V–A–C Sreda online magazine completes its three-month programme dedicated to air in art and culture.
In this issue, we publish a text by journalist and documentary filmmaker Anna Filippova on the history of Soviet cinema from the 1930s to the 1980s. Through airy metaphors, the author explores the “breathing” of the cinematic landscape and of individual films during the era of the Iron Curtain, tracing how genres and techniques evolved, how the limits of the permissible shifted, and how the atmosphere within the professional community changed. Filippova also turns to today’s box-office hits—Piter FM and The Stroll from the “airy” 2000s—as symbols of an unrelenting yearning for freedom.
Le cinéma, c’est ce qui est entre les choses [The cinema is what is in between things].
Jean-Luc Godard
In cinema the most difficult thing is to film the air between people.
Andrei Tarkovsky
“There isn’t enough air here”—this is what they usually say when everything stands too close together in the rough cut: line following line or unending frenetic camera movement. You have to add in a couple of quiet frames for the viewer to catch their breath.
In 1967, Iosif Kheifits, a master of Soviet cinema and one of the founders of Lenfilm, wrote to Naum Birman, the director of Chronicle of the Dive Bomber (1968):
Among the bustle of the mise en scène, among the idle chatter, among the other lines of necessary action, do not forget pauses for thought, for evaluation//appreciation, for deliberation, to calmly see the eyes—”the windows of the soul.” Dissolve in these windows (in silence and in dialogue) more frequently, they will give your film air!
1. tеch. Free space in a frame, not occupied by characters or objects. Alexander Rodchenko’s emblematic shot Pioneer with Trumpet (1930) comes to mind: the camera looks from below, and air seems to fill everything—the space around the pioneer, the blown out cheeks, his lungs. A shortage of space leads to asphyxia, to depression. The Greek word στεναχωριέμαι, to be sad//distressed//upset, is composed of two words: “narrow//close” (στενός) and “space” (ο χορός), that is, literally, a “shortage//lack of space.”
2. fig. A clear metaphor. The action of Georgy Natanson and Anatoly Efros’s film A Noisy Day (1960) unfolds in an apartment, but in it is a great quantity of air: the euphoria of the Thaw has filtered into the frame. The metaphor also works the other way around, as we know well from Stalin and Stagnation-era film. As examples of “airless” films, Georgiy Alexandrov’s musicals Volga-Volga (1938) and Happy People (1943) are the first that come to mind.
3. phys. injection, afterburn—not least among the reasons people go to the cinema. Personally, when I leave the theatre, I feel it becomes physically easier to breathe.
The history of Soviet cinema as a whole can be approached through the logic of breathing: a few greedy inhalations separated by long periods of airlessness and reaction. The most “airy” decade was, of course, the 1920s, and its constituent pathos. The borders are not yet closed, the box office teems with imported films, and Soviet film directors, along with their own inventions (Vertov’s “direct cinema” and so on) enthusiastically appropriate foreign genres and techniques—in particular, the methods of German Expressionism and Hollywood crowd-pleasers. Inspired by the tasks of the creation a new man and the propaganda of a new social order, Soviet avant-gardisrts—Dziga Vertov, Alexander Dovzhenko, Yakov Protazanov, Boris Barnet, Sergei Eisenstein—consider themselves the legislators of world film-fashion and float in the air.
Eisenstein’s cameraman Eduard Tisse wrote to Eisenstein from Switzerland during their American tour—which, by the way, nearly fell through:
It is full summer weather here (in Zurich), the sun scalds all the time and it's fairly warm. They say that in Lugano people are still swimming, in the coming week, we’re thinking of going there by train, you can’t go in a car at the moment. Wechsler has made us a new proposition: to take a road trip in the spring from New York to San Francisco and then through Mexico, with a movie camera, and then to make a big film—he says he will find big money for this.
They really do drive all the way to Mexico and shoot a film there—true, they aren't able to edit it. First, the money runs out, second, Stalin already almost officially considered them defectors and bombarded them with threatening letters. Eisenstein and Tisse don’t hurry to return home and fairly audaciously answer the letters of the “curators”: the “critical” year of 1929 in the USSR began far sooner than they began the road. They had not yet understood that NEP, international tours, foreign producers, and strong directorial egos—were finished, finito.
