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From Spectator to "Differentiated" Consumer
Film Audience Research in the Era of Developed Socialism (1965-80)
Joshua First
In 1980, the Gor'kii film studio in Moscow released Piraty XXveka (Pirates of the 20th Century), which became the highest-grossing domestic film in Soviet history with over 85 million tickets sold in that year alone.' The film's plot, simultaneously simple and entirely unique for Soviet cinema, concerns a group of patriotic sailors experienced in martial arts who defeat a band of AK-47-toting pirates, one of whom also holds a black belt in karate. While audiences and film distribution authorities warmly received Pirates, the film's supposed lack of character development and absence of classical narrative structure appalled critics, who claimed its popularity represented Soviet spectators' lack of taste. The director Boris Durov defended his film, saying, "I feel that the audience wants to see spectacle. A contemporary film about pirates [eases] melancholic [feelings] with romance and adventure."2 Vladimir Ishimov, a Soviet film critic relatively sympathetic to the film, commented that its creators "understand well the rules of audience perception prevailing in our country, and consequently all the picture's components are strictly measured."3 This puzzling statement raises several questions, not the
1 would like to thank William Rosenberg for helping me through early drafts of this manuscript. I am grateful to Thomas Lahusen, a second peer reviewer, and the editors of Kritika for their excellent suggestions. I presented an earlier draft of this article at the 2004 American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) Annual Convention in Boston and would like to thank the discussants, Vladimir Shlapentokh and Slava Gerovitch, for their comments.
' See Sergei Zemlianukhin and Miroslava Segida, eds., Domashniaia sinematika: Otechestvennoe kino, 1918-1996(Moscow: Dubl'-D, 1996).
2 Quoted in Vladimir Ishimov, "Posle uspekhov," Iskusstvo kino (hereafter IK), no. 7 (1981): 73.
' Ibid., 75.
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9, 2 (Spring 2008): 317-44.
JOSHUA FIRST
ul which include what produced this type of knowledge about audience perception and where such "measurements" were available.
Eight years later, Sjanislav Govorukhin, the film's screenwriter and first secretary of the Odessa branch of the Cinematographers Union, opened the* proceedings for the first "Golden Duke" film festival, presenting the event as an "alternative" space for producers of popular cinema. The future political documentarist and State Duma member (since 1993) attempted to counteract the newer trend during glasnost' toward experimentation and the melancholy associated with chernukha [dark] films. His speech reads as a legitimating manifesto for what he called the "low" genres. Govorukhin sarcastically labeled them as Soviet cinemas "seven deadly sins," which included comedy, melodrama, musical, detective, adventure, science fiction, and thriller. He later reported in Sovetskaia kul'tura that instead of the usual film critics who presided over the annual all-union film festival and the Moscow international film festival, a "large group of sociologists" were present at the "Odessa alternative." He further stressed the greater need for "contact with the spectator," and the necessity to study viewers' needs, desires, and sympathies/' What did Govorukhin intend with this counterposition of sociology with film criticism? His statement was at once populist, with its predictable anti-intellectualism, and affirming of a different intellectual tradition and particular method of understanding the social work that film does.
Moreover, the article represented Govorukhin's amazing ability to reconstruct the discourse of "cinema and spectator" as it existed in the era of "developed socialism" (1965-85), with its emphasis on gathering "scientific" knowledge about society and its reliance on "objective" technological processes over "subjective" understandings to find meaning in cultural products/ "Developed socialism" had less use for the literary or film critic, whose role in Soviet cultural politics was gradually being outmoded by the media sociologist, an individual with a social-science or technical education. Nonetheless, critics at first participated in their own demise, welcoming the "new methods" of sociology for understanding the relationship between media and their consumers. It was only by the mid-1970s that several leading critics began to question the practice of "reducing spectators to statistical averages," which appeared to them as all that sociology had accomplished over the past decade. By this time, however, the sociologist's position had already eclipsed that of the critic, in no small measure owing to the Soviet film
* Stanislav Govorukhin, "Sem' grekhov kino," Sovetskaia kul'tura (hereafter SK), 10 September 1988: 4.
s Donald R. Kelley provides an analysis of the main components of "developed socialism" in The Politics of Developed Socialism: The Soviet Union as a Post-Industrial State (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986), 4. Although the term "developed socialism" did not become an official designation until it was enshrined in the 1977 Soviet franiiriirinn rk<» lmmi«» nf
FROM SPECTATOR TO "DIFFERENTIATED" CONSUMER
319
industry's greater emphasis on such entertainment films that Govorukhin
and DurqY had pionrprrrT.--......
In addition to Pirates, the Ail-Union State Institute for Cinematography (VGIK) classmates Govorukhin and Durov collaborated on their graduation project, the successful Soviet mountain film Vertikal' (1967), starring the popular Taganka actor and future folk-music icon Vladimir Vysotskii. Theit particular mode of merging popular male youth trends (from mountain climbing in the 1960s to martial arts in the 1970s) with the nascent adventure genre demonstrated the pair's penchant for gauging box-office success, even as the two filmmakers became the subjects of intellectuals' scotn. Govorukhin's response to such scorn caused him to favor the film sociologist's methods of interpretation over that of the film critic. Film sociology imagined a new discursive relationship between text and spectator, which the aesthetic foundation of the two Govorukhin/Durov collaborations clearly predicated and necessitated. Their films foregrounded a genre-driven iconography and the spectacle of young masculinity over direcr engagement with ideological or classic literary concerns. The shift from rhe strictly narrative-driven cinema i that Thaw directors and critics promoted to films that brought to the center its iconography also coincided with the diversification of filmmakers' own cultural background. Durov was born in 1937 in Ukraine's Donetsk region and started his adult life in the Soviet Air Force as an engineer, having graduated first from the Kazan Cadet Academy in 1955, where he first met Govorukhin. In I960, he completed the postgraduate Aviation Engineering School in Riga. Stanislav Govorukhin, born in 1936, entered the Geology Department at Kazan University in 1953. After graduating in 1958, Govorukhin immediately abandoned his profession and received a technical position at a local television station in Kazan. Eventually, he entered VGIK in 1964 along with Durov, who had recently completed his four-year term in the air force.6 Social-science discourse and the aesthetic and economic principles that it promoted found a comfortable union with these two figures who possessed technical backgrounds. By contrast, earlier filmmakers tended to have a different kind" of background as film critics, that is, they had either a VGIK education or experience in other art and literature programs,......   _ .
In this article, I attempt to demonstrate, through the Durov/Govorukhin collaboration, that the sociological approach to understanding the relationship between text and spectator tiansformed both the aesthetics of Soviet cinema and what media consumers came to expect when going to the movies. I do not pretend here to be exhaustive in my examination of popular cinema during the 1960s and 1970s.7 Rather, I locate the significance of the Durov/
6 "Anfas i v profil': Stanislav Govotukhin," Kinograf, no. 5 (1998): 74-78.
