Kelly , Catriona Soviet Art House: Lenfilm Studio under Brezhnev (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 757 and montage, with montage scenes and declamation being used ‘to achieve a sense of realism’ (pp. 207, 209). Here the ‘concepts of theatrical rhythm, declamation, and characterisation remain largely intact despite the enormous political pressure’ Prokof´ev underwent (p. 210). That said, Guillaumier largely stays clear from discussing the external political forces that prompted revisions of his Soviet operas. Overall, the book gives an in-depth analysis and vivid narrative of the music and would be of particular interest to musicologists and operatic producers, but also to the non-specialist reader. Reading the book, one is often prompted to study the operatic scores, as the text sometimes refers to bars which are not included in the given musical examples. The musical description of acts and scenes sometimes does not follow the logical progression of the plot, which is partially compensated with the inclusion of Synopses at the end of the book. Despite these minor caveats, this well considered and compelling monograph does indeed provide ‘a coherent and illuminating narrative of Prokofiev’s operatic career’ (p. 2) and Guillaumier’s scholarly work certainly contributes significantly to the existing Prokof´ev scholarship. Department of Music Viktoria Zora Goldsmiths, University of London Kelly, Catriona. Soviet Art House: Lenfilm Studio under Brezhnev. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2021. xxii + 512 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £81.00; £29.99. When she was an exchange student in Voronezh in the early 1980s, Catriona Kelly sought ‘salvation’ (p. xiv) in cinema, perhaps to dispel the boredom of provincial life. While astonished by acclaimed films from Abuladze, Paradzhanov and Tarkovskii, Joseph Heifitz’s now obscure Married for the First Time (Lenfil´m, 1979) ‘stayed with her as well’ (p. xv). The author was moved by Heifitz’s film, which is indeed an affective, if of course, clichéd, example of Lenfil´m’s efforts to convey the personal, to evoke emotional registers among the (often quite appreciative) audiences. Aleksei German’s My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Lenfil´m, 1984), an ‘art house’ film of the time, demonstrated to her what types of experimental films Lenfil´m Studios was still able to produce. Kelly’s work reads like the product of someone enthusiastically interested in Soviet film of the ‘Brezhnev era’. This enthusiasm often leaps from the pages and has brought me back to re-watching many of the films I had forgotten. Far too much scholarly work in film studies has focused on specific films or ostensibly groundbreaking directors. The resulting generalizations have tended to obscure rather than enlighten cinematic history. Kelly’s absorbing SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 758 monograph is a rare study, based on a significant documentary base (in addition to an impressive array of archival and secondary sources, she enriches her discussion with interviews with many figures active now or previously in Lenfil´m) of the most critical site in cinema, the production studio. The work under review is an original contribution to the study of Soviet film. Her diachronic study of Lenfil´m from the early 1960s to the collapse of the Soviet Union (and in a concise conclusion, into the 1990s) includes compelling analyses of dozens of films, both now obscure and those long celebrated. Kelly also advances convincing arguments as to why the collective nature of Lenfil´m’s (indeed Soviet film efforts generally) often produced captivating cinema. More on this later. Kelly examines the people: directors, editors, camera operators, set and costume designers, and studies directors and Leningrad (city and regional) officials, among others, who collectively, as it were, constituted Lenfil´m and shaped its productions. She states that, as opposed to banal invocations of an overarching era of stagnation, Lenfil´m, during the 1960s and 1970s, produced an array of films ‘at once lyrical and obscure’ (p. xvi). Many Lenfil´m productions were also, as she observes, ‘some of the most widely discussed cultural events of the era’ (p. 23), including Gelb Panfilov’s No Path through Fire (1968), Il´ia Averbach’s Monologue, Dinara Asanova’s Woodpeckers Don’t Get Headaches (1976) and Aleksei German’s Twenty Days without a War (1976). Of the nineteen chapters in her book (not counting the introduction and...