Harkening back to Aleksandr Pushkin (“Your sincerity is dear to me” [Mne vasha iskrennostʹ mila], ill-fated Onegin admits to Tatʹiana, that artistic ideal of earnestness), romantic notions of sincerity have long beckoned to Russian and Soviet artists. Although receding under Stalin, candor and authenticity would resurface post-1953 as central concerns for filmmakers. It is such sincerity that provides the compelling basis for Viktoria Paranyuk’s study of Thaw-era cinema and its well-balanced mix of canonical and underappreciated Soviet films from the period.
Paranyuk begins by recounting Nikita Khrushchev’s dressing down of Marlen Khutsiev and his screenwriter, Gennadii Shpalikov, for including in Ilyich’s Gate (Zastava Ilʹicha, 1962) an oneiric scene in which the central protagonist speaks with his deceased father. A victim of the Great War, the ghostly patriarch refrains from offering his son guidance, much to Khrushchev’s chagrin in 1963. In response to the Soviet leader’s reproach, Khutsiev emphasized his sincerity in shooting the scene, thus signaling sincerity’s newfound cache.
Although an elusive concept, such candor presents a useful prism through which to view Soviet cinema. Sincerity remains “beyond epistemological verification” (4), admits Paranyuk, yet she makes a strong case for why Thaw-era cinema, in the wake of Khrushchev’s Twentieth Party Congress “cult of personality” speech, tacked toward honesty and authenticity. In “bridging the public and private spheres” (6), sincerity allowed for individuality—but not individualism, per se—to reemerge within the Soviet collective. After all the eloquent, rote speeches championing Soviet society and amidst what had become Soviet cinema’s “entrenched logocentricity” (12), it was often inarticulate speech and even silence that conveyed a new-found honesty as film’s visual—and sonic—attributes took up the slack.
Mikhail Kalatozov’s Letiat zhuravli (The Cranes are Flying, 1957) may have garnered most of the plaudits for its early-Thaw cinematic pyrotechnics, but it was less celebrated Soviet films indebted to Italian neorealist and post-neorealist cinema—and French New Wave cinema—that appealed to a new generation of Soviet cineastes. Reactions to Roberto Rosselini’s Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy, 1954) and its “stylistic integrity” (35), for instance, helped frame Thaw-era filmmaking, as did André Bazin’s call for ontological authenticity and critique of Eisensteinian montage that ushered a “formal tension” (45) into Soviet cinema.
Thaw cinema’s complex relationship with its own past would be nowhere more evident than in Mikhail Romm’s Deviatʹ dnei odnogo goda (Nine Days of One Year, 1962). A pedagogue with ties to early socialist realist cinema and mentor to many young Soviet filmmakers, Romm established a forthrightness in 1960s cinema with this film’s stylized look at the way a physicist sacrifices himself and the well-being of his wife for scientific progress. In shooting his visually striking film, Romm echoed formal and ethical concerns found in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959); Romm, à la Resnais, reflects back to audiences “a collective self-examination and shared history” (84) through his Nine Days protagonists.
When discussion circles back to Khutsiev’s Ilyich’s Gate, Paranyuk dwells in particular on the film’s famous public poetry reading, where Khutsiev, aided by Margarita Pilikhina’s deft camerawork, recreated an authentic audience reaction to recitations by some of the era’s most famous poets. Although cut down considerable by the authorities and repackaged as Mne dvadtsatʹ let (I am Twenty, 1965), Ilyich’s Gate represented a new form of cinema through its often metacinematic “aesthetic of sincerity” (110).
As Paranyuk implies, a “childlike intensity of experience” (26) underpinned Thaw cinema’s sincerity, and this was especially so in films produced on the periphery of the Soviet state. In the Republic of Georgia, Tengiz Abuladze’s Skhvisi shvilebi (Other People’s Children, 1959) called into question the official narrative of the Soviet multinational project through its forthright depiction of two motherless children in Tbilisi. A “spontaneous energy” (128) arising from its unabashedly neorealist aesthetic allowed the film to diverge from a centralized Soviet film industry, despite efforts to dub the film into Russian. And in Lithuania, Arūnas Žebriūnas would place children at the forefront of two striking films, Paskutinis šūvis (The Last Shot, 1960) and Paskutinė atostogu diena (The Girl and the Echo, 1964). Paranyuk’s analysis of these two Lithuanian films underscores how filmmaking on the Soviet edges could exist “in a dynamic state of experimentation and becoming” (159).
In Paranyuk’s telling, as the Thaw drew to a close, sincerity would turn to anxiety, so vividly exemplified by the “failure of language” (165) found in Kira Muratova’s Dolgie provody (The Long Farewell, 1971). Alas, the urge toward authenticity would go the way of the Thaw, which The Cinema of Sincerity, such a welcome addition to scholarship on Soviet cinema, makes candidly clear.