7 Several treatments of popular cinema in the Soviet Union have appeared recently, in addition to rhe now classic works bv Denise YonnpWood and Richard Srires (cited helowV
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Govorukhin collaboration in the two filmmakers' ability to articulate, both on film and in the press,va.sociological approach to media consumption\ Nonetheless, Vertikal' and Pirates are highly dissimilar films. The former was a black and white film, made by two students working with a shoestring budget and (at that time) little-known actors. More than generic popularity, Vertikal' achieved what we might now label "cult" status, in its association with the post-Thaw music subculture of educated urban youths.8 Pirates was a blockbuster (boevik in Russian), filmed on location in Crimea in lavish color, with a budget to afford special effects, stunts, and the actor Nikolai Eremenko in the lead role.9 Like Chapaev, Pirates-was intended to be "cinema for everyone" (kino dlia vsekb). Yet even the differences from Vertikal' to this later blockbuster follow a shift in sociological understandings of audiences over the course of the long 1970s, shifts of which the filmmakers were only too aware and to which they gave ready support. Thus the filmic texts themselves must be understood within the critical culture in which they existed and alongside the development of film sociology as a discipline.
This article traces the development of film sociologxin the Sovier Union together with one of its effects: the legitimization of entertainment cinema. I first examine the growing disiflusibnment^vmh'the "format arid' ideologi-""" cal methods of professional film criticism, then move to an analysis of the peculiar response to Durov and Govorukhin's anti-critical film, Vertikal'. This film raised issues at the root of the campaign against traditional film criticism: How were people to understand audience desire as an independent variafete^rather than as rundamentally subject to the ontological quality of the filmic text? How do consumers of the text create meaning apart from critics' concerns with the text alone? The central section of the article confronts the sociological theory of "differentiation" that developed in the Soviet Union To helpoeal with mese questions for the film industry during the 1960s and 1970s. In conclusion, I return to Durov and Govorukhin as they collaborated on Pirates of the 20th Century, a film I see as one of the principal results of Goskino's growing interest in ticket sales. While film sociology emerged as a way to understand how and why audiences made
Leonid Gaidai's Comedies and El'dar Riazanov's Satires of the 1960s," Slavic Review 62, 3 (2003): 455-72; and Kristin Roth-Ey, "Mass Media and the Remaking of Soviet Culture, I950s-1960s" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2003).
8 Thanks to Thomas Lahusen for helping me conceptualize Vertikal' as a "cult film,"
9 In contemporary Russian, boevik more closely approximates the American genre of "action." I use the term more loosely, primarily because critics were srill trying to understand its meaning during the 1970s. Perhaps the firsr extensive examination of boeviki came from Maia Tutovskaia in her 1979 article, "Pochemu zritel' khodit v kino (Neteoreticheskic za-metki)," in Zhanry kino, ed. Valerii Fomin (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979), 138-54. There she says that boevik is not a genre per se, because it is orienred toward only one issue—the "box office." In this formulation, boeviki could be adventure films like Pirates or melodramas like Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.
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certain evaluations, films like Pirates represented a decreasing concern with matters outside of "box office" success and provoked the criticism that this subdiscipline was approaching a capitalist theory of marketing.
When scholars began reevaluating Soviet cinema's history in the early 1990s, a few dominant trends quickly emerged. Along with a critical and documentary analysis of the oppressive qualities of the Brezhnev-era film industry and the resurrection of the period's "dissident" geniuses came a flurry of treatments of Thaw cinema.10 The most extensive of these included Vitalii Troianovskii's edited, two-volume Kinematograf ottepeli (Filmmaking of the Thliw7T996, 2002) and Josephine Woll's Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw, both focusing on Soviet auteurs, their conflicrs with the state, and their aesthetic concerns." Scholars have also examined the phenomenon of popular cinema in the Soviet Union—in relation to the 1920s and 1930s with Denise Youngblood's Movies for the Masses (1992), and mote broadly in Richard Stites's Russian Popular Culture (1992).'2 These works establish the existence of a "politics of entertainment" that repositions Soviet cinema's great men within the context of economic stability for the domestic film industry and rhe authorities' concern for public taste. The latter works reflected a general movement away from auteurist studies ot its histotical equivalent of traditional intellectual history and toward the exploration of public experience with the text, in addition to questions of how knowledge itself was produced."
I hope to extend these concerns in histotical studies to the Brezhnev petiod. The cinema of developed socialism was an entettainment cinema. It was also a high-art cinema and a cinema entrenched with didactic ideological messages. Between the Thaw's end and what George Faraday called the "revolt of the filmmakers" during the eatly years of perestroika, Goskino's film production strategies were geared parricularly towatd satisfying spectators' "aesthetic needs."'4 Along with this producrion goal came a unique understanding of the film consumet, one that eroded earlier textual constructions
10 See Valerii Fomin, Kino i vlast': Sovetskoe kino, 1965—1985 gody (Moscow: Materik, 1996).
" Vitalii Troianovskii, ed., Kinematograf ottepeli (Moscow: Marerik, 1996, 2002); Josephine
Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (New York: 1. B. Tauris, 2000).
12 Denise Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Richard Stiles, Russian Popular Culture:
Entertainment and Society since /.90(? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
" See also Roth-Ey, "Mass Media," and the series of articles on Russian blockbusters in
Slavic Review (,2, 3 (2003): 441-524.
M George Faraday, Revolt of the Filmmakers: The Struggle for Artistic Autonomy and the Fall of the Soviet Film Industry (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).
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/ of the spectator {zritel') that favored the knowledge of film critics, and in-; stead promoted a socio-demographic analysis of the audience that supported i sociological research. While the "nonconformist" directors and critics who assumed control of the industry by 1987 (after the Fifth Congress of the Cinematographers Union on 13-15 May 1986) were perfectly willing to return to high-art cinema's "centralized cultural text," others like Govorukhin were less eager to appease a group that had always looked down on the production of popular cinema.
As Pirates of the 20th Century made clear to many people in the Soviet Union in 1980, a film's status and meaning could shift from being an artistic object or a propaganda vehicle to an item of consumption. Valerii Kichin satirized the film's box-office significance in a comic published in Literaturnaia gazeta on 10 June 1981, titled, "Who's Next for a Ticket?" picturing a long line of people in the shape of a snake.15 While critics found such films as Pirates endemic of an emerging Soviet "mass culture," the "new science" of audience research gave voice to this snake-like mass.16 Whereas Soviet film : scholars had articulated a deterministic quality to the relationship between ! film and spectator, believing that spectators were subjects of a given cinematic ; text, sociology dismissed such determinism and helped establish the specta-1 tor as an independent social subject. The sodoJo^Qal^jj^dJgrri's implications served to question cinema's role as a viable organ of political and social indoctrination. The film spectator's establishment as an object of sociological analysis in the mid-1960s would highlight a renewed attempt by cultural authorities to uncover objective knowledge about individuals and social groups in the Soviet Union. This new emphasis on objectivity in turn endangered the kinoved's role as the producer and interpreter oFcultural knowledge.
In Desperately Seeking the Audience, Ien Ang argues that audience research must be understood as a form of symbolic politics. She understood the discipline as a discourse that sought to control actual audiences while serving to legitimize programming decisions within a media bureaucracy. Ang states that, in distinguishing between the "audience as market" and the "audience as public," media institutions increasingly viewed them as "taxonomic collectives."17 In the Soviet Union, sociologists referred to this methodology of constructing taxonomies as its "typological approach," but unlike in the West, they had the_Qaiticular problem of reconciling the growing demand to ^roduxeasolid "formula for success" for fihTidistribution with maintaining
' the cinema's mission ot cultural and political enlightenment._
"'*" Soviet cinema's traditional goal for enlightenment worked in tandem with how workers in the culture industry imagined their relationship to and
323
15 Valerii Kichin, "Kto poslednii za biletomi" Literaturnaia gazeta, 10 June 1981: 8.
16 O. F. Nechai, Ekran i my (Minsk: Nauka i tekhnika, 1971), 3.
17 len Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience (London: Routledge, 1991), 2-14, 33.
