Russian films take a page from Soviet playbook
MOSCOW -- When Vladimir Putin visited the set of the latest movie by Oscar-winning filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, he sat in the director's chair while actors playing Soviet soldiers marched toward the front.
Putin didn't direct the action -- he left that to his host. But the prime minister's presence at the $55-million "Burnt by the Sun 2," the most expensive film in Russia's post-Soviet history, was a potent symbol of his government's expanding role in the country's film industry.
Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin called cinema "the most important of all arts," and film was regarded by the Communist leadership as one of its most powerful propaganda weapons. Legendary directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, who made "The Battleship Potemkin," and Andrei Tarkovsky, whose brooding classics can still astonish, won acclaim even as they bent to the will of the totalitarian state.
Now the Russian government is trying to revive the Soviet film tradition, helping to produce movies and miniseries that push the Kremlin's political views, vilify its critics and glorify the military and intelligence services.
Artistically, the results have been decidedly mixed.
Outside of the work of Mikhalkov, whose international fame dates back to the 1960s and who won a foreign-language film Oscar for 1994's "Burnt by the Sun," few government-sponsored films have won either critical acclaim or box-office success.
"History repeats itself with a farce, so this new propaganda seems ridiculous compared to textbook Soviet examples," said Yuri Valkov, a historian of Russian culture.
Throughout the 1990s, the Russian film industry was mostly limited to imitations of Hollywood blockbusters and attempts to preserve the old artistic traditions.
In the new millennium, Russian filmmakers have found themselves in a business-oriented environment of investments and profits. But the government has taken a greater role in film projects and remains the country's largest film producer. Putin recently proposed a merger of three Soviet-era film studios into a mammoth, state-owned concern.
Some in the film industry -- the largest in Europe alongside France -- welcome the influence of authorities over which movies get made and the political lessons they teach.
"Law enforcement agencies are part of our state, and the government has the right to propagate whatever it considers necessary," said producer Leonid Vereshchagin of 3T, Mikhalkov's own production company, which has released several highly patriotic films.
