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Mosfilms wasn’t Hollywood, whatever Godard says, Although the American dream may
have won over a few imaginations (more among the producers than the filmmakers,
I suspect), still Russian cinema played by other rules, and even the worst sub-products
of socialist realism betray some glimmer of the storming of the image, more powerful
and real than the storming of the Winter Palace. Like a clandestine revealing his origins
through a slip of the tongue, a stutter of his native language, a Russian film would give
vent to a Barnet sigh, a Dovzhenko cry, between two glossy Metro-Goldwyn-style shots
-and the viewer would recognize an accomplice behind the mask. Just look at the actresses:
stars, perhaps, but their beauty and folly had nothing in common with the glamour of the
crazed alcoholics of Beverley Hills. The two Tanias, Samoilova and Lavrova, split the best roles
between them, and the worst gossip. Samoilova, the better known of the two in the West, after
the triumph of The Cranes Are Flying… Lavrova, simply sublime in Mikhail Romm’s Nine
Days of One Year (the role of a woman divided between two men, an anti-Jules and Jim,
where each one respects the two others…). Like Barnet, like Medvedkin. Romm used the
weapons of propaganda to combat propaganda, and amid th false grandeur purveyed by the
official mythology he offered those with ears a chance to hear the voice of true human
grandeur, muffled, but still present.