Russian Film Symposium in Pittsburgh (3-8 May 2004)

[Vladimir Padunov]

Prophets and Gain: New Russian Cinema (3-8 May 2004)

Much has been written in the past decade about the crises besetting the
film industry in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.  These
crises, however, were simply the inevitable consequence of capital's
struggle to differentiate itself from money--that is, a painful transition
from funding individual film projects (by the state, by Klondike
capitalists, by the underworld) to the investment of funds with an
expectation of generating surplus value; a transition that transformed the
film industry by shifting the focus from products to profits.  Even the
film studios inherited from the recent Soviet past--Mosfilm, Lenfilm,
Gor'kii Film Studio--were forced to allocate their now limited resources in
a new way: film projects had to be packaged both in terms of their "social
(or artistic) merits" and their projected ability to return capital
investments to the studios.

This radical development in the Russian film industry redefined the
procedures in obtaining film financing and, in the process, gave birth to a
new profession: the producer.  Inevitably, the rise of independent
producers was accompanied by the emergence of privately owned film
production companies that also initially used already existing
infrastructures.  In particular, three private production studios have
dominated the independent market in Russia and have begun to transform both
the kinds of films being made and audiences' tastes: STW Film Company in
St. Petersburg, established by former film director Sergei Sel'ianov in
1992; NTV-Profit Film Company in Moscow, a joint company established in
1995 linking Igor' Tolstunov's production studio Profit with Vladimir
Gusinskii's NTV Television Company; and Pygmalion Productions in Moscow,
established in 2001 by Sergei Chliants.

This new domestic film production industry has prompted the return of
Russian films to Russian movie theaters, and this, in turn, has generated a
demand for better quality domestically produced films, not just by
established filmmakers (whether those whose careers are identifiable with
the Soviet past or by ones who emerged in the immediate post-Soviet years),
but also by completely new and unknown filmmakers, as often as not young
directors who have just completed their first feature film.

The works of these new directors (Petr Buslov, Aleksei German, Jr.,
Gennadii Sidorov, Andrei Zviagintsev), the output of the new private
studios (STW, NTV-Profit, and Pygmalion), and the new landscape of Russian
cinema are the focus of Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium 2004
www.rusfilm.pitt.edu.

_________________________________________
Vladimir Padunov
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
1433 Cathedral of Learning          voice: 1-412-624-5713
University of Pittsburgh                   FAX: 1-412-624-9714
Pittsburgh, PA 15260                          padunov at pitt.edu

Russian Film Symposium        http://www.rusfilm.pitt.edu

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