FROM SPECTATOR TO "DIFFERENTIATED* CONSUMER_
conception of actual spectators. Authorities viewed film screenings tobeje-gitimate cultural events and, indeed, necessary components of public life, sociology of cinema helped erode this conception gradually, as spectatorship came to signify something more akin to consumerism. The film consumer 'was a haunting figure In the USSR, a country where discourse tended to view him/her as the subject of capitalist "mass culture." Nonetheless, its discursive presence would only grow with time. In 1971, Nikolai Lebedev, the "father of Soviet film criticism," used the words zritel' (spectator/viewer) and potrebitel' (consumer) interchangeably in one of his many essays on film sociology.18 Lebedev had taught the yearly introductory seminar on audience research at VGIK since 1962, for which several textbooks freely employed the term potrebitel' for the subject and potreblenie (consumption) for how that subject interacted with media.1'' The sociologist Aleksandr Ianov stated in 1972 that audience research "consists of the study of the cinema consumer [kinopotrebitel'] ,"20 Nonetheless, Lebedev and film sociologists on the whole affirmed that cinema's consumer essence did not contradict its enlightenment goal.
The subdiscipline of audience research offers a particularly important perspective on the period, given its integration within an industry that has traditionally had very different means for producing knowledge about its subject. Furthermore, and perhaps more important, the sociology of cinema was unique for producing a discourse not about production but of consumption. An understanding of such a "scientific" discourse will help our understanding of how elites addressed individuals as consumers and how subjects felt entitled as such during the Brezhnev period. Whether deeming consumption and entertainment as healthy, frivolous, or merely necessary, sociology's attempt to approach the issue as a problem set reinforced new political and social relations in the Soviet Union.
The two films on which Govorukhin and Durov collaborated represented small victories for spectacular entertainment in that they articulated the desires of a particularly active section of the cinema-going public (adolescent boys) and helped recover (albeit briefly) the Soviet film industry from the downward spiral that began in the early 1970s. The very existence of Vertikál' and Pirates indicated a movement away from what Světlana Boym
18 N. A. Lebedev, "O konkretno-sotsiologicheskikh issledovaniiakh kinematografa," Kinematografsegodnia: Sbornik states, no. 2 (1971): 269. For the claim that Lebedev was the "fathet of Soviet film criticism," see Viral i i Zhdan. introduction to Lebedev, Vnímáme kinematograf: O kino, kinovedenii. Stať i, issledovaniia, vystupleniia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1974), 3. |l) See, for example, Sergei losifian, Kino i molodezhnaia auditoriia: Uchebnoe posobie (Moscow: VGIK, 1979), 19; and losifian, Zrelishchnye iskusstva i studenchestva (Moscow: VGIK, 1981), 19-21.
20 Aleksandr Ianov, "Kino i nauko-tekhnicheskaia revoliutsiia: Sotsiologicheskie zametki." flCno. 11 (1972): 88.
L
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called "the Russian literature-centered empire, with its centralized cultural text."21 Boym, however, perceived this challenge to high culture as particular to a post-Soviet context and not within the "common places" of Soviet social sciences in their relation to art and art criticism. The Belorussian film critic O. F. Nechai suggested that the spectator was no longer analogous to the citizen but represented something else when subjected to the sociologist's gaze.22 That something else was the motion-picture consumer, the understanding of whom is also revealed in the Govorukhin/Durov collaboration, which textualizes the complexities of how media consumption was imagined during the Brezhnev era.
This correlation of the spectator with the consumer was aided in no small measure by ideas for economic reform of the industry beginning in the mid-1960s. Projects for linking box-office returns to honorariums and bonuses emerged as part of a general economic "restructuring" that resulted in the Central Committee's and Council of Ministers' 1965 joint resolution, "On the Improvement of Planning and Strengthening of Economic Stimulation in Industrial Production," This major reform, associated with the economist Evsei Liberman and Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin, stressed elements of market relations within a socialist economy. Even before the 1965 resolution, however, notions of kbozraschet during the 1950s urged greater self-reliance and responsibility in industrial production more broadly. For filmmakers and studios, this initially meant not so much a concern with commercial success but a prescription to fulfill their civic obligations to a wide audience. Films not only needed to be comprehensible to as many people as possible but also to attract those people to the movie theater. If filmmakers and studios failed to accomplish their goals, not only in film production but also in distribution, Goskino would hold them accountable.23
The 1965 resolution, however, stressed sales and profits in particular, and de-emphasized gross output, while also focusing on labor "stimulation" through material compensation. It proposed "to place labor cost in industry in direct dependence not only on the results of fa worker's] individual labor, but also on the general results of an enterprise's work." Awards and bonuses to workers should be based more on the enterprise's profits, the
" Sverlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 2. " Nechai, Ekran i my, 6.
See Abraham Katz, The Politics of Economic Reform in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1972), 30-31, 58. Katz writes that, even under Stalin, kbozraschet was promoted as a means to empower industrial managers to make production more efficient through capital investment in better technology. Within the economy more broadly, khozraschet implied support for "economic methods" and the "law of value." Duting the Khrushchev period, khozraschet took on the additional meaning of devolution of real authority to local enterprises.
FROM SPECTATOR TO "DIFFERENTIATED" CONSUMER_325
resolution argued.24 At least five years before the resolution, officials within the film industry and in the Cinematographers Union began advocating a profit-sharing plan at Soviet film studios. A 1961 Ukrainian project, for example, suggested that a "part of a [film's] profit go toward the incentive for good work at studios and for the introduction of new technology."" After the 1965 resolution, industry officials further pushed for economic reform. In a report to the Council of Ministers in August 1966, State Committee on Cinematography Chairman Aleksei Romanov and First Secretary of the Union Lev Kulidzhanov focused on increasing the "commercial effectiveness" of the "only art that gives us a steady, continual return [on our investment]." Romanov and Kulidzhanov suggested the correlation of a film studio's profit with the production's box-office receipts.26 In the early 1970s, further reforms also sought to structure workers' pay around box-office returns.27
Plans for industry reforms, however, warned of going too far in this di-rection and of ignoring a film's ideological and artistic quality when only focusing on the quantitative aspects of reception. The Ukrainian plan argued thatT>ay scales and profit-sharing would need to be further differentiated according to a film's type.28 Although audience research was still in its infancy in the mid-1960s, studio management recognized the contradiction of demands for "serious" films on politically "hot" topics and the sophisticated films of Soviet auteurs, both of which typically failed at the box office, and the demands for genre productions that subsidized the former. It is difficult to assess the effects of this teformist mood in the film industry. In her disser-ration on mass media during the Thaw, Kristin Roth-Ey states that nothing came of these reforms. Despite the presence of foreign genre films and a few domestic equivalents that "bankrolled" the industry, cinema remained completely outside of a supply-and-demand model.29 While this is true in many respects, there is no doubt that profit considerations became an ever-growing
24 "O sovershenstvovanii planirovaniia i usilenii ekonomicheskogo stimulirovaniia pro-myshlennogo proizvodstva," 4 October 1965, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi atkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI) f. 2944 (Goskino documents), op. 1, d. 155, 11. 122-30. 21 Letter from Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Culture Svitlana Kirillova to Soviet Deputy Ministet of Culture Nikolai Danilov, "Predlozheniia o merakh dal'neishego uluchsheniia or-ganizarsii proizvodstva khudozhestvennykh fil'mov," January 1961, Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv litetatury i mystetstva Ukrainy (TsDAMLMU) f 655 (Documents of the Union of Ukrainian Cinematographers), op. 1, d. 198,1. 108.
