The Lost Movies
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Subject essay: James von Geldern
Congresses of the Soviet creative unions existed to approve prepared reports and reelect officers whose names the party group had settled in advance. In May 1986, meeting in the Great Kremlin Palace under the gaze of Gorbachev's own Politburo, the Filmmakers' Union broke the pattern. Delegates refused to endorse the board's report, condemned two decades of administrative-command management, and voted out the entire leadership, including Lev Kulidzhanov, who had run the Union since 1965. No congress of a creative union had behaved this way before. Though a lifelong party man, the delegates' eventual choice for first secretary, Elem Klimov, was no bureaucrat's favorite: his own Agony, a study of Rasputin's court, had itself sat on the shelf since 1975, even as his newly released Come and See filled theaters. Enthusiasts called the congress a rehearsal for perestroika; opponents called it hysteria rather than history, and thirty years on the argument remained unsettled.
The mechanism for reviewing the shelf was improvised from the floor. On 14 May the delegate A. I. Khamraev proposed a joint commission of Goskino, the state committee overseeing cinema, and the Union to view every unreleased film and decide its fate, and the Conflict Commission was constituted two days later, its authority resting on a single clause obliging Goskino only to take Union recommendations into account. Though nominally advisory, the Commission in fact unlocked a shelf that held, by one delegate's count, some twenty-six pictures even after Agony, Panfilov's The Theme, and Aleksei German's Trial on the Road had already reached audiences that spring. Klimov and German proved, in their different ways, the process's chief beneficiaries. Klimov now led the very Union that was unshelving his own decade-old film, while German, whom the ban on Trial on the Road had cost a studio bonus, a public denunciation in the house paper, and two years without salary, emerged from the wreckage to become one of the era's most honored directors.
Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance followed a different route, for it never appeared before the Commission at all. Made in Georgia under the protection of Eduard Shevardnadze, then the republic's First Secretary and a Politburo candidate member, the production had bypassed Goskino's normal channels of approval, an irregularity the leadership judged too dangerous to expose. Banning the film nominally meant enforcing Goskino's procedures; in fact it meant a fight with Shevardnadze, so the leadership chose instead to guard the film's very existence as a state secret. Outside Georgia almost no one knew Repentance had been made, while inside the republic its appearance was understood, correctly or not, as something Shevardnadze himself had guided into being. Though the film reached Soviet audiences at large only in 1986, its allegory reaches past its release date: a Georgian mayor's corpse, exhumed again and again because the earth will not keep him, indicts every leadership still unwilling to bury him, including the one that finally let the film be seen.
17 Moments in Soviet History - The Lost Movies, by James von Geldern is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.