Five years later, Eisenstein, who in 1931 and 1932 had shot the surrealistic ¡Que viva México!, would come out with an apology for socialist realism:
I would like to say the great historical events in cinematography that are taking place in these very days ought to mobilise us to address head on and with determination all the colossal, difficult problems that the coming classical period of socialist realism sets before us. It is classical because, as a matter of fact, from today onwards it establishes the correct norms and correct paths for searching, the correct relationships between our themes and the forms of our art, and all work as a whole. This is a period of the greatest inner harmony. This does not mean that we, as in Eden, will sleep peacefully, without vigilance and without struggle. Much has been done, but even more lies before us!
Two years later, for, among other things, “religious references,” Stalin ordered Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow (1937) liquidated. The “classical” period in art had begun.
And yet, before the “iron” thirties conclusively took hold, with their “large style” and total censorship, a number of absolutely un-socialist-realist films slipped through the censor. Earth (1930) by Alexander Dovchenko, Outskirts (1933) by Boris Barnet, A Severe Young Man (1935) by Abram Room—in all these films, there is so much improvisation, roughness, paganism, that, forgetting the year of their production, it would be difficult to think that they had been shot when the unification of culture was already on the march.
For some reason, this fact fascinates me, and I rewatch these films in an attempt to catch the transitional moment (“The Great Turn”) between relative freedom and the conclusive triumph of “true, historically-concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development.” How are you to breathe when you feel the approach of a great block that will crush everything? Breathe in one final time, but deeply? Or breathe very often, but furtively, so that no one will hear?
I don’t know, and therefore I constantly rewatch the films of the early 1930s, that were filmed before everything finally imploded. My unconditional favourite in this list is A Severe Young Man, shot according to a scenario by Yuri Olesha in 1935. At the centre of the plot is a love triangle. On one side—a respected professor of oncology, Yulian Nikolaevich Stepanov, who constantly participates in conferences abroad. It’s a good life being a Soviet doctor! His rival is Grisha Fokin, an ideally-formed, dreamy young man who seeks to devise the moral codex for the building of communism all by himself, and seems unburdened by other cares. Between them is the beauty Masha, who works for Stepanov, but does not unambiguously reject Fokin.
A tall white door with a high glass-paned door. It’s a door into a library [...] beyond the windows, a garden. This proximity creates airiness in the room. Every object, even those set in far corners, reflects the sky, the boughs, the clouds, which strengthens this impression.
This is how Yuri Olseha describes one of the scenes in A Severe Young Man. There really is a lot of “airiness” and play with scale in the film, and this is one of the contributing factors to a feeling of “falling out,” of sharp dissonance. In the middle of the film, for example, there is a dinner party scene in a room with high ceilings, filled with light and air. A piano stands in the room, to the left of it is an enormous hanging chandelier. Against this background, dark figures in tail coats stand out sharply, recalling a Fitzgeraldian aesthetic. This should not be in a film of the Soviet 1930s, what is going on? A plot so un-Soviet it is absurd, aesthetic camera work that unites eroticised images of discoballs—some time later, these would be repeated and developed by Leni Riefenstahl in Olympia (1938)—with fantasy interiors and futuristic art-deco. Every time I rewatch this scene, I am frightened—you can’t shoot like that, they punished you for that! And they did.
In the method of artistic realisation of the scenario “A Severe Young Man” the director Room took the position of militant formalism and aestheticism, which are harmful to Soviet art.
The excessive magnificence and formalist refinements alongside inner emptiness, willfulness, ridiculous invention (episodes: Fokin’s dream, at the opera, at the stadium, and others) confirm this best of all.
The cameraman Yekelchik also displayed “unresistance,” unprincipledness.
Undoubtedly, Room dictated his mode of work to the cameraman, but the latter displayed unprincipledness and unresistance, though the “mysticism” present in the film is not characteristic of the work of the cameraman Yekelchik [...]
