The Cold War's cultural ecosystem: angry young men in British and Soviet cinema, 1953–1968

Abstract

Using examples from postwar British and Soviet cinema, this article interprets European Cold War culture within the framework of a shared cultural ecosystem. The case study of reformist movements in 1950s and 1960s British and Soviet cinema makes clear that analogous sociopolitical and economic developments across postwar Europe inspired film heroes, narratives, and aesthetics that transcended national and ideological borders. The concept of a continent-wide cultural ecosystem elucidates how and why specific cultural phenomena—such as the figure of the “angry young man”—reflect an existence of a dynamic trans-systemic Cold War culture.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Clayton Koppes, Louise McReynolds, Paula Michaels, Annemarie Sammartino as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. The author is also much obliged to the participants of the Midwest Russian History Workshop, held at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2011, for their insightful feedback.

Notes

¹ The term ‘angry young man’ was coined in 1956 when the Royal Court Press Officer noted that John Osborne, the author of the famous play Look Back in Anger, was ‘a very angry young man.’ The term was subsequently used in the UK to describe both the authors and protagonists of similar works. Although specific to the UK cultural scene, the phrase was frequently applied to other national contexts. For instance, the US press referred to poet Evgenii Evtushenko as a ‘Soviet Angry Young Man.’ See ‘Soviet ‘Angry Young Man’ Raps Stalin,’ St. Petersburg Times, October 22, 1962, p. 9-A.

² Thaw cinema has thus far been the subject of two monographs: Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000) and Alexander Prokhorov, Unasledovannyi diskurs: Paradigmy Stalinskoi kul'tury v literature i kino ottepeli (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii Proekt, 2007). The British New Wave has received more extensive scholarly attention than Thaw cinema. Representative examples of this body of scholarship include, among others: Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre, and the “New Look” (New York: Routledge, 2000); John Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963 (London: BFI Publishing, 1986); B. F. Taylor, The British New Wave: A Certain Tendency? (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006); Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003).

³ The existing scholarship on the British New Wave and Thaw cinema has accentuated the trends' national specificities. Post-Stalinist Soviet films in particular are rarely compared to contemporaneous Western cinema because British and Soviet New Wave motion pictures differed perceptibly in their ‘look.’ Without the explicit sex scenes, depictions of violence, and graphic language typical of British angry young men features, the Soviet ‘angries’ may appear downright Victorian. Nevertheless, Soviet angry young men expressed an unmistakable hostility toward both consumerism and authority figures no less unequivocally (if not as vividly) than their British counterparts.

⁴ The most notable examples of the British angry young man trend include: Jack Clayton's Room at the Top (1959); Tony Richardson's Look Back in Anger (1959) and his The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962); Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960); Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963); and John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963). The Soviet New Wave motion pictures starring ‘the angries’ include: Georgii Natanson, Noisy Day (Shumnyi den', 1960); Iulii Raizman, And If It's Love? (A esli eto liubov'?, 1961); Aleksandr Zarkhi, My Younger Brother (Moi mladshii brat, 1962); Marlen Khutsiev, Lenin's Guard (Zastava Il'icha, 1964); Mark Osep'ian's Three Days in the Life of Viktor Chernyshev (Tri dnia Viktora Chernysheva, 1967); and Igor Shatrov, Man-to-Man Conversation (Muzhskoi razgovor, 1968).

⁵ The cultural and historical relevance of these film productions is amplified by the fact that both British and Soviet novelists and playwrights spearheaded the cinematic bonanza of the 1950s and 1960s. More importantly, the angry young men's cultural significance is evident in that it operated across artistic genres and thus captured different segments of society.

⁶ For studies analysing the angry young men phenomenon in British cinema see: Susan Brook, “Engendering Rebellion: The Angry Young Man, Class, and Masculinity,” in Posting the Male: Masculinities in Post-War and Contemporary British Literature, eds. Daniel Lea and Berthold Schoene (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003); Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), 150–160; and Lynne Segal, “Look Back in Anger: Men in the Fifties,” in Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity, eds. Robert Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988).