:<' "Ob"iasnitel'naia zápiska k proektu postanovleniia Sověta mimstrov SSSR 'Ob uluchsh-enii upravleniia, sovershenstvovaniia, planirovaniia i usilenii ekonomicheskogo stimulirovaniia v otrasliakh kinematografii,'" 3 August 1966, in Kinematograf ottepeli: Dokumenty i svidetel'stva, ed. Valerii Fomin (Moscow: Materik, 1998), 76.
}~ SeeG. M. Lifshits, in Problémy sotsíologii kino: Materiály zasedaniia Sověta po koordinatsii nauchno-issledovatel skikh rabot v oblasti kinovedeniia (Moscow: Goskino, 1978), 88.
28 "O merakh po vypolneniiu sentiabrskogo Plenuma TsK KPSS," TsDAMLMU f. 670 (Dovzhenko Studio documents), op. 1, d. 1948,1. 60.
29 Roth-Ey, "Mass Media," 105.
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factor in determining pay categories for films into the 1980s, especially after Romanov's removal as chairman of Goskino in 1972 in favor of the "normal-izer" Filipp Ermash^0 At the same time, the only studio operating on a purely suppfy-and-demand model was the Experimental Film Studio at Mosfil'm, which Grigorii Chukhrai founded in 1964 and which lasted until 1973. The Experimental Studio was to be one of the testing grounds for Libermanesque economic reforms, along with Khrushchev's garment factories and the many other "experimental" enterprises, mostly in light industry, that sprang up in the mid-1960s. After the studio's closure on Ermash's orders, its "experiments" were increasingly integrated into the industry at large, while many others operated on a purely unofficial basis.
In locjkmg^at marker trends for the domestic film industry, we notice a sharpfupturn fa attend.jt"~ A"'iiyl rhf mH- tr late 1960^ followed by a
decline iri"1969-7(). th4^m^ince^l945, which continued into the latter part of the 1970s (see Figures 1 an3"2). In emphasizing responsibility to a market, Goskino increasingly turned to social scientists like economists and sociologists, along with spectators themselves, for solutions that would make cinema a viable enterprise. Beginning in th^early 196^such ideas coalesced in the I mass-circulation film magazine Sov^tttkrdh with its annual "competition" \ (konkurs), later to be a model for more rigorous audience research. The konkurs was a forum for readers tojubmit their favorite films and actors/actresses of the previous year. The(guestionnaireJalso asked participants to list their sex, age, "social position," and residence, which served as a guide for evaluating which spectator "types" preferred which "types" of films..The novelty of the_ konkurs was in its means^for eyjiluaring Jims externaJ_to their textual .qualities. Through the konkurs, and its propensity to highlight foreign production^ Sovetskii ekran articulated elements of economic competition within a closed market system. Competition occurred on many levels alongside the preference for foreign or domestic production, which included preferences for different genres and competition with television. An article in Sovetskii ekran in 1970 stated that "we should not be indifferent observers to this competition," but that film distribution organs were guilty of promoting bad taste in young people with their frequent privileging of West European and American productions. The magazine suggested that a diversity of institutional interests existed during the Brezhnev period, the participants of which were negotiating issues of aesthetic taste, economics, and consumer need.31
30 At a 1978 union plenum, Filipp Ermash mentioned creating a "normal" film industry in the Soviet Union, which he almost certainly connected to Hollywoodization. He argued: "The struggle for a high quality of cinema production is mdissolubly connected with concerns about its effective use. The scale of the audience here is the decisive denominator" ("O khodevypolneniiaresheniiXXVs'ezdaKPSS..." IK, no. 7 [1978]: 18). " One article spoke of "young spectators' natural needs for entertainment and diversionary spectacle." See "Chetvero iz piaterykh," Sovetskii ekran (hereafter SE), no. 1 (1970): 3.
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Figure 1. Total Attendance Figures in the Soviet Union, 1966-80 (billions)
1966
1968 1970
1972
1974
1976
1978 1980
Figure 2. Attendance Rate per Individual, 1966-80 (no. visits per year) 25
1966
1968
1970
1972
1974
1976
1978
1980
Source: Tsentraľnoe statisticheskoe upravlenie pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR, Narodnoe khoziai-stm SSSR (Moscow, 1966-80).
The Vertikál' Phenomenon: A Response to Thaw Cinema and the Critical Establishment
Audiences saw the first Govorukhin/Durov collaboration, Vertikál', in the year that most scholars argue signaled the end of the cultural Thaw.32 In the period between Stalin's death and the^watMshed_ofT%8A literary critics played a significant role in the cultural politics of de-Stalinization. From Vladimir Pomerantsev's "On Sincerity in Literature" in the December 1953 issue of Novyi mir to Vladimir Nekrasov's "On Words Great and Simple" in the May 1959 issue of Iskusstvo kino, literary (and film) criricism has most
32 Woll, Real'Images, 225.
r
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PROM SPECTATOR TO "DIFFERENTIATED" CONSUMER
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. A
clearly articulated what we understand as the "literary politics" of the Thaw. Recently, scholars like Qenis Kozlov and Kristin Roth-Ey have reminded us that there were also readers (and spectators) who participated in the Thaw-era politics of culture.33 These readers, and the critics themselves, were continually responding, oftentimes negatively, to critics' roles as producers and interpreters of knowledge.
Letters from Sovetskii ekran readers and statements from filmmakers, workers in distribution, and critics expressed intense unhappiness with the cultural work that criticism performed, precisely because it seemed out of touch with prevailing popular opinion. Writing in Sovetskaia kul'tura, Elena Bauman asked why audiences en masse flocked to entertainment films, while "critics always use the [same] word with nuanced scorn?"34 During a 1967 conference titled "Cinema—Art and Entertainment," Lebedev argued that, at its origin, cinema functioned as an atraktsion?'' He stated that the "screen satisfied a side of [the spectators'] need for spectacular entertainment, just as did the marketplace attraction, the circus, or soccer and hockey games." Lebedev not only provided a means to discuss box-office success but also reconstituted the 1920s enlightenment/entertainment debates with his reconciliation with entertainment as a viable mode of cinematic production.36 Lebedev, however, positioned entertainment as a form of film consumprion only for certain "types" of cinema spectators, which constituted a new element to the debate. Others, he claimed, were still prepared to engage with more serious films.3'Because each film could have "its own" spectator, there was no internal contradiction between enlightenment and entertainment, and no need to favor one over the other. While not all critics or sociologists would agree with Lebedev's particular distinction between audiences who enjoyed entertainment and those who engaged with "serious" films, the attempt to group spectators and place meaning on these groups had achieved some resonance by the time Vertikal' was released in 1967.
