Aesthetic Innovation and the Politics of Film Production at Lenfil′m, 1968-1991

Alex Graham (UCL SSEES)

My research addresses the question of how, during late Socialism, creative and executive production strategies at Lenfil’m can be framed as part of an institutional critique, in which I approach the working film studio as an intersection of artistic, ideological and managerial-bureaucratic discourses.

Long basking in the glow of its self-proclaimed ‘golden years’ in the 1920s and 1930s, Lenfil’m’s persistent commemorative narrative remains that of a highly mythologised and under-historicised, auratic site of cultural identification. While acknowledging the lasting significance of memoirs, milieu and person-centred approaches to the study of Soviet cinema, I seek to unpack the studio’s conception of its own historicity by focusing on the structural organisation of its production processes during a less closely examined period.

This paper will introduce the scope of my research, beginning with a discussion of the relationship between the studio’s editorial cohort, its managerial staff and its creative workers in the early years of my chronology. This focus will engage in dialogue with the question of the role played by screenplay committees and creative councils at Lenfil’m, asking not just how these (and other equivalent) bodies contributed to the production of meaning in specific films, but moreover examining their strategic attempts to elaborate an emergent language of innovation in film aesthetics during the 1970s and early 1980s. Since my doctoral research is significantly invested in the archival contexts of Lenfil’m, my discussion will also reflect upon some of the opportunities offered, and methodological challenges posed, to this study by an engagement with archival materials.

Alex Graham is a research student at UCL SSEES, working on readings of aesthetic experimentation and the politics of film production at the Lenfil'm studio between 1968 and 1991 under the supervision of Dr Philip Cavendish. His early research on the then completed films of Aleksei German Sr. was published as ‘Immersion in time: history, memory and the question of readability in the films of Aleksei German’ in the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 6:2, 2012, 177-216. In September 2014, Alex was invited to give a paper on the compilation film Sady skorpiona (Gardens of the Scorpion, Oleg Kovalov, 1991) as part of the postgraduate panel at the New Directions in Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema Studies conference, organised by UCL SSEES and the University of Cambridge to mark the retirement of Professor Julian Graffy.