⁷ For Italian examples see: Michelangelo Antonioni's The Vanquished (I vinti, 1953), Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e suoi fratelli, 1960), Pier Paolo Pasolini's Accatone (1961) and his Mamma Roma (1962). For French instances of this phenomenon see: André Cayatte's Before the Flood (Avant le déluge, 1954), Marcel Carné's The Cheaters (Les tricheurs, 1958) and his Terrain vague (Wasteland, 1960), François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups, 1959), Jean Delannoy's Lost Dogs without Collars (Chiens perdus sans collier, 1955) and Julien Duviviers' Boulevard (Boulevard, 1960). For Czechoslovakia see Štefan Uher's, The Sun in a Net (Slnko v sieti, 1962) and Miloš Forman, Black Peter (Cerný Petr, 1964). In Japanese cinema representatives of this trend include: Takumi Furukawa's Season of the Sun (Taiyo no kisetsu, 1956), Kon Ichikawa's Punishment Room (Shokei no heya, 1956), Kō Nakahira's Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu, 1956), Ôshima Nagisa's A Town of Love and Hope (Ai to kibo no machi, 1959), Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth (Seishun Zankoku Monogatari, 1960), Koreyoshi Kurahara, The Warped Ones (Kyonetsu no kisetsu, 1960), and Susumu Hani's Bad Boys (Furyo shonen, 1961).

⁸ The most notorious mid-1950s US examples of the rebel genre, such as The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, and Blackboard Jungle, made headlines throughout the world. Although James Dean and Marlon Brando, as the embodiments of the rebel trope, reflected an idiosyncratic American experience, they translated exceptionally well across national borders since audiences in Brazil, West Germany, Australia, Japan, Columbia, Holland, and the UK found the rebel without a cause to represent a terrifyingly familiar figure. See Daniel Biltereyst, “American Juvenile Delinquency Movies and the European Censors: The Cross-Cultural Reception and Censorship of The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, and Rebel Without a Cause,” in Youth Culture in Global Cinema, eds. Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 9–26. For an examination of international reactions to US rebel films see, Adam Golub “A Transnational Tale of Teenage Terror: The Blackboard Jungle in Global Perspective,” Red Feather: An International Journal of Children's Visual Culture 3, no.1 (2012): 1–10.

⁹ The scholarship on postwar gender constructions emphasises the extent to which women's increasing relevance to postwar socioeconomic order affected both the fate of national politics and the trajectory of the Cold War standoff. See, for instance, Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, eds., Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Christine von Oertzen, The Pleasure of a Surplus Income: Part-Time Work, Gender Politics, and Social Change in West Germany, 1955–1969 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), and Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic:Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP; 2008).

¹⁰ Samantha Lay, British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit-Grit (London: Wallflower, 1993), 16.

¹¹ For instance, Geneviève Sellier points out that the French New Wave filmmakers expressed a highly ambivalent, if not misogynistic, attitude toward the new liberated woman. See Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008).

¹² A rich selection of works offers a comprehensive view of Cold War cultural diplomacy although the focus remains almost exclusively on the activities of the US administration. See, for instance, David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford UP, 2003); Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004); Yale Richmond, Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Cold War Odyssey (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008); and Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989, (New York: Cambridge UP, 2008).

¹³ György Péteri, “Nylon Curtain: Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe,” Slavonica 10, no. 2 (2004): 113–23. Péteri adapted the term “Nylon Curtain” from David Riesman's 1951 short story “Nylon Wars,” in which the author depicts a scenario in which the United States “bombs” the USSR with consumer goods under the cover of “Operation Abundance.”

¹⁴ Several works below astutely comment on the specificity of Cold War experiences in national and regional contexts. See, for instance, Andrew Hammond, ed., Global Cold War Literature: Western, Eastern, and Postcolonial Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2012); Jeffrey A. Engel, ed., Local Consequences of the Global Cold War, (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007); and Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In From the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter With the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008).

¹⁵ The works below demonstrate the significant impact Western popular and “high” culture exerted on the countries of the Warsaw Pact, illustrating the inter-bloc character of the Cold War ecosystem. See Timothy W. Ryback, Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford UP, 1990); Tomas Tolvaisas, “Cold War ‘Bridge-Building’: U.S. Exchange Exhibits and Their Reception in the Soviet Union, 1959–1967,” Journal of Cold War Studies 12, no. 4 (2010): 3–31; and Sergei Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in SovietDniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010).

