|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Burden of Freedom
| Article
# : |
19807 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
2,319 Words |
| Author
: |
Marina Zvereva
Marina Zvereva, vice president and treasurer of the Union of
Soviet Cinema Workers, lives and works in Moscow. |
In order to discuss the current state of Soviet cinema I must begin way back. Without knowing how we lived and worked before, it is next to impossible to understand the way we live and work now. Everything in life is so interrelated I think it is fitting to start with the concept of freedom. To a certain extent, we in the Soviet Union can serve as a pure scientific experiment of transition from the total lack of freedom, which lasted for several generations, to a state of relative freedom. Regardless of what we may say today, we must all relate in one way or another to the pain and suffering associated with this transition period. Because, as we see over and over again, freedom simply cannot be given. One cannot become free starting Monday, for example. Liberation of the soul is not an event, it is a process.
We film workers--and all creative people--used to dream for years. We dreamed about Americans as lucky people free of censorship, free to create whatever they desired. Miserable under the pressure of censorship, we could not help but think that there is nothing uglier and more frightening for creativity than this weight of censorship. All movie companies were the property of the government and were fully controlled by Goskino, representing that same government. If one had a conflict with one company he could not resolve it by switching over to another company, since they all had one owner.
Ideological Reasons
But it was easy to get funding for projects. The government provided funds from its half-empty but still deep pockets. Nobody cared whether the movie returned a profit to these pockets. The government also took care of distributing movies to theaters, and this meant that once the movie was released it would be shown in theaters. Failure at the box office did not prevent the authors from receiving hundreds of thousands of rubles for another commercially hopeless project. It was easy to ban a completed movie for ideological reasons because ideology was always more important than money.
Filmmakers used to sign contracts without even reading them, and the contract itself, unlike American movie contracts, was about three pages long. The government paid on time. Contracts were quite unimportant. Both fledgling and experienced film people were paid on the same scale, no matter whether two or twenty million people saw the film. The government paid equally and, I would say, equally little (this is, in fact, the distinctive feature of socialism). So there was nothing to worry about. There was a childlike condition of
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
