Shostakovich on Screen: Film as Metatext and Myth

Abstract

he Viola Sonata (Altovaia sonata), a film about Dmitrii Shostakovich, was made in 1980 but immediately prohibited, submerged into social nonexistence. Why did the Soviet regime consider a film with an innocent musical title so dangerous that it kept the film out of the cultural realm for six years, until glasnost and perestroika? To answer this question we must analyze the film from historical, socioanthropological, and narratological perspectives, and also from the perspectives of the semiotics of propaganda and censorship. It is also important to understand the film as a metatext and myth, to determine its place in the semiosphere of Soviet and postSoviet cultures. This article consists of three parts: plot-an introduction to the film's problematic and history from the viewpoint of cultural anthropology (which tends to be very topical approach in the field of film studies as well as the field of Russian studies); climax-a film text analysis from the perspectives of the semiotics of film and of culture; and denouement-an analysis of the film's metatextual and mythological structure, its cultural discourse, and its role in the development of antitotalitarian semantic counterstrategies. The Viola Sonata is a film experiment; an optative-a modeling artistic structure, the major idea of which is, by showing the inward world of the great composer, to reproduce his imagined dialogue with history.