Scientists, punks, engineers and gurus: Soviet experimental film culture in the 1960s–1980s

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses the most popular but least understood modes of experimental cinema that developed in the Soviet Union in the period between the late 1950s and early 1990s. It focuses on two officially sanctioned types of film production, popular science and amateur cinema, each produced within specially designated film studios. My paper discusses the ways in which these studios could act as creative environments that nurtured experimental film culture. The paper argues that in the Soviet context, visual arts community and the unofficial art circles were not the only domain of experimental art and filmmaking and highlights the role of science-technological intelligentsia in artistic experimentation.

KEYWORDS:

• Amateur film
• experimental film
• media infrastructure
• nontheatrical film
• science film
• Soviet parallel cinema

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Parallel Cinema emerged in the 1980s as a loosely connected network of underground artistic groups that made experimental films. It is mainly associated with the Cine Fantom circle in Moscow, led by Igor and Gleb Aleinikov, and the Necrorealist movement in Leningrad, led by Evgeny Iufit. Parallel cinema falls outside of the scope of this essay; for more information, see Aleinikov (1989) and Graham (2001).

2. For more information on the Dvizhenie group, see Sharp (2008).

3. Both Galeyev's SKB ‘Prometei’ and Murzin's Electronic Music Studio are really fascinating pages in the history of Soviet experimental art scene that I do not have the opportunity to cover in this essay. See Murzin (2008) and Galeyev (1991), as well as Galeyev's other publications that he regularly contributed to the Leonardo magazine in the 1990s and 2000s.

4. Transcripts of these discussions within conferences and symposia are stored within the collection of the Union of Filmmakers at the Russian Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI), Fonds 2936.

5. One type of experimentation that received substantial attention in the 1960s and also continued through the 1970s and 1980s was the poliekrannyi film, or multi-screen installation – see Sokolov (1968), as well as many other publications in Iskusstvo kino.

6. Vladimir Kobrin, before he went to film school, worked at the Moscow factory for experimental film equipment and obsessively collected, modified and constructed all sorts of film and later computer equipment through his entire career (Gornostaeva 1997). Exhibitions of filmmaking devices made by amateur filmmakers are frequently mentioned in documents within the archive of the Union of Filmmakers at the RGALI, Fonds 2936.

7. In my experience, the only popular science film director who is also credited as the script writer is Vladimir Kobrin. In all other cases, the director and the script writer are different people.

8. ‘MIIT’ stands for Moskovskii institut inzhenerov transporta.

9. A much more famous example of a film centered around a face in a Renaissance painting is Pavel Kogan's poetic documentary Vzglianite na litso/Look at the Face (1968). Using a hidden camera, Kogan films the visitors contemplating Leonardo Da Vinci's Madonna Litta at the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.

10. The popularity of the environmental movement was largely related to the immense prestige of Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989), a physicist and subsequently a dissident who was among the first creators of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, but by the end of the 1950s became an active advocate against nuclear weapons testing when he realised the scope of the disaster that they could cause. Since the late 1960s, his environmental advocacy extended towards human rights activism, and he was repeatedly persecuted by the Soviet government. It is probably due to his popularity and spotless reputation among the members of the intelligentsia that environmental activism implied a moral position and was associated with a broader criticism of the Soviet regime within the society.

11. For more information on the Mukhomory group and their films, see Gundlakh et al. (2010).

12. A compelling account of experimental filmmaking in the Czechoslovak military is presented by Lovejoy (2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Vinogradova

Maria Vinogradova is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University. Her primary research interests encompass various aspects of minor cinema practices, especially in the former Eastern Bloc and other socialist contexts. She is currently completing her dissertation on amateur cinema in the Soviet Union, the project that led to the discovery of rare films unknown in the academic and archival community. She has published essays on this subject, presented her work at conferences, and organised public screenings of Soviet and Eastern Bloc amateur films in New York, Amsterdam, and Helsinki. She is a 2015--2016 recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship that partially supported work on this article.