With a weak central narrative, Vertikal' relies more on pop-culture representations—such as Vysotskii's image, his music, and mountain-climbing—for its appeal with audiences. The film is not, in fact, goal-oriented, nor does it rely on a spontaneity/consciousness plot. While the sports film genre, to which the film marginally belonged, commonly
J
" Denis Kozlov, "The Readers of Novyi mir, 1945-1970: Twentieth-Century Experience and Soviet Historical Consciousness" (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronio, 2005); Roih-Ey, "Mass Media."
34 Elena Bauman, "Razvlekatel'nyi film, ktoza?" SfC, 18 February 1967:3.
35 Lebedev, "O konkretno-sotsiologicheskikh issledovaniiakh kinematografa," 255.
36 See Youngblood, "The Entertainment or Enlightenment Debate," in Movies for the Masses 35-49.
37 N. A. Lebedev, "Fil 'my sozdaiutsia dlia zritelei," SK, 12 December 1967; repr. in Vnimanie, kinematograf, 360-63. „ i
V,  I *l 3      V       ~" ■■ :
employed the formula from competition to victory, Vertikál' relies on the display of physically fit male bodies as an end in itself. Vysotskii played the role of Volodia, a radio operator who remains at rhe base of the mountain, in case of emergency, with the group's doctor, played by Larisa Luzhina. Meanwhile the rest of the group—which includes Gennadii, Rita, and Sasha—ascend the mountain under the leadership of mountain-climbing veteran Lomov. On the second day of their ascent, Gennadii receives a call from Volodia, who informs him that a cyclone is headed their way and orders the group to return to the base immediately. For reasons unknown, Gennadii chooses ro ignore the call and proceeds with the others to the top. As the cyclone arrives, Sasha is wounded by a small avalanche. He and Rita stay behind in a cave, as Lomov and Gennadii attempt to get help at the base. Gennadii eventually loses courage and refuses to proceed further, as Lomov alone makes it back to the tent where Volodia and Larisa anxiously await the climbers' return. They rescue the other three and return to the city. t
Vertikál', although a leader in distribution for 1968 (32.8 million people / saw it), was virtually ignored by the film press. Sovetskii ekran published , Vysotskii's theme song, "Proshchanie s gorami" (Farewell to the Mountains), in late 1968 but provided no promotion of the picture or plot analysis. Sovetskaia kul'tura and a handful of local dailies around the country published short reviews, which focused on the absence of chatacter development and other narrative insufficiencies. The critic Evgenii Šimonov complained more generally that the plots in mountain-themed films were already completely familiar to the spectator in 1968, and the Vertikál' crew tailed to demonstrate any originality in this area.38 Before the 1970s, very few filmmakers were willing to prioritize a genre-based iconography over narrative developmenr. Artists, critics, even political authorities believed in the ontology of good taste and in the story's quality and comptehensibility as the primáty requisites for acceptable cinema. They also thought such "light" genres as adventure and melodrama represented potential thteats to the central narrative.39 Sevetal features of rhe film demonsrrate the development of the filmmakers' unique popular aesthetic. Although the directors found it difficult to explain why individuals like Gennadii act in a certain way, in effect eroding Vertikal"s narrative continuity, features that were external to plot and character development actually explain why this film was so successful.
Despite the absence of discussion of Vertikal' as an acceptable artistic object, the film was praised and criticized in other venues. In May 1968, for example, V. E. Potapenko and A. S. Cherniaev wrote a scathing critique
18 Evgenii Šimonov, "Ekho minuvshei voiny," SE, no. 16 (1970): 3.
35 Aleksandr Prokhorov argues that Leonid Gaidai's comedies of the 1960s were among the first Soviet films after the death of the avant-garde to break from narrative conventions. S-c his "Cinema of Attractions versus Narrative Cinema."
U O-*
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of youth clubs where adolescents were reported to be singing Vysotskii's songs from the film. More positive, however, was N. P. Cherepanova's interview with Vysotskii in Sportivnaia zhizn' Rossii, where the bard discussed mountain-climbing's transcendental quality as a sport. Vysotskii stated that Vertikál' was a film about cultivating masculine individuality. "It seems to me," he told the interviewer, "that, of all types of sports, mountain-climbing tends to have more of a moral effect on the individual."40 Although their films enjoyed little acclaim from film critics, Govorukhin and Durov found more particularized spaces for successfully promoting their genre-based iconography.
Soviet critical culture, in both its "liberal" and its "conservative" incarnations during the Thaw, ascribed to films certain types of meaning. The fact that critics literally had nothing to say, qualitatively, about the film meant that other—quantitative—methods needed to be available to evaluate and understand its success with certain "types" of audiences. Vertikál' gave evidence that certain types of spectators preferred such a film and that it could be promoted in tandem with other facets of youth culture. Rather than the specific features of Vertikál', its importance was contained in the particular dimensions of its success, which could be gauged socio-demographically with such questionnaires as Sovetskii ekran and sociologists wete promoting. At the same time, there were more than a few cautionary notes regarding this collection of audience data, f- Aleksandr Karaganov, a film critic well connected to the industry hier-\ archy and the CPSU Central Committee, advocated cautious quantitative research but saw in sociology the danger of using audience evaluations to construct a "formula for success" akin to marketing in capitalist countries. Karaganov advocated paying attention to the study of audience desires but also warned, "There are filmmakers who study the audience's habits only to ! exploit them. They please the audience instead of respecting it. They attend to [obsluzhivaiut] the audience instead of serving [sluzhat] it [or] treat it as a silly fellow amused by common toys and spectacles."41
At the same time, the numerous possibilities for the "new science" struck many in the film (and television) industry as nothing short of revolutionary. Vladimir Azarin, a television screenwriter, marveled at the study of audience taste conducted in Western Europe and argued that, for diverse genres to develop in the Soviet Union, one must first be able to predict the response of each. Sound advice indeed for promoting such films as Vertikál', whose audiences could be very different from that of the re-release of Ivan Pyr'ev's classic 1949 Kubanskie Kazaki (Cossacks from the Kuban'). To understand
40 V. E. Potapenko and A. S. Cherniaev, "Esli drug okazalsia vdrug...." Sovetskaia Rossiia, 31 May 1968: 17; N. P. Cherepanova. "Luchshe got mogut byť tol'ko gory," Sportivnaia zhizn' Rossii, no. 5 (1968): 23.
41 A. V. Karaganov, "Kino i zntelV' SE, no. 6 (1965): 3.
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audience "psychology," Azarin claimed, one must conduct a "deep and wide study of the spectator."42 For Azarin, advocating audience research was a "means for codifying a scientific basis for perception, which film criticism could neither discover nor even had an interest in trying. As the film critic Neia Zorkaia put it, critics had failed in their duty to assess the Soviet spectator's individual character. The shortsightedness of such film criticism cliches as, "the artist entrusts to the audience," "the audience becomes an active participant in the events," and the most common, "our viewer does not accept" marked for Zorkaia the importance of objective standards in evaluating how spectators perceived what they were seeing on the screen.43 According to such self-critique, film theory simply did not possess the methods for gathering knowledge about audiences.
