Abraham Lincoln: Twentieth Century Popular Portrayals (review)

Book Reviews | Regular Feature the mid-1950s—the USSR crackled with the excitement of de-Stalinization and a cultural "thaw" that transformed many aspects of Soviet life. The movies born of these changes, while falling short ofthe innovation and sheer genius of the 1920s silents, nevertheless demonstrated that the cinema had acquired much ofthe artistry lost to the rigid dictates of socialist realism. What is more, these films told stories and depicted characters with remarkable honesty, so that—to audiences then and now—they offered a revealing look at a society long closed to the West. In short, the images they projected were indeed real. WoIl, who has chronicled other aspects of Soviet culture in previous monographs, approaches her subject by combining cultural history with film analysis. Moreover, she manages to shift gears quite deftly, moving between the larger context and the specific works that grew out ofit. Among the notable developments of the cinematic thaw was the emergence of two generations ofdirectors. The older group was born in the early 1920s and fought in the Second World War; the others were only five to ten years younger but lacked combat service. Their careers blossomed as aresult ofthe expansion in film production, which represented a dramatic change from the late Stalin period, when enormous resources were channeled into producing a few "classics " each year that turned out to be duds. Some of the newer directors started working for smaller studios in the outlying republics rather than the mammoth complexes in Moscow or Leningrad. Indeed, by the late 1960s, the Soviet motion picture industry was no longer a strictly Russian affair. Younger filmmakers also enjoyed the guidance and sponsorship of seasoned veterans in resisting the reactionary forces, especially Mosfilm chieftain, Ivan Pyrev. While the films of the Khrushchev era were not all cut from the same cloth, thematically they represented a definite break with the past. The Party—along with its inflated heroes and blowhard ideologists—began taking a back seat to individuals whose problems were personal rather than political. Emotions replaced slogans, and black-and-white yielded to gray, even in the case of villains. Early in the thaw, filmmakers took a realistic approach to selected parts ofthe Soviet past, especially the CivilWar andWorldWar II, dwelling on civilians rather than soldiers and even suggesting that initial defeats hadresulted from mistakes at the top. As the years went by, directors and their audiences sought increasingly to engage contemporary life and problems officially deemed nonexistent, such as generation conflict , class friction, and gender struggles. By the late 1960s—as the Brezhnev regime began to impose controls on artistic freedom —some screenplays dared to portray antiheroes who actually rejected the core values and basic beliefs of Soviet society. Unlike the situation in today's Russia, moviegoing in the Khrushchev erawas a popularpastime, and audiences responded deeply (and by no means always positively) to motion pictures. Some of them are familiar to Western cinéastes, especially warbased photoplays such as Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying (1957), which WoIl calls the "first indisputable masterpiece ofpost-Stalin cinema," Grigorii Chukrai's Ballad ofa Soldier (1959), Sergei Bondarchuk's Fate of a Man (1959), and Andrei Tarkovskii's first feature film Ivan's Childhood (1962). All of them receive their due here, but equally interesting are many titles little known to U.S. audiences—for example, Nine Days ofOne Year (1962), with its modern science portrayal, and Ilich's Gate (1961/1965), a tale ofdisaffectedyouth, whose problems with authorities (Khrushchev included) delayed its release for several years. These and many other titles make vivid impressions thanks to Woll's thoughtful analysis of the pictures themselves and herbehind-the-scenes discussions among industry and government figures. One can only hope that more of these movies eventually appear on video, with English subtitles, for classroom use. Real Images deserves the attention of all who are interested in film, Soviet history, or the inevitably close interaction of the two. The scholarship is sound and, for the most part, the prose has grace and even wit. In sum, Woll's book ranks with the works ofDeniseYoungblood, Peter Kenez, andAnna Lawton: all of them breathe life into noteworthy chapters from...