¹⁶ Many of the essays in the two edited volumes below reflect on the transnational character of postwar and Cold War processes. See Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968: A World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) and Gerd-Rainer Horn and Padraic Kenney, eds., Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

¹⁷ John Patterson, “Films We Forgot to Remember,” The Guardian, May 15, 2008, accessed October 2, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/may/16/filmandmusic1.filmandmusic3

¹⁸ The exception to this rule is Jeremi Suri's monograph, which incorporates the Soviet domestic context to explain 1968 and the eventual rise of Cold War détente. See Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003). For the classic comparative and transnational studies of 1968 in the context of the long 1960s in West Europe and the US see Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of '68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (New York: Oxford UP, 2007) and Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and United States, c. 1958-c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998).

¹⁹ Like US historians, who are demonstrating the dynamism of the 1950s, European scholars are also reevaluating the characterisation of the 1950s as conservative and reactionary. See Heiko Feldner, Claire Gorrara, and Kevin Passmore, eds., The Lost decade?: The 1950s in European History, Politics, Society and Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2011) and Nick Thomas, “Will the Real 1950s Please Stand Up?: Views of A Contradictory Decade,” Cultural and Social History 5, no. 2 (2008): 227–36.

²⁰ Speech at a Kremlin reception for cotton growers, TASS, February 20, 1958. The quotation is available through the digital Open Society Archives: http://www.osaarchivum.org/files/holdings/300/8/3/text/57-2-227.shtml. Accessed December 20, 2011.

²¹ For instance, Vance Packard's 1957 best-selling book, The Hidden Persuaders and John Galbraith's celebrated 1958 monograph, The Affluent Society led the way in lambasting “conspicuous consumption” and served as templates for subsequent critiques of postwar mass consumerism.

²² Dennis L. Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997), 59.

²³ Quoted in Stephen Brooke, “Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 4 (2001): 787.

²⁴ Quoted in John Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 6.

²⁵ Pomerantsev's comments are quoted in Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 176.

²⁶ Quoted in Susan E. Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 40 (2005): 295.

²⁷ Aleksandr V. Pyzhikov, “Soviet Postwar Society and the Antecedents of the Khrushchev Reforms,” Russian Studies in History, 50, no. 3 (2011): 33.

²⁸ M. Iu. German, Slozhnoe proshedshee (St. Petersburg, 2000), 436. Quoted in Natal'ia Lebina, “Plus the Chemicalization of the Entire Wardrobe,” Russian Studies in History 48, no. 1 (2009): 43.

²⁹ Lynne Segal, “The Silence of Women in the New Left,” in Out of Apathy: Voices of the New LeftThirty Years On, ed. Robin Archer et al. (London: Verso, 1989), 117.

³⁰ Arthur Marwick, The Sixties, 381.

³¹ Igor S. Kon, The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 88.

³² Hera Cook, “The English Sexual Revolution: Technology and Social Change,” History Workshop Journal 59 (Fall 2005): 123.

³³ Martin Francis, “A Flight from Commitment? Domesticity, Adventure and the Masculine Imaginary in Britain after the Second World War,” Gender & History 19, no.1 (April 2007): 166.

³⁴ Amy E. Randall, “Abortion Will Deprive You of Happiness!”: Soviet Reproductive Politics in the Post-Stalin Era,” Journal of Women's History 23, no 3 (Fall 2011): 14.

³⁵ Between 1960 and 1979 residents of the Russian and Baltic republics had smaller families as well as higher rates of divorce compared to the Soviet average. See Iu. A. Poliakov, V. B. Zhiromskaia, and V. A. Isupov, Naselenie Rossii v XX veke: Istoricheskie ocherki, vol. 3, no. 1 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2005), 119–30.

³⁶ Brooke, “Gender and Working Class Identity,” 773.

³⁷ John Hill, “From the New Wave to ‘Brit-Grit’: Continuity and Difference in Working-Class Realism,” in British Cinema, Past and Present, eds., Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (London: Routledge, 2000), 249–51.

³⁸ Brooke, “Gender and Working Class Identity,” 732–33.

³⁹ Quoted in Stephen Lacey, British Realist Theater: The New Wave in Its Context, 1956–1965 (London: Routledge, 1995), 31.

⁴⁰ From a transcript of a roundtable discussion entitled “Nikto bol'she ne sdelaet ni Pepel i almaz ni Tishinu i krik: Kinematograf Vostochnoi Evropy—proshchanie s proshlym,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 71 (2005): 43.