Although not directly related to promoting audience research, the 1970 Central Committee resolution "On Literary and Art Criticism" confirmed what many had previously claimed about the shallowness of tecent criticism and theory. "Many articles, surveys, reviews bear a shallow character, ... wHicK testifies to an inability to correlate the phenomenon of art with life."44 "Later, critics who supported sociological research used the 1970 resolution as a source; of legitimacy for the conunuedjj^^ffawífences. Critics, wrote '"ívgénii Veitsman, a film critic himself, no longer interacted with the society around them and functioned as a self-contained and alienated group. The resolution, he argued, "forces us again to explain the role of a sociological approach to art." Sociology, in contrast to criticism, attempted to explore how "consumption" and "production" of the cinema interacted, whereas the former could only establish the art object's autonomy.45
Anastasiia lunisova of the Leningrad Department for Film Distriburion complained that critics and distributors spoke completely different languages. In her "quick-tempered defense of 'average' films," lunisova argued thar it was impossible for almost 200 films a year to all be of the highest quality. She accused critics of "snobbism," claiming that all films released in the Soviet Union have something good about them. "Here I get to one of the most important questions for distribution: it is no longer an issue of what to show, but to whom to show, and how to show." lunisova promoted the idea that each film could have "its own" spectator, which justified its existence apart from supposedly subjective notions of quality. She argued that sociology was one of the greatest recent innovations, and distribution could no longer exist without its involvement. Moreover, she claimed that
42 Vladimir Azarin, "Za kruglym stolom—televizionisty," IK, no. 3 (1965): 62.
4' N. M. Zorkaia, "O shtampakh zritel'skogo vospriiatiia," Voprosy kinoiskusstva, no. 9
(1966): 105.
44 "O liceraturno-khudozhestvennoi kritikc: Postanovlenie TsK KPSS," IK no. 3 (1970): I. 44 Evgenii Veitsman, "Eshche o sotsiologii kinoiskusstva: K postanovke problémy,' IK, no. 7 (1972): 82, 87-88.
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the greatest value of audience research was its vindication for workers in distribution. Sociologists—and not critics—had come to the realization that service (obsluzhivanic), which pointed toward the viewing context, was just as important to cinema's functioning as the politically and artistically devoted filmmaker.''6
Origins and Development of "Differentiation" Theory
According toLebedev in 1971, audience differenriationTtepncerned the "de-^velopxiient of scientific audience typologies [for] differentiated film screenings to morejrffeaiyely satisfy the cultural-aesthetic needs of different population groups."47 This articulation of "objective" differences in the Soviet popula-•   tioh was the contribution more generally of Soviet sociology, an academic ! -discipline that had only emerged by the late 1950s in the USSR. From the Y to the early 1950s, which saw the greatest development of the disci-
. pline at the American and West European academy, sociology was determined to be an essentially "bourgeois" science in socialist countries. When ^b'mited quantitative research was permitted under Khrushchev^the focus was on time management at the workplace. Soon thereafter, studies of "pop--ular opinion" emerged under Boris Grushin's Public Opinion Institute at the Komsomol"skaiapravda editorial office. In this approach, the model was clearly "Western" sociology, although filtered through prior developmenrs in the discipline taking place in Eastern Europe"48 In following earlier studies"of public "opinion conducted in Poland and Hungary, the institute distributed questionnaires about such diverse topics- as foreign policy, standard of living, and reading practices.49 According to Vladimir Shlapentokh, sociologists were motivated by a desire to know what Soviet citizens thought about the government and how they understood their daily lives. Although connected to similar intentions of discovering what ordinary people thought about the mass media, audience tesearch took on a life of its own, largely because the film industry was developing into a profit-minded enterprise in the 1960s and -1970s. According to Shlapentokh, as the discipline gained greater legitimacy during the 1970s, it became more ideologically pure and, in fact, "offered very little in the way of quality empirical research."50 Although not without qualifications, thisjoajrative follows the trajectory of audience research. Tfje typological approach^rr^s major contribution of audience research to
Anastasiia Iunisova, "Voprosy k sebe i k chitatcliam," SE, no. 12 (1969): 1. _.Lebedev, "O konkretno-sotsiologicheskikh issledovaniiakh kinemarografa," 278. Vladimir Shlapentokh, The Politics of Sociology in the Soviet Union (Boulder, CO: \ Westview, 1987), 3, 15-16. ¥* Elizabeth Ann Weinberg, The Development of Sociology in the Soviet Union (London: ^-Apwledge, 1974), 82-83.
w Shlapentokh, Politics of Sociology, 47, 167-68.
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the discipline—was defined in 1967/68 and changed little until its rupture a decade later.
The use of sociological methods to study film audiences was not new in the 1960s, as many studies appeared in Russia before the Revolution and continued until the late 1920s. Accusations of "formalism" halted audi-ence research by the early 1930s, however, and nothing like ir would appear-for three more-decades. Research resurfaced in Moscow under Goskino's and VGIK's joint tutelage, in Sverdlovsk at the Ural Science Center, and in Estonia at Tartu" University. In 1963, the Cinematographers Union Bureau of Propaganda created the Office of Audience Studies (OAS) under _ V. I. Volkov's leadersjugjjB. 1.967, the Sverdlovsk group, which Lev Kogan headed, joined social scientists from the Scientific Research Institute on Cinema Photography (NIKFI) Cinema and Spectator Laboratory, which, together with the All Union Research Institute on Cinematography (VNI1-kinematografii), became the aegis under which almost all audience research was conducted throughout the 1970s.
The consolidation of audience research within these two institutes eventually eliminated the divergent research agendas of media and art sociologists working within different academic environments and intellectual traditions of the 1960s. A. L. Vakhemetsa and S. I. Plotnikov were initially associated with the Tartu cultural studies scholars, and N. A. Lebedev with the film critical establishment working at VGIK. Similarly, Kogan's group pursued its quantitative research in Sverdlovsk with a large degree of autonomy from Goskino.51 The two major volumes of film sociology that came out in 1968—Vakhemetsa and Plotnikov's Cbelovek.i iskusstvo (Man and Art)_ and Kogan's Kino i zritel' (Cinema and Spectator)—were published by intellectual rather than technical presses (Mysl' and Iskusstvo, respectively).,2 NIKFI was a technical research institute that worked primarily on development of materiel—film technology, cameras, projectors, and the like—a space far removed from the literature-dominated world of traditional criticism. The VNII institute was funded and controlled by Goskino and, as such, followed the indusrry's explicit agenda.
Man and Art and Cinema and Spectator appeared at the convergence of this consolidation and deserve particular attention for their key roles in the development of audience research's official methodology of "differentiation" and the "typological approach." Following Lebedev's and others' critique that film criticism had developed only a consistent means for discussing film aesthetics, Vakhemetsa and Plotnikov provided a mass communication theory
S1 Lev Kogan, "Issledovaniiakul'tury vparadigme kul'turnoi kommunikatsii," in Sotsiologiia v Rossii, ed. V. A. Iadov (Moscow: Inštitút sotsiologii RAN, 1998), 329-32. " A. L. Vakhemetsa and S. I. Plotnikov, Chelovek i iskusstvo (Problémy konkretno-sotsiologicheskikh issledovanii iskusstva) (Moscow: Mysľ, 1968); Lev Kogan, Kino i zritel': Opytsotsiologicheskogo issledovamia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968).
