Young Researchers Conference--1

Young Researchers Conference--1 YOUNG RESEARCHERS CONFERENCE MIAMI UNIVERSITY “Dream Factory of Communism: Culture, Practices and the Memory of the Cold War” OCTOBER 26, 2007 “SIDEKICKS AND STEREOTYPES RUSSIANS AND THEIR IMAGE IN THE MOVIES” Prof.Harlow Robinson Matthews Distinguished University Professor, Department of History Northeastern University I. Meeting Doctor Zhivago Like many members of my generation, I received my first enduring images of Russia from the movies and television. In 1965, my parents took me and a school friend to the Elmwood Cinema in Elmwood, Connecticut, to see the just-released David Lean epic Doctor Zhivago. That was in the days when big serious films had overtures and intermissions, and Doctor Zhivago was nothing if not serious and big, with a super-sized running time of 192 minutes and a balalaika-spiked Oscar-winning score by Maurice Jarre that contained a hit tune (“Somewhere My Love”) that saturated the airwaves for months. I was enthralled. Young Researchers Conference--2 The cinematically constructed Russia of angelic Lara and handsome Yuri and brooding Strelnikov and evil Komarovsky--full of waltzes, wars, gigantic hydroelectric dams, endless train trips, ice palaces, flowering Siberian fields, humorless revolutionaries equipped with dramatic facial scars—seduced me utterly and forever. Lean’s desperately romantic and passionate film, released at a moment when the United States and the USSR (which was more or less synonymous, incorrectly, in the American popular consciousness with Russia) were locked in the deadly nuclear competition of the Cold War, sent me on a quest for deeper knowledge of things Russian. I began to read the novels of Dostoyevsky, and a few years later, began studying Russian, taking the first steps on a lifelong crusade to conquer and penetrate that most challenging and rewarding of languages. Doctor Zhivago humanized Russia for me, transporting me far beyond the small faded New England clock city where I had spent my life to date to a vivid and exciting world that on the screen loomed so much more real and important than my own. There was Russia right on the screen just a few hundred feet away, alluring and seemingly attainable. I could almost reach out and touch it. This Russia affected me emotionally in a way I had never been affected before, erasing whatever vague fear I had absorbed from school textbooks or daily newspaper and television news stories about the evil Commies in Moscow and their dangerous comrades in nearby Cuba who were building missiles with which to attack us. We talked in school about building fallout shelters. Those stories seemed abstract, academic and remote, but Dr.Zhivago’s was immediate and full of very recognizable feelings. No wonder Vladimir Ilych Lenin, scheming godfather of the USSR, had once called the cinema “the most important of all the arts.” For it conveys the illusion of reality like no Young Researchers Conference--3 other medium ever invented. Images seen on the screen have a way of overwhelming and superseding all others. The ability of film to shape public opinion has also been widely recognized by American politicians, including (to name only one prominent example) Senator Joseph McCarthy and members of the UnAmerican Activities Committee of the House of Representatives in the early 1950s, who combed through movies in search of evidence of overt and hidden pro-Communist (and therefore pro-Russian) messages. At the time, I knew nothing about Boris Pasternak, the genius upon whose poetic and complex novel the movie Doctor Zhivago had been based (much too loosely for the taste of many critics, including Brendan Gill of The New Yorker, who called the film a “grievous disappointment”), and who had died just five years earlier, engaged to the bitter end in an exhausting life-and-death struggle with Soviet totalitarian censorship. I do not believe I knew then that the novel had never been published in the USSR, or that its appearance abroad had gravely endangered Pasternak’s already precarious existence, or that Pasternak had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to the deep chagrin of the Soviet government. Indeed, I knew next to nothing about the Russian Revolution, or Communism. Of those artists and matters I would come to know later. But such is the awesome power of the moving visual image, the vivid sense of its undeniable reality, its ability to establish immediate and direct emotional connection, that none of this mattered during my first intimate encounter with Russia at the Elmwood Cinema. It was the people and their stories in Doctor Zhivago, and the hypnotic beauty of the musical and visual synthesis achieved by a great director working with some of the greatest actors of the time, that removed all barriers of geography, history and ideology. How awful could Russia be if such people as Julie Christie and Omar Shariff lived there? Young Researchers Conference--4 In time, I came to recognize how artificial, inaccurate and manipulative was the image of Russia