This was not unexpected. The first version of the film had been filmed with a different actor in the role of Fokin—Dmitri Konsovsky. They arrested him during the filming, accused him of counter-revolutionary activity, and, a few years later, he died in the GULAG. They tried to warn the film crew, there were signals, and many of them—criticism of editors, publications in magazines, open letters. They decided, all the same, to press on and finish the film as they had conceived it. In the end, Olesha’s career as an important writer and scenarist was essentially finished, and A Severe Young Man, naturally, was shelved until 1994, when Naum Kleiman restored it. Then began the second chapter of the film’s existence as a cult-object: Timur Novikov, Georgi Guryanov, and other heroes of the Petersburg 1980s and 1990s adored it. Evidently, they were attracted to this "militant formalism” and aestheticism. What lessons about breathing can we take from the case of A Severe Young Man? Clearly, you really can’t breathe enough before you die.
Such "asphyxiates" in the 1930s were not few: Margarita Barskaya, for example, a genius director and actress, who wanted to make independent child cinema, founded a school for work with child actors. They interfered with her work, forced her to mutilate her own films, and, in the final years, also poisoned her, apparently due to a connection with the revolutionary Karl Radek, who they had arrested in 1936 and dragged through the Second Moscow Trial. Barskaya’s final film, Father and Son (1936), which they cut and re-edited many times, never made it onto the screens. The film she was preparing with the writer and pedagogue Anton Makarenko, Flags on the Towers, did not take place. Following another meeting, during which Barskaya was essentially excommunicated from the profession, she threw herself from the cinema studio stairwell.
What is this? Delirium? Lies?.. One would need to have an aversion to children, to hate life, in order to come up with such an inexpressible lie. Like a maniac, insistently and unrelentingly seeking to slander everything that enters his field of vision. Family, school, factory, construction, people, children, streets, houses, air—everything in the film becomes dark, dull, joyless, loses light, colour, is filled with a blunt, stony heaviness… This anti-artistic, lie-poisoned film cannot have a place on the Soviet screen.
Of course, this wasn’t the case. There was air in Barskaya’s films, there was real, non-socialist realist life—and this frightened the censors. The Soviet regime had already formulated an image of the “happy Soviet childhood” to be transmitted in films, paintings, and books. It was also in 1936, the same year they banned Father and Son, that the image of Stalin with a little girl, Engelsina Cheshkova, was circulated. The little girl gave Stalin a bouquet, kissed and embraced the vozhd—and this photograph remained in the collective memory for decades. The two minutes of tenderness between the vozhd and the little girl had been carefully directed, preparations for them had gone on for a number of weeks. Barskaya, with her child-actors improvising in frame, here, of course, didn’t come to the table.
They began drawing the air out of everything—a colossal amount of censorship constricted the metaphysical and literal space. Frames became narrower. It was not only necessary not to allow the shooting of “incorrect” films and avoid repeating the case of A Severe Young Man, but to clean up what had already been filmed—to remove enemies of the people from newsreel footage,
February 22, 1938
Sov. Secret
To the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, Comrade V. M. Molotov
In the process of the receipt of the case of the Main Directorate of Cinematography (GUK), questions of the removal of frames containing shots of enemies of the people from Soviet documentary films and newsreels sold abroad arose before me.
[...]
For this purpose, it would be necessary to send a worker from our mission in Paris familiar with the film trade to a number of Western European countries, and to instruct him to carry out all the work of removal on the spot, in each country, in agreement with plenipotentiaries and in keeping with the local political situation. However it is necessary to foresee that these cuts may disturb the musical accompaniment of the film where this is connected with the soundtrack, and thereby lead foreign companies to the thought that we are carrying out removals.
After this intense censorship, a nearly ten-year period of silence began, known as “few-filmed” period. It lasted until the mid-1950s. The majority of films shot during this time were socialist “biopics,” the lives of remarkable people. Here there is no place for air, the genre itself does not allow for it. On the screen are great men: Ivan Michurin, Vasily Zhukovsky, Pyotr Nakhimov, Nikolay Pirogov, Vissarion Belinsky, Ivan Pavlov, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Taras Shevchenko, Alisher Navoi, Peter I. All of them are similar to the point of indistinguishability—this is one person, a collective fantasy of a hero. Regardless of when the hero lived, they preempted the Soviet project with their actions and character, and the connection between Stalin and Suvorov; Stalin and Peter I, was indisputable.
