Festival Wars: Goskino versus Union of Soviet Filmmakers

For three decades, from 1959 to 1989, the biannual Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) ruled supreme as the kingpin of all Soviet film events. It was the official festival showcase of power and policy at Goskino, the USSR State Committee for Cinematography

Only the Tashkent Festival of Asian, African and Latin American Cinema, founded in 1968 to fill the gaps during the Moscow off years, could hold a candle to MIFF. Here, too, the Uzbek capital functioned principally as a showcase for the emerging cinematographies of Central Asia: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan.

Today, only a few professional festivaliers remember the old Moscow film festival with any feeling of nostalgia.

Scheduled in July, MIFF programmed a trio of international events: an International Competition, a Documentary Film Festival, and a Children's Film Festival - all housed under one roof at the Hotel Rossia, just around the corner from Red Square.

The official competition wasn't much to talk about, but that two-story-high Rossia dining room was awash with colorful national dress. Once, the Indian tables alone totaled more than a hundred guests from across the subcontinent!

Although we, as international guests, had relatively easy access to festival screenings, tickets for movie-crazed Muscovites were hard to come by. Just as difficult for the home crowd were the invitations to parties - particularly those held at embassies, which ran until the wee hours of the morning.

Despite heavy security checks, however, the Moscow festival could sometimes be a wild and woolly affair. Once, at the 13th MIFF in 1983, I was nearly trampled to death before the flagship venue at the Rossia.

That was the year when veteran Yank director Stanley Kramer, a regular guest at MIFF, was given a Special Medal by the Soviet government for building "a cinematic bridge of peace" between the peoples of the United States and the Soviet Union.

At that time, Stanley Kramer was the popular Hollywood personality in Moscow. His deft handling of contentious sociopolitical themes apparently fit the Russian version of socialist realism like a glove, although in fact there was a big difference between the two.

Moreover, Kramer's Oklahoma Crude (1972), starring George C. Scott and Faye Dunaway in a 1910 oil-boom yarn, had been awarded one of the three Golden Prizes at the 1973 MIFF.

So, when a friendly Goskino representative asked if I would be interested to accompany Stanley Kramer to his award festivities, I jumped at the chance. But I was hardly prepared for the overflow crowds before the theater that hit us like a tidal wave!

"This is not a stunt!" shouted an interpreter in my ear over the screaming crowd. "I've never seen anything like it before."

In fact, Stanley Kramer's presence at the festival upstaged even Francis Ford Coppola, whose The Outsiders - starring thespian newcomers Matt Dillon and Tom Cruise as juveniles in a gang war - needed some juiced-up fanfare to hold its own in the competition.

What made that 13th Moscow film festival so unusual?

Easy to answer. The 1983 MIFF marked a crossroads in Soviet cinema. That year, old-fashioned socialist realism went out with a thud. In with a bang came an independently minded director's cinema. It was like the cap had just blown off Mount Vesuvius.

Not too far away from Hotel Rossia, in a squat prewar edifice known as "Dom Kino" (House of Cinema), the Union of Soviet Filmmakers (USF) ran its own underground-style program of new and recent productions from across the Soviet Republics. And, even though screenings in USF's two venues were not officially announced in advance, the crowds that showed up - mostly cineastes - knew exactly why they were there.

In fact, a revolution was brewing - with good reason. The USF was fed up with Goskino's tricky "package deals" on the international festival circuit.

As I knew from first-hand experience as a selector for the Berlinale, Soviet-style deals were encased in Cold War cultural politics.

Under Goskino's Filipp Yermash, if a festival honcho wished to book a qualified art film for his A-competition festival, he had to agree to invite a pedestrian Soviet jury member as well, thus rewarding a dependable Party lackey and possibly assuring a top prize for the Soviet entry. Of, if the festival director wished to invite an internationally recognized Soviet director to serve on the jury, he had to accept a couple of mediocre films to fatten out the main program, thus assuring that a couple Party directors could tag along for the ride and maybe keep an eye on the movements of their elite jury member.

Earlier in 1983, when the Berlinale negotiated a package deal with Goskino to enable ace Soviet film director Elem Klimov to serve on the international jury, the festival agreed to program Sergei Mikaelyan's melodrama Love by Request in the competition. The possibility of a Silver Bear for actress Yevgenia Glushenko, in her favorite comic screen role as a sympathetic, long-suffering "Mother Russia" type, was also included in the deal.

But when the Berlinale also requested a sidebar screening of Elem Klimov's banned screen adaptation of ace Soviet writer Valentin Rasputin's controversial bestseller Farewell to Matyora (1981/83), the plea led to naught.

Titled simply Farewell - its title thus doubling as a passionate cinematic memorial to Elem's late wife, Larisa Shepitko, who had died in a tragic car accident while on location with her film crew during the first days of shooting - the film's theme openly criticized Soviet policies of resettling Siberian villagers to impersonal block-apartments to make way for the construction of a power dam.

A few months after the 1983 Berlinale, another suspect deal was negotiated by Filipp Yermash with the Cannes festival. This time, however, some very outspoken USF members at Dom Kino headquarters labeled Goskino's shady deal an outright scandal.

As the story goes at the 1983 Cannes festival, with Soviet icon director Sergei Bondarchuk serving on the international jury, Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalgia, an Italian production directed by the exiled Russian master, was bypassed for the Palme d'Or. Instead, Tarkovsky was honored, together with Robert Bresson's L'Argent (France), with a consolation prize dubbed Le Grand Prix de Création. Several well-informed Cannes critics then stated publicly that this brand new Cannes citation could easily be construed as an open-ended apology - to Bresson as well as Tarkovsky.

Meanwhile, back in Moscow, where Tarkovsky was honored by cineastes as second only to Eisenstein, the "Cannes scandal" hit especially hard. According to the buzz at Dom Kino during the 1983 MIFF, it was said that Filipp Yermash had urged Sergei Bondarchuk to work overtime at Cannes to prevent Andrei Tarkovsky from getting his just due.

And if that Cannes scandal wasn't bad enough, Goskino, under the hardliner Filipp Yermash, was sitting on circa 50 banned Soviet films. These were productions that international festival directors were anxious to view, if not book, for their respective festivals.

Of course, topping that notorious "wanted list" was Elem Klimov's Farewell.

To stem the growing tide of protests at the Moscow festival, Filipp Yermash finally allowed an unofficial screening of Farewell, but not within the hallowed sanctuary of Dom Kino. Rather, to show that the Soviet Union does not censor the works of its talented filmmakers, Goskino scheduled a screening of the film in a venue far from home base on the very outskirts of the city.

Thanks to an attentive FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Journalists) colleague, the camouflaged Farewell screening was spotted in a newspaper notice. So off we went on the metro line with festival badges dangling from our necks - only to encounter a puzzled but pugnacious lady at the ticket window.

"It can't be a very good film," she said, shaking her head. "Hardly anybody comes." She was right. Save for a dozen foreign journalists, the theater was practically empty. On the way out, the perplexed ticket lady asked again why we had bothered to come and waste our time.

"Au contraire," countered FIPRESCI's Marcel Martin with a broad smile. "We've just seen a masterpiece!"