Six Letters about Beat Music
Six Letters about Beat Music (1977)
Description: Aleksei Khaniutin's 1977 VGIK diploma film is the sole surviving video document of the Moscow underground rock scene of the 1970s. Structured as "letters to the editor," it juxtaposes the opinions of older Soviet citizens, schoolchildren, and sociologist Igor Kon with rare live footage of three bands: Rubinova ataka, Visokosnoe leto, and Mashina Vremeni. That the bands sing in English tells its own story: Soviet rock was still a culture of imitation, its practitioners reproducing Western songs in a language many barely understood, convinced that rock belonged to the English tongue. A time capsule of the generational anxieties that "beat" provoked in a society officially pretending it did not exist.