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that incorporated both the "situation of arr creation [SSI]," along with the "situation of art consumption [SPI]." Here, SPI was not approached as a clearly demarcated independent variable; rather, Vakhemetsa and Plotnikov argued that the consumption of cinematic "products" involved both subjective and objective factors, including the particular circumstances of consumption in addition to social identity and personal experience. The authors srated that, implicitly, "SPI does not exist if art production is an object of some mechanical manipulation, when the relationship between a person and an artistic production is founded on the basis of utilitarian interests."53 Instead, the art consumer must have the ability to evaluate the work, wherein affiliation with various social groups determines the precise nature of individual responses. According to Vakhemetsa and Plotnikov, evaluation is in essence an act of identifying oneself in relation to existing social categories and an assertion of individuality. "Evaluations," the authors claimed, "provide the individual with an inner balance and an aspiration toward having fulfilled one's responsibility."54 A film evaluation articulates the individual's selfhood, while unconsciously representing their social position. "Insofar as an individual spectator is a typical representative of a determined group of recipients," he or she will react in accordance wirh the rest of the group to determined sets of information.5''
! This formulation coexisted in the authors' theory of film consumption, | which intended mote genuinely individualized responses to films. Vakhemetsa and Plotnikov wrote: "Singular impressions always contain many moments ol subjectivity and chance. The circumstance makes any single impression richer and more differentiated ... [and] more incapable of completely explaining with generalities." They argued that each film essentially had "its" audience, each member of which provided his or her own evaluations.56 Vakhemetsa and Plotnikov's argument alluded to the growing cynicism with theoretical notions of the "ideal spectator" that Zorkaia, Lebedev, and others had recently dismissed as banal commonplaces. Man and Art instead positioned the critical establishment itself as merely another social group, whose taste was differentiated from other such groups as manual laborers, civil servants, and students.57 Kogan stated that his putpose as a film sociologist was to understand the individual's aesthetic needs and desires in order to smooth the distribution of Soviet films. Thus, while Vakhemetsa and Plotnikov were primarily interested in how films penetrate the "inner world" of a differentiated consumef mass, Kogan's project was more directly oriented toward practical matteis. In six cruestionnaires distributed between 1963 and 1966 throughout Sverdlovsk
B Vakhemetsa and Plotnikov, Chehvek i iskusstvo, 16. 54 Ibid., 19. * Ibid., 22. 56 Ibid., 20, 22. s' Ibid., 32-33.
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oblast, tesearchers asked about spectators' favorite films, actors, and actresses (in both Soviet and foreign productions) and correlated these responses based on age, education, and profession. In rhe later surveys, Kogan's team added the category of "sex" {pot) and asked pointed questions about television view-ership and its potential impact on cinema attendance. Although Cinema and Spectator reported nothing alarming about attendance rates in 1966—in fact, the growth rate for this year was higher rhan any since 1955—emphasis on attendance would inform much audience research throughout the 1970s, eventually eclipsing the more radical differentiation theoties that were predominantly interested in questions of subjectivity.58
Cinema and Spectator produced a profound effect on critics and future sociologists. Zorkaia called the monograph the "most serious, scientific soci-" ological study of the 1960s."5' Essentially in agreement with Vakhemetsa and Plotnikov with regard to spectators' choices differenriated according to "socio-economic position, worldview, tastes, and desires," Cinema and Spectator proposed that a combination of subjective and objective factors influenced a film's success.60 During the next decade, film sociologists' attempts to understand the dynamics of audience subjectivity apart from its textual construction became more closely associated with efforts to explain and solve the problem of declining attendance during the 1970s.
Kogan, however, already insisted on the primacy of distribution concerns when he constantly inserted in his study the necessity to plan the repertoire according to sociological findings. The difference that became evident as the 1970s sragnation of the film industry grew ever more apparent lay in the emphasis sociologists placed on the problem they claimed to have the methods to solve. In the 1960s, film sociologists were principally interested in understanding why certain types of spectators preferred certain type of films, like Vertikal', for which critics had failed to notice any artistic or ideological value. In the 1970s, with Kogan's Cinema and Spectator as the turning point, the / question became how to produce films that all "types" of spectators would enjoy, so that the industry could again stand on its own feet. Film sociology ' became a form of intellectual investment, which could inform the industry of how to exploit its capital most effectively. In this function, sociologists themselves gained a more hegemonic role in the gathering and interpretation of audience data. Autonomously produced studies, like the Sovetskii ekran competition, inevitably fell under the control of leading sociologists like Kogan and Furikov and, later, Igor' Rachuk and the NIKFI lab.
58 Kogan, Kino i zriteľ, 310-26.
5<1 N. M. Zorkaia, "Kinozriteľ shestidf siatykh godov," Voprosy kinoiskusstva, no. 13 (1971): 130.
60 Kogan, Kino i zriteľ, 9-10. Kogan had already established the importance of subjective factors of evaluation for a work of art in his first monograph, Khudozhestvennyi vkus: Opyt konkrimó^mTÚoiogicheskógolúlédovahiia. (Moscow: Mysl', 1966).
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337
Alongside lowering attendance overall, fan culture had also subsided by the 1970s. Perhaps the most evident expression of this was a loss of three-fifths of SEkonkurs respondents from 1966 to 1972. Sociologists accustomed to using the data in the konkurs to supporr rheir conclusions found that the popular study increasingly lacked representativeness and "methodological oversight." It was time for the professionals to step in. In 1971, SE's editorial board turned over management of the konkurs to the NIKFI lab. Perhaps drawing attention to the annual questionnaire's uselessness for distribution putposes, Editor-in-Chief Dmitrii Pisarevskii wrote that konkurs respondents generally chose "serious" films as their favorites, while films that they ignored became box-office successes. Indeed, the choices for "best film" from 1966 to 1970 were, without exception, films heavily promoted through official channels as rhe "best films" by the "best directors," while their box-office receipts were modest at best. After NIKFI took control in 1971, it changed the ; method by which participants evaluated films so that researchers could more 1 closely correlate socio-demographic groups with a more precise rating system. Although participation in the konkurs never approached the mid-1960s level, the reforms initiated by the NIKFI lab brought evaluations closer in line with box-office success.61 The move from editorial control to a NIKFI-• managed konkurs was endemic of sociology's growing power in relation to film criticism. The changes NIKFI made to the konkurs also were intended to confront declining attendance more direcrly.
At this moment when sociologists were achieving more authority in the film industry, critics began questioning what in fact they were accomplishing. Endemic of this new critique of the discipline, Zorkaia now wrote in a series of "side observations" that the new research field "has served neithet commercial nor creative putposes," and that differentiation theory has "been the pathos of all conversations in recent years," but seemingly without goals. While dispensing with the idea that there exists a "uniform" spectator, Zorkaia claimed that sociologists had given the cinema nothing to fill the gap.62 A founding member of the NIKFI lab, Mikhail Zhabskii, also complained in 1971 of the discipline's methodological weakness, emphasized more petsonal contact with the interview subjects, and discouraged anonymous questionnaires (the standard practice in most audience research).63 At their root, these complaints indicated disillusionment with a discipline that had initially promored undersranding audience subjecrivity; a discipline that could compensate for criticism's lack of understanding in this realm. Audience research initially attempted to re-formulate a concept
61 "Konkurs SE-7X? SE, no. 24 (1971): 18-20.
