'Cinema of Sincerity: Soviet Films and Culture during the Thaw' by Viktoria Paranyuk
In 1963, Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev summoned director Marlen Khutsiev and screenwriter Gennady Shpalikov to talk movies. Specifically, their new film, Illyich’s Gate. Khruschev questioned the content, especially the scene where the protagonist is visited by his father’s unhelpful ghost. The ghosts of the recent past haunted the Soviet Union; Khruschev’s denunciation of his predecessor, Stalin, launched a period called the “Thaw” in which people spoke more openly, and artists could create more independently of state-imposed sanctions. Everyone whispered the same question: How openly, how independently?
What was it that Khruschev didn’t like about that ghost? The director and writer talked their way out of trouble, but the episode was a reminder that despite the Thaw, the Soviet Union was a cold place for artists who displeased the ruling elite.
Viktoria Paranyuk’s Cinema of Sincerity is a close reading of work by five Soviet filmmakers working during the Thaw (1956-1964): Khutsiev, Shpalikov, Mikhail Romm, Tengiz Abuladze and Arunas Zebriunas. By dubbing their work as “cinema of sincerity,” she describes the uncertain processes by which filmmakers tried to strip the varnish from the “socialist realism” of Stalin’s cinema (parallel to movements by writers and visual artists) to expose the actual reality of Soviet life.
But how much varnish could be stripped? Soviet leaders still expected films that promoted the basic Party line—or at least didn’t violate the enforced ideology. One solution was to concentrate on showing rather than telling. Language itself had become suspect, corrupted by decades of propaganda. The more adventurous filmmakers summoned “the audience to connect the dots,” Paranyuk writes, as the flickering images sought to reproduce the spontaneity of life.
Her prose is often ensnared by the weeds of academic language, but unlike many of her colleagues in film studies, Paranyuk (Pace University) has ideas that shine through the verbiage. Cinema of Sincerity: Soviet Films and Culture During the Thaw is published by University of Wisconsin Press.