The space of the frame itself is also airless in such films: in studio filming, where there is little light and the camera stands on a tripod, medium shots dominate. The crown of the hero’s head comes up against the upper limit of the frame—this is how constrained he is in the circumstances. The dialogues are high-flown, and the actors speak past the viewer, addressing, apparently, Stalin directly. In fact, films of the “few-filmed” period were shot only for him. They can’t be watched without gasping for breath.
When you first begin to play a wind instrument, it’s possible to faint as the lungs are not used to such a quantities of air. This is a novice mistake, later, you get used to it, and learn to measure your strengths. For some reason, people often speaks of the generation of the 1960s as though they were children or newbies: they suffocated from living too thirstily, they should have been more measured, calm. This can be agreed with to a point—in 1968, with the sending of troops to Czechoslovakia, the Soviet sixties prematurely and brutally ended.
The other extreme is to see the 1960s exclusively in a romantic key, as an “airy” time full of hope, a time of dreamers, a time for the young. This too is a big oversimplification.
It may be reckless, but I’ll dare to assert that the 1960s would be the most interesting in world and Soviet cinematography—and not only because of the maturation of the first postwar generation with their aspiration to “live differently.” The main reason was that cameras became lighter, and it became possible to record synchronic sound. You could now set off after your heroes whenever you liked and take the position of a fly on a wall, not influencing what was taking place on the frame. People even began to move differently in frame, they did not always notice they were being filmed. Purely physically, more light appeared between the filmer and the filmed. Scripted films also tried to seem documentary, a passion for verité took over everyone.
The angles became sharper, as they had been in the 1920s: frames included crowds, legs, transport, camera spans through corridors that had been unthinkable until then, escalators, spaces between buildings, under water. The film-space grew a number of times wider, and this expansion is just as important as the conquest of space, the stratospheres and the Arctic were to the generation of the 1960s. The generation of the 1960s fetishised the outskirts and the frontiers— virgin lands, the North, the village, BAM. It was there, allegedly, that genuine thoughts were born—though they all flocked to metropolis afterwards.
The 1960s was a time of star cameramen, it was most of all to their benefit. Directors had to gnaw out every line from the artistic advisers, every decision, while the cameramen were somewhat freer. They could let themselves go even when the basis of the plot was open propaganda—let us recall at least Sergey Urusevsky’s genius work on Mikhail Kalatozov’s film I Am Cuba (1964). A double responsibility lay with the cameramen—to work on what the director had been pressured to do: forced to forgo an episode or line at the scenario stage.
Air began to be filmed more often. For some viewers, this produced an effect almost the same to what had been experienced by those who had been frightened by the Lumière brothers’ The Arrival of a Train (1896).
The young female viewer watching the film “Wings” with me exclaimed in fear: “What if it crashes?” But then the words “The End” broke out across the screen, and so we didn’t learn how the flight ended.
This is an episode from Larisa Shepitko’s Wings (1966), when the heroine played by Maya Bulgakova—a front-line pilot who could not accustom herself to civilian life—decides to steal a plane. She wanted to experience the feeling of flight she had been deprived of for many years. In the 1970s, to think of such a subject was no longer possible—what flights can you talk about in the time of “developed socialism” and Beryoska stores? You could argue, of course, and recall Alexander Mitta’s Air Crew (1979)—this film also features flight as an exit from the everyday, but the plane there plays the role of a cage, a trap. A plane could be in its place, as in Andrey Malyukov’s 34th Express (1981), a car, or a submarine—any close space appropriate as a setting for a film-catastrophe. In Naum Birman’s Chronicle of the Dive Bomber (1969)—still strictly speaking the 1960s—the airplane is not just a means of flight for the heroes, they literally merge with it into a single body—and catch fire together with it.
As in the 1930s, in the 1960s, many break-through films ended up shelved—for example, Aleksandr Askoldov’s Commissar (1967) and Mikhail Kalik’s To Love (1968), which combines acted and documentary frames and, has the Soviet Orthodox priest Alexander Men appear among the heroes—and this during a time of state atheism. Also almost shelved was the absurdist Welcome, or, No Trespassing (1964) by Elem Klimov, in which pioneers literally soar through the air, fleeing the control of adults. For two years, they torturously reworked Gleb Panfilov’s Beginning (1970) and Marlen Khutsiev’s July Rain (1968).
