered was the very existence of shared concernsbetween the Soviet Union and the world outside it that remained inaccessible for the vastmajority of Soviet people.

While members of the amateur film community were more likely to be a part of thetechnological intelligentsia than unofficial culture, there is also no doubt that under-ground artists made 8 mm films, but such films are much harder to find. One knownexample is the Mukhomory group associated with the Moscow Conceptualism circlesactive in 1978�1984 that created performances, worked in a variety of DIY techniques,and created a few 8 mm films in the late 1970s. Some of these films were improvisationsmocking Soviet clich�es; others were satirical absurdist adaptations of ‘grand classics’, suchas Hamlet or Julius Caesar.11

In the 1980s, in the chaos of the last Soviet decade, a number of the unofficial artgroups and individuals who made experimental films relied on the resources of the state-supported amateur film studios, without associating themselves with the amateur filmmovement. A few amateur film studio directors welcomed the ‘angry young men’ of theunderground. Raw 16 mm stock secured by the amateur film studio system continued tocirculate in the filmmaking community until the late 1990s, when most of the studiosceased to exist in the swipe of privatisation upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union.While the more mainstream amateur filmmakers switched to the video, artists and aspir-ing film professionals continued to shoot black and white films on 16 mm. Many of theteenage amateurs creating films within the same state-run amateur film studios in the late1980s adopted stylistic elements of Parallel Cinema (echoing the experiments of the Nec-rorealist group in Leningrad and the Cinefantom circle in Moscow) without preoccupyingthemselves too much with its aesthetic programme. It seems that only the laziest urbanpunk at that time was not making films, fast, raw, incomprehensible and mostly guidedby one aesthetic principle, to be ‘strange’ and as anti-Soviet as possible, which usually

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meant looking grim and hallucinatory, and using either rock music or Soviet pioneersongs as a soundtrack.

Conclusion

The examples discussed above show that the experimental film culture in the SovietUnion existed within a complex infrastructure for media production. This infrastructurecould sometimes be put to unintended uses, as was the case with Parallel Cinema in the1980s, but it appears more interesting to look across the whole spectrum of films pro-duced by nontheatrical film studios. Such a dispersed nature of experimental film cultureis a characteristic feature of socialism where state monopoly on cultural production, onthe one hand, excludes that which does not fit into the official ideology and, on the other,nurtures cultural phenomena that could only develop in a situation where they are freefrom the economic pressure imposed by the free market.12 It is hard to untangle the eco-nomic factors from the ideology, politics and cultural prerogatives; none of these existindependently, but are a part of a complex whole. Embracing this complexity gives a farmore nuanced understanding of Soviet reality than the frequent misperception that it wasentirely constrained within sets of rigid binaries, such as ‘the Party and the people, repres-sion and freedom, oppression and resistance, truth and dissimulation, official economyand second economy, official culture and counter-culture, totalitarian language and peo-ple’s language, public self and private self’ (Yurchak 2003, 482). At the same time, under-standing the way in which experimental film culture developed in socialism calls us toreexamine the categories that we use to describe experimental cinemas in any context,and, in particular, it points to the insufficiency of the framework of art and aesthetics fortheir study.

Notes

1. Parallel Cinema emerged in the 1980s as a loosely connected network of underground artisticgroups that made experimental films. It is mainly associated with the Cine Fantom circle inMoscow, led by Igor and Gleb Aleinikov, and the Necrorealist movement in Leningrad, led byEvgeny Iufit. Parallel cinema falls outside of the scope of this essay; for more information, seeAleinikov (1989) and Graham (2001).

2. For more information on the Dvizhenie group, see Sharp (2008).3. Both Galeyev’s SKB ‘Prometei’ and Murzin’s Electronic Music Studio are really fascinating

pages in the history of Soviet experimental art scene that I do not have the opportunity tocover in this essay. See Murzin (2008) and Galeyev (1991), as well as Galeyev’s other publica-tions that he regularly contributed to the Leonardomagazine in the 1990s and 2000s.

4. Transcripts of these discussions within conferences and symposia are stored within the collec-tion of the Union of Filmmakers at the Russian Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI), Fonds2936.

5. One type of experimentation that received substantial attention in the 1960s and also contin-ued through the 1970s and 1980s was the poliekrannyi film, or multi-screen installation � seeSokolov (1968), as well as many other publications in Iskusstvo kino.

6. Vladimir Kobrin, before he went to film school, worked at the Moscow factory for experimen-tal film equipment and obsessively collected, modified and constructed all sorts of film andlater computer equipment through his entire career (Gornostaeva 1997). Exhibitions of film-making devices made by amateur filmmakers are frequently mentioned in documents withinthe archive of the Union of Filmmakers at the RGALI, Fonds 2936.

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7. In my experience, the only popular science film director who is also credited as the scriptwriter is Vladimir Kobrin. In all other cases, the director and the script writer are differentpeople.

8. ‘MIIT’ stands forMoskovskii institut inzhenerov transporta.9. A much more famous example of a film centered around a face in a Renaissance painting is

Pavel Kogan’s poetic documentary Vzglianite na litso/Look at the Face (1968). Using a hiddencamera, Kogan films the visitors contemplating Leonardo Da Vinci’s Madonna Litta at theHermitage Museum in Leningrad.

10. The popularity of the environmental movement was largely related to the immense prestige ofAndrei Sakharov (1921�1989), a physicist and subsequently a dissident who was among thefirst creators of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, but by the end of the 1950s became an active advo-cate against nuclear weapons testing when he realised the scope of the disaster that they couldcause. Since the late 1960s, his environmental advocacy extended towards human rights activ-ism, and he was repeatedly persecuted by the Soviet government. It is probably due to his pop-ularity and spotless reputation among the members of the intelligentsia that environmentalactivism implied a moral position and was associated with a broader criticism of the Sovietregime within the society.

11. For more information on the Mukhomory group and their films, see Gundlakh et al. (2010).12. A compelling account of experimental filmmaking in the Czechoslovak military is presented by

Lovejoy (2014).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Maria Vinogradova is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University. Her primaryresearch interests encompass various aspects of minor cinema practices, especially in the formerEastern Bloc and other socialist contexts. She is currently completing her dissertation on amateurcinema in the Soviet Union, the project that led to the discovery of rare films unknown in the aca-demic and archival community. She has published essays on this subject, presented her work atconferences, and organised public screenings of Soviet and Eastern Bloc amateur films in NewYork, Amsterdam, and Helsinki. She is a 2015–2016 recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Com-pletion Fellowship that partially supported work on this article.

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