New Russian Cinema, Pittsburgh, May 3-8, 2004

Prophets and Gain: New Russian Cinema

May 3-8, 2004, Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium 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.

Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium 2004