Had it not been for the bureaucratic wires, the chronology of the Soviet 1960s would have been completely different, given films would have come out earlier, and new ones shot after them. Preceisely for the reason that the freedom of the sixties was to a large extent illusory—or at least very limited—many films were able to convey the coexistence of air and stuffiness and invent a particular kind of Soviet melancholy, a radiant sadness. In Khutsiev’s July Rain, there is a lot of air and happiness—the city itself seems happy and young, it is enough to remember the frames with the bridges wet from the rain. And beside this happiness is total collapse—of love, milieu, belief, ideals.
It is interesting that not long ago, both July Rain and its direct descendant, Oksana Bychkova’s Piter FM (2006), returned to the big screen (in 2021 and 2025 respectively). To a certain extent, Piter FM surpasses July Rain in terms of airiness—its heroes literally live on roofs and windowsills, and, it seems, never close their windows. Precisely this aspect of the film frustrated many viewers, who not infrequently criticised it for naivety and infantility. As though there should be a lot of air, but it should remain within measure.
It is customary to think of the 1970s as a time of conformism, when, symbolically speaking, we lost our country, choosing prosperity in exchange for freedom. By the start of the 1970s, most cinematographers had ceased demanding the impossible from the sensors, understanding clearly where the “double standard” lay, what could be “dragged out” and what could not. To my mind, what is most interesting about the 1970s are Soviet adaptations and interpretations of traditional American genres. The air of the 1970s, the air of “deterritorialisation” seeped into the USSR through a small opening through the work of black-marketeers, diplomatic corps employees, and people returning from business trips abroad. In the end film professionals and the public became fairly well acquainted with westerns, musicals, biopics, and revues.
In 1978, The Woman Who Sings came out—an autobiographical film with Alla Pugacheva in the main role. Pugacheva is not only the bearer of an explicit sexuality and audacious vocal manner—one is reminded of how an Estonian cameraman filmed her as Botticelli’s Venus during a concert in Talin—the plot is also built around artists, women, for whom what is most important of all is self-realisation. The man beside Pugacheva is too petty and envious, and quickly eliminates himself. Neither the musicians, back-vocalists, directors nor anyone else is able to reach her//are able to live up to her. Pugacheva travels all over the country, writes music, breathes thirstily, but all the same she has little. And the country has little, and the people have little, and life has little. You had to shoot such a film about freedom in the conditions of collectivism and unjustified egalitarianism! This uprising is crowned by a cross-dressing trick—Pugacheva wrote the music for the film under the pseudonym/alter-ego of Boris Gorbonos. This is what high camp looks like, and few besides her could have mastered it.
Woman was to have had a peculiar sequel—Alexander Stefanovich’s film Dusha [Soul] (1981), about a singer who constantly loses her voice due to her full touring schedule. Pugacheva declined the film, and in the end the main role was played by Sofia Rotaru, who was in constant dialogue-competition with her. This film sounded quietly and was lost in the hum of the era—its main achievement was the inclusion of the music of the half-forbidden Mashina Vremeni [Time machine] in its soundtrack.
Another example of the “leaking” genre is Larisa Shepitko’s innovative new-year film In the Thirteenth Hour of the Night (1969), where musical and dance numbers alternate with the play subject: a rabble of all kinds of evil epic spirits are preparing for a visit from an important foreign guest. In the end, a small dwarf in red clothing resembling Santa Claus appears to them. Zinovy Gerdt, Anatoly Papanov and Georgy Vitsin play the main roles, and look so camp doing so that they could, without changing costume, been shot by the American director. John Waters. The eccentricity of the plot, montage, and mult-lingual soundtrack makes the film more reminiscent of some kind of SNL than of Soviet Stagnation-period television.
Beginning: the scope of the work and the creative tasks are discussed. I wait for proposals. A week, another—no proposals. I make a proposal myself. They listen, nod. They bring in samples. Nothing is right. Excuse us, we didn’t understand. Another week. Silence. What’s going on? The lavender has disappeared somewhere—out of focus. We order new lavender, wait another week, Then—shaking frames, then—exposure errors, and so it continues until the end of the filming and editing.
