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Sex, Violence, and Videotape in the USSR
| Article
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18911 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
2,538 Words |
| Author
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Anna Lawton
Anna Lawton teaches history of Soviet cinema at Georgetown
University. She specializes in Soviet cultural politics and
has published numerous articles and books. |
In the Soviet society of old (read, preperestroika), where morals as well as ideology were controlled by the Communist Party, sex was one of the many taboos. The movie screen was kept artificially puritanical, as were all other manifestations of public life and culture. Nowadays, with the newly acquired freedom of expression, sex has come out of the closet with a vengeance. Whether used as a symbol of political oppression, as engage Western European directors did in the 1970s, or simply as a voyeuristic device, sex has become one of the mandatory features of almost every new film.
Ingredient for Success
Truth was another ingredient for success, until very recently. Making a pun on the word pravda (truth), the people used to say that "there is no truth in Pravda." Not any more. In the past five years the mass media has acquired an objective voice.
Subscriptions to daily newspapers and magazines grew dramatically, and the television evening news got the highest ratings. Documentaries and feature films investigating social problems and throwing light on the dark spots of past history created a sensation and attracted large crowds. This trend, however, is already fading out. After having satisfied their hunger for truth, the audiences now find it to be too depressing.
What has been steadily on the rise, with no sign of decline, is the demand for videotape. And the tycoons of the video business are making sure that the audiences will not be disappointed. Video in today's Soviet economy means big money, and in this area state enterprises compete with the legitimate private sector and with an aggressive black market for a share of the pie.
Videofilm Corp., a branch of the Ministry of Cinema (Goskino), is the state producer and distributor with studios in many republics and regions. Since the early 1980s, Videofilm has opened more than one thousand "video salons" around the country, where customers can rent or watch cassettes. In remote villages, video wagons and trains have been set up in lieu of theaters, following in the tradition of the revolutionary agit-trains of the 1920s that brought motion pictures to rural areas for propaganda and educational purposes. This time, however, the purpose is purely commercial. One of Videofilm's goals in the near future is to turn 100,000 movie theaters into high definition video salons, with the input of Japanese
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