A RUSSIAN WINTER FOR THE ARTS : A Free Cinema: Before It Can Run, It Must Learn to Walk

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia —  Looking out the window of his office in Comedy Theater at the food lines forming along Nevsky Prospekt, 34-year-old stage and film director Dmitri Astrakhan has reason to be happy.

His first film, “Go Away,” about Jews expelled from their village by anti-Semitic Russian peasants, is Russia’s official entry for the best foreign-language film Oscar. The original screenplay, co-written by Astrakhan, was inspired by the classic Sholom Aleichem story “Tevye the Milkman.”

All but 8% of “Go Away’s” 1.5-million-ruble budget (in yesteryear, a mere $30,000), according to the director, was raised from private sources. Astrakhan says that in Russia’s new market-driven film industry, it is possible to produce cinema of artistic quality that filmgoers will want to see. For several years now, Russian movie theaters have been flooded with American films, many of a quality so low that they were never shown in U.S. theaters. The rush to bring new, domestically produced material to the screen has produced dozens of quickly made adventure-exploitation films about the new criminal underworld: entrepreneurial black marketeers and prostitutes pitted against power-hungry bureaucrats and secret police.

From the dismemberment of the old Soviet Union’s huge film studios, a confusing web of independent companies has emerged, crowding an already fragmented industry. Directors, critics and filmgoers concerned about the future are now voicing despair at the prospect of a film industry driven entirely by market forces--the replacement of the dictatorship of the proletariat by the whims of the audience.

Astrakhan believes that his “Go Away” balances the requirements of art and audience. Recently named artistic director of Comedy Theater, a respected repertory company in the center of St. Petersburg, Astrakhan was approached by the film director Alexei Gherman (“My Friend Ivan Lapshin”), who proposed that the young director make a film.

Astrakhan and Gherman teamed up with screenwriter Oleg Danilov. “We thought for a long time,” Astrakhan says, “at least half an hour, until we found an idea that would be interesting to Russians and audiences around the world.” The answer wasn’t too far removed from the day’s headlines.

“We understood that it had to be a question of nationalism because it’s the most difficult and painful question for all countries and you’ll never escape it,” Astrakhan says. “And we also wanted to show that nationalistic conflicts are usually advantageous to somebody.

“We took anti-Semitism as a particularly vivid example of this problem,” he adds, “because we’re Jews.”

Astrakhan obtained only 100,000 rubles from Lenfilm, the large film studio in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), but he needed 1 million rubles. That money came, Astrakhan says, from a cooperative of St. Petersburg Jewish businessmen who were initially skeptical until they learned that the sale of foreign rights for hard currency could easily pay back the original investment.

So far, “Go Away” has played at festivals in Telluride and Toronto, but it still has no American distributor.

“This is one of the best examples of independent production,” says Moscow film critic Andrei Plachov, during an interview at the Dom Kino (House of Cinema) in Moscow. Astrakhan’s achievement, warns Plachov, who formerly reviewed films for the newspaper Pravda, which was formerly the Soviet Communist Party daily, is not necessarily a cause for optimism about the Russian film industry in general.

“If you see the majority of these productions,” he says, “these are really terrible, horrible films.”

More typical of independent films, Plachov says, are movies such as “The Night of the Long Knives,” a prescient adventure film, shot before August’s failed military coup, which observes an army Putsch in Moscow through the eyes of two provincial girls who have come to the capital to work as prostitutes. The same studio is also releasing “Woman Terrorist.”

(The English translations are indicative of the kinds of American films many Soviet directors have chosen to imitate.)

“This is typical of Russian films today, using themes of interest to the public,” says Plachov. “Everybody is thinking about military coups. Everybody is interested in erotic cinema, which did not exist before. So they combined the two in this film, which has been very successful in cinemas.”

In the film magazine Cine-Eye, just a few pages past notices for “Gangsters in the Ocean” and “Sons of a Bitch,” an ad for the new film “Top Class,” financed by the Moscow Commercial Bank of Publishers, reads: “A luxurious car, expensive restaurants, dollars! No wonder, as the heroine, handsome and exquisite, works for KGB and a Western commercial intelligence service simultaneously. Starred by Irina Alfyorova.”

It’s a mystery where all the money to finance projects by the estimated 500 new production companies in what once was the Soviet Union will originate. At least that many films were represented at a film market last month in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Veteran Soviet film directors and critics acknowledge that production budgets provided by some cooperative firms are often a philanthropic cover for unsavory business activities.

