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New growth in
Soviet filmmaking occurred from the late 1950s onward with the
appearance of such films as Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are
Flying (1957), which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film
Festival, and humane and stylistically innovative stories about the
war, such as Sergei Bondarchuk’s Fate of a Man, Grigory
Chukhrai’s The Ballad of a Soldier, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Ivan’s Childhood. These films were less constrained
ideologically and showed a more truthful picture of the Soviet
realities. |
The
extraordinarily prolific decade of the 1960s and the relaxation of
censorship paved the way for the rise of the new generation of
Russian film directors, represented by Elem Klimov, Larisa Shepitko,
Kira Muratova, Alexei German, Gleb Panfilov, Vasily Shukshin, Andrei
Konchalovsky and others. Their productions were distinguished by the
attempt to break the conventions, to find their own individual
style, and to express their personal view about the world they lived
in. However, the Brezhnev period soon brought a curtailment of
cultural liberalization and an intensification of government
pressure on the film industry to conform to the state’s political
demands.
In the
1970s-80s only melodramas and comedies seemed relatively safe from
strictures imposed by the censors. These genres of cinema, as practised
by Eldar Ryazanov, Georgy Danelia, and Leonid Gaidai, were very
popular with audiences. Animated cartoons by Yury Norshtein and
Andrei Khrzhanovsky won world recognition. Yet, by the mid-1980s,
Soviet cinema as well as the Soviet system in general, had found
itself in a deep crisis. Only mainstream conformist filmmakers faced
no snags in their work. Many talented directors spent years out of
work, some chose to emigrate.
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