It was in this dysfunctional condition that the Soviet film industry found itself at the beginning of the 1980s, after the “stagnating” decade. In the film studio collectives, there was disorder and instability. At Lenfilmm, they had already recalled the word “few-filmed.”
In 1986, the scandalous V Congress of Cinegmatographers of the USSR took place, during which delegates fell upon the “film-generals”—Sergey Bondarchuk, Lev Kulidzhanov, Stanislav Rostotsky. The stagnation in the industry was blamed on them, they were to blame for everything at once. An atmosphere of Jacobin chaos reigned.
The Congress took place in the Kremlin. The atmosphere was surrealistic: a Fronde in the very heart of the communist citadel. In the summative report, Kulidzhanov mixed up Lithuania and Latvia, and this at a time when an explosion of nationalistic self-consciousness was brewing—the hall reacted with laughs and cries of indignation. Never before had the Kremlin Palace Guards been witness to such behaviour. Plainclothes security guards took seats in the hall out of curiosity, when usually they would languish by the doors on the side of the foyer. The overexcited hall gave an ovation to radical speakers (Rolan Bykov, Vladimir Menshov, Anatoly Grebnev, Evgeny Grigoriev, Viktor Dashuk) and clapped over those who tried to defend the old order—among them Nikita Mikhailkov, who call the attacks against Bondarchuk “childishness.”
It seemed like a revolution. After this, a flow of fresh air ought to have poured into cinema. And this, it seems to me, is the main paradox of 1980s film: from the point of view of cinematic language, a lot truly became possible—instead of the tired heroes of the Stagnation, Solovyov’s Banana boys from Assa (1987) poured onto the screen, ready to break everything apart immediately, just like the delegates of the V Congress. But this artistic freedom was spent on fixing the unbearable stuffiness all around. Perestroika’s glasnost was spent on a fixation of collapse.
Vasil Pichul’s Little Vera (1988) is a genius not because in it is the first erotic scene in Soviet film, but because out of unremarkable cut-away shots—here a freight train slowly pulls out of a metallurgical plant, here young people loaf about a port—such an existential tension arises that you want to choke yourself. Typical teenage hysterics—when Vera (Natalya Negoda) asks exasperatedly why is it all so nauseating, even though she does everything correctly—are the grandiose culmination. And to hell with it, with the moralising, given its clear, Vera is all of us, it’s us that “cannot live like this any longer.” You easily forget about this when you see how the heroes choke, and know well what it’s like.
It’s interesting that here too the 1960s make an appearance with their method of cinema verité. It is verité that dictates the stylistics of Little Vera, as the film critic Aleksandr Fedorov has noted:
The film is made in the spirit of the so-called “direct cinema,” with an almost protocolic accuracy reproducing the dismal existence of the so-called “average Soviet working family.” Of course, the author made no discoveries here. Especially if we take into account the films made in a similarly harsh, naturalistic vein by the Hungarians Pal Erdos ("The Princess") and Pal Gabor ("Trips with Jacob"), Poles Krzysztof Zanussi ("The Constant") and Krzysztof Kieslowski ("The Incident").
Perestroika’s break ended with another “few-filmed” period (in terms of studio cinema) and a flood of cooperative exploitation.
The main box office hits of 2025 were the re-released naughties hits The Stroll by Aleksey Uchitel and Piter FM by Oksana Bychkova, worthy successors to the 1960s opuses on troubled youth in the big city. It would seem that this success is logical: both films are filled with “air”—cinematographically, with long walks around the city, difficult scenes with in-frame editing and deft hand-held camera work. And metaphorically—few other films were able to so capture the euphoria of the naughties. This euphoria comes first of all not from the price of oil crawling upwards, but from a feeling of unlimited possibility. Both Piter FM and The Stroll are full of pure drive—after watching them, it’s impossible not to leave the cinema and set off on a walk.
The main thing is that they brought back, if only for a brief moment, the smell of that already half-forgotten air. Everything was before us: they were playing Soviet pop-rock on the radio, love was hiding somewhere around the corner, Nokia connecting people. What can you say? That what’s important, most likely, is not so much the availability of air, as the demand for it. Fortunately, we have not lost it.