presented in Doctor Zhivago, and in other films about Russia that emerged from Hollywood. I came to understand that a feature film was not the same as reality, and discovered that Zhivago was filmed in Spain and in studios, not on the streets of Moscow and the steppes of Siberia. For the great majority of Americans, however, the image of Russia and the USSR presented in mainstream Hollywood films acquired enormous power and authority, particularly in the absence of consistently reliable alternative information on a country that because of historical and political events of the twentieth century occupied such a privileged and unusual position in the American psyche. Hollywood films about Russia were fated to play a special role, because for most of the twentieth century, Russia/USSR was the primary “other” in the American consciousness, the ideological and military enemy, with vast and terrifying resources, by the middle of the century capable and apparently desirous of blowing us all off the planet. It is also a most curious historical coincidence that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (which led to the establishment of the world’s first socialist/communist society, one of whose avowed goals was to overthrow world capitalism, headquartered in the United States) occurred precisely at the moment when the American film industry was entering a rapid period of development, moving westward from New York towards Hollywood (farther away from Russia, even more abstract viewed from the palm-lined avenues of Los Angeles). The overthrow of the Romanov dynasty and the creation of the USSR was one of the biggest and most shocking stories of the century, so it is hardly surprising that films about Russia constituted a significant part of the output of the Hollywood studios Young Researchers Conference--5 from the very beginning of their existence. The increasing importance of the Soviet- American relationship, especially after World War II, and its centrality in American foreign policy, ensured that films about Russia would continue to occupy a privileged position in Hollywood production, given the studios’ need to make movies of a topical nature. Not surprisingly, many of these feature films about Russia engaged in a vigorous (and sometimes humorous) defense of capitalism, as we shall see. Who were the men who ran the Hollywood studios, after all, but some of the most successful capitalists that the system had ever produced? Further complicating and enriching this phenomenon was the presence in the Hollywood film industry from its earliest days of a large number of emigres from both pre- and post-Revolutionary Russia. Some of them anti-Soviet and some pro-Soviet in their ideological leanings, they participated (as directors, actors, composers, writers, designers, cameramen) in the making of many of the films that presented Russia and the USSR to the American audience. These Russians also worked, of course, on many other films that did not deal with Russia, joining other emigres (from Hungary, Germany, Austria, France, England, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and so on) in the amazing ethnic melting pot that Hollywood became. II. STEREOTYPES IN FILM In The Kaleidoscopic Lens: How Hollywood Views Ethnic Groups, Randall M.Miller has noted the enormous power of cinema as a transmitter of cultural values to a very wide audience. “Hollywood movies became a major transmitter of ‘assimilationist’ Young Researchers Conference--6 values and helped to reinforce a narrow conception of American life to which all groups were expected to conform.”1 Because Hollywood movies were made (for the most part) by studios and producers eager to attract the largest possible audiences and to maximize profit, social attitudes--including the representation of “non-Americans”--had to remain within the range of what was perceived to be generally acceptable at any given moment in the “common culture.” Whether Hollywood films, whose primary goal has been to entertain rather than to educate (the reverse of the paradigm existing in the nationalized state-subsidized Soviet cinema) have shaped public attitudes and prejudices or merely reflected them is a question that has been long debated by critics, scholars and historians. The answer seems to consist in a combination of these two forces (depending upon the courage and personal convictions of the producers and artistic staff for any given film), but there is general consensus that films can be viewed as a relatively reliable barometer of social attitudes, as “handbooks of social behavior.”2 The making of films is a collective enterprise, so the product tends to exhibit collective values. Important, too, is the fact that the medium of the cinema grew from lower-class roots, and was aimed (especially in its early history) at a lower-class broad audience, not an elitist one. Thus, the values system presented could not conflict too sharply with that of the audience, or the film would not be commercially successful.

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