Critic Anna Kagarlitska, who writes about film for Moscow publications, speculates that independent film companies are employing a number of former KGB agents. While she and her colleague Plachov speculate that, at best, only one-fifth of these new production companies will be in business a year from now, Plachov says the region’s economy will continue to create private fortunes that will find their way into film budgets.

However, it may be years before cinema has more than a few investors whose principal business is film. “For the moment, our investors are people who might as well be investing in shoe factories,” says director Astrakhan.

Predicting what films the public will want to see has become as important as financing films. Producer Rifat Pateev, who came from a career in promoting pop variety shows to producing movies, believes that “people have sobered up” and want to watch Soviet, instead of American, films. According to Plachov, adventure may be giving way to sentimentality on the screen.

“Audiences now want to cry and are looking for pure stories, without drugs and prostitutes,” he says. Plachov offers the example of “Adam’s Rib,” a drama by director Viatcheslav Krichtofovitch about three generations of women in one family sharing a Moscow apartment. (“Adam’s Rib” got good reviews at its American premiere at the New York Film Festival last fall and will be released theatrically in the U.S. in the spring.)

Films about conflicts among nationalities clearly have an audience, as evidenced by the success of “Go Away.”

“A lot of films now are being based on Jewish stories,” says Naum Kleiman, director of the respected Museum of the Central Filmmakers’ Union in Moscow. Not all of these projects have noble motives underlying them, Kleiman warns. “I know some filmmakers who are anti-Semites and who are trying to make Jewish films just to get money.”

One of the most promising independent film enterprises in the region--the KOBZA Studio in Kiev owned by Ukrainian emigres in Toronto--has largely dismissed the domestic market.

The newly appointed Ukrainian minister of film, Kiev film director Yuri Illienko, says that with its 53 million people and 25,000 theaters the Ukrainian market may well be inundated with American commercial films. He says Ukrainian films only reach about 10% of the market, but the country’s three major studios expect to turn out dozens of features in the coming year.

KOBZA joined with the 45-year-old Illienko to produce “Swan Lake--The Zone,” based on years that the late Georgian film director Sergei Paradjanov spent in prison. “Swan Lake,” a survival epic with almost no dialogue, has already played short engagements in Los Angeles and New York to the best American reviews Illienko has ever received--so good, in fact, that a Swiss firm has offered to finance his next project.

Mykola Moros, president of KOBZA and producer of “Swan Lake--The Zone,” says the enterprise is an effort to promote Ukrainian culture as much as a profit-making business. The Canadian company is also involved in Ukrainian publishing and the import of Western electronics technology to Ukraine.

Marco Stech, 31, “Swan Lake’s” assistant producer, says KOBZA has no interest in the headache and minimal profits in domestic film distribution, and sold the Soviet rights to a Swedish firm experienced in Soviet joint ventures. The film’s additional costs were met by the sale of rights in Western Europe where, Stech maintains, Illienko has a sizable audience.

Stech says his firm decided against making strictly commercial films: “It’s a very short-sighted approach to go with commercial films, even financially. The chances of selling a bad commercial film outside of the Soviet Union are zero. Sure, the commercial films will make a lot of rubles in the Soviet Union, and we will not because Soviet viewers are not used to art cinema and they don’t want to watch it. But we have a chance to sell our films to the West and make our money in hard currency.”

While KOBZA is already enjoying the fruits of a shrewd investment plan, most Russians and other filmmakers in the region are still struggling to find Western audiences for their films. And although free to promote and sell their movies abroad, little prepares them for doing business in the West.

Michael Brainerd, president of the Citizens Exchange Council who organized the Glasnost Film Festival’s Soviet documentary tour of the United States two years ago, says directors in this region still have unrealistic expectations of the money their films can earn abroad.

“For them, it’s still the Klondike,” he says. “They think our market is so active and varied that there should be a buyer for everything.”

However, as Americans take a greater interest in events in this part of the world, the market is opening, according to Anne Borin, who organized the first selection of Soviet films at the Independent Feature Film Market in New York last fall. New filmmakers here are like other independents, she says: Inexperienced.

“They don’t know much about contracts and they don’t understand the complexity of the marketplace, that a film can have several different markets in this country,” Borin says.

Despite encouraging future projects from directors Illienko--he’s in search of a European partner to co-produce a film version of Shakespeare’s “King Lear”--and “Go Away’s” Astrakhan, some view this region’s cinema as being on the verge of collapse, either edged out by American films or being restricted to money-making ventures.

“It’s very difficult to survive in this situation for filmmakers who don’t take commercial success into account and only have artistic values,” says film critic Plachov.

“I am afraid that this generation of filmmakers who would like to make artistic cinema will be a lost generation.”