"2 Zorkaia. "Kinozrirel' shestidesiatykh godov," 134-35.
63 M. M. Zhabskii, "Printsipy metodiki standartizovannogo intcrv'iu v sotsioiogichcskikh issledovaniiakh," in Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia kinematografa, ed. I. A. Rachuk and Z. G. Kurorga (Moscow: NIKFI, 1971), 12-13.
of social categories duting a time when "prolétatian" lacked analytical force but theorizing the "individual" remained all too "boutgeois."
The film sociologist now proceeded along lines that might be more familiar to a markering major in business school, but one who was not even making the grade. As other NIKFI researchers and Goskino devoted more energy toward increasing attendance and recovering the mid-1960s profit margin, however, the pervasive critique of the "bourgeois sociology of marketing" seemed increasingly hypocritical. Igor' Rachuk, the NIKFI lab directot during the early 1970s, wrote that the purpose of sociological research was to give information for practical action.64 In their firsr publication in 1971, the NIKFI lab promoted a "satisfaction index" that would predict the success of a given film within determinable audience categories.65 The study also introduced the possibility for using advertisements to direct specific films to a target audience. Lebedev argued that advertisements were absolutely necessary so that film consumers could avoid the "sickness of omnivorousness,"66 and the sociologist I. P. Lukshin applied the examples of England, France, and the United States' to demonsttate the effectiveness of film advertising.6 The specialized cinema press, while effective in promoting cinema itself, could not compete with more widely dispersed advertisements for endorsing individual films.
In addition to more effective use of advertising, genre Became a deciding factor in determining how films were targeted io'specific audience groups. B. P. Dolynin identified ten genres, 'b*r wrrr rrrnrjnirrH by Goskino, which it grouped as either "serious" or "light." The latter—which Tncluded adventure, comedy, science fiction, musicals, and fairy tales . ^ i 'Xfil'my-skazki)—composed a mere 20 percent of the Soviet repertoire in     ' L"v-1971. Dolynin argued that, although "our distribution is not organized for a proportion similar to West European nations, the number of domestic films in these genre-thematic groups ... turns out to be less than necessary for film distribution's successful functioning."68 Another study made the argument for marketing (without, of course, using the word itself) clear in rationalizing film distribution. The author openly connected the success of genre releases with seasonal considerations: "One should think thoroughly about the planning of production according to gente and period of release much more so than is currently the case."65 Furthetmore, in Ermash's 1978
M Rachuk and Kutorga, eds., Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia kinematografa, 3.
65 K. A. Ianulaitis and E. Zelentsov, "Otsenka fil'mov zritelem i ego khudozhestvennyi vkus," in ibid., 73-83.
66 Lebedev, "O konkretno-sotsiologicheskikh issledovaniiakh kinematografa," 268.
6  I. P. Lukshin, "Problémy reklamnoi informatsii i ee effektivnosr," in Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia kinematografa, ed. Rachuk and Kurorga, 93-101. "8 B. P. Dolynin, "O struktuře deistvuiushchego fil'motonda," in ibid., 124. 6tJ V. V. Poltavtsev suggested building theaters that would show films of one genre ("Prokarnaia zhizn fil'ma," IK, no. 10 [1972]: 112-13, 115).
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address to the Cinematographers Union, he privileged genre diversity even as he argued for limiting financial support to republican studios for poor box-office returns.70 In effect, "national" studios had failed to cultivate "their own" audiences, and were thus duly censured. Rachuk and L. A. Rybak wrote in a 1973 NIKFI study that concern for service (i.e., obslti-zhivanie) "can indicate a tendency to activate the moviegoers and attain a higher attendance rate at clubs (movie theaters) from each spectator." Later in the same publication, Rachuk stated, "Film service should be built at its foundation on an exact measure of audience needs, both spiritual and material [zaprosy and potrebnosti) ,"71
In his retrospective on film sociology in 1977, Zhabskii stated that cinema attendance was researchers' primary concern, essentially connecting its very existence to the box office. This interpretation was counterfac-tual, however, because the discipline arose during a time of unprecedented growth in film consumption during the mid- to late 1960s. Summarizing Furikov's prior research, Zhabskii frankly admitted his narrow definition of a film's success. Just as success gradually became the discipline's explicit agenda in the late 1970s, Zhabskii grew more critical of its methods: "Today, when the practice of film sociology already has a definitive history, the lack of an elaborate sociological theory of cinema is particularly felt." Zhabskii was particularly concerned with the "applied" nature of audience research, of "carrying concrete sociology down to the level of social statistics."72
At the same time, the typological approach as it developed in the late 1960s was already under serious criticism within Goskino, the critical establishment, and the sociological community itself. Ten years after Kogan's seminal work, Cinema and Spectator, Z. G. Kutorga's study of the same title appeared, in some sense as a response to the former. Articles written by E. Kokarev and G. M. Lifshits, in particular, confronted the applicability of differentiation for solving current economic problems within the industry. While both sociologists commented on the lack of development of the typological approach, Kokarev also implied rhat the theory was used merely as a crutch to explain why attendance was steadily decreasing. Instead, he affirmed the ability to find a mass audience based on "mass perception regularities" (rather than differentiated perception). Although ultimately supporting
0 Ermash, "O khode vypolneniia reshenii XXV s'czda KPSS," 9, 20. Ermash confirmed the "seasonal attitude" of film consumption.
1 I. A. Rachuk and L. A. Rybak, eds., Sotsiologicheskie iísledovaniia kinematografu: Sostoianie kinoobduzhivaniia sel'skogo naseleniia (Moscow: NIKFI, 1973), 8, 121.
- M. M. Zhabskii, "Sotsiologiia kino: Opyt i problémy," Sotswlogicbeskie issledovaniia, no. 4 (1977): 105-7; Zhabskii, "Nekotoryeaktual'nyr problémy sotsiologii kino," in Kino izritel: Problémy sotsiologii kino, ed. Z. G. Kutorga (Moscow: Goskino SSSR, 1978), 23.
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the typological approach, Kokarev's critique was that sociologists still had a shallow understanding of what differentiation meant.3
Lifshits's attack on differentiation was more complete, as he argued rhat the typological approach had consistently "ignored the whole." Citing Zorkaia's earlier article, he advocated a "unified" approach to audiences (rather than a differentiated one). Lifshits caustically parodied Lebedev's position, writing, "There even arose an opinion that a uniform audience does not exist, but that separate groups compose the cinema public, which differ
according to characteristic features____This explains the tempting idea: to
create for each of these groups 'its own' film."74
If sociologists looked at real numbers, Lifshits argued, they would find an incredible similarity, rather than difference, among social categories. Nonetheless, he was unwilling to dispose completely with differentiation; rather, he was more concerned with eroding its radical formulation, which he criticized as overly concerned with subjectivity, and not with the objective factors of consumption. Ultimately, then, Lifshits was concerned with financial rňatters. Indeed, just as attendance had steadily decreased during the 1970s, film production followed a counter-trajecrory. Lifshits concluded his critique, stating, "As sociological materials prove, for spectators, 'their own' pictures are those that answer nor the interests of a certain differentiated group but also the interests of the majority, or all, of the film audience. Hereafter, the typological approach exerted a minimal influence, especially in official pronouncements. Ermash's 1981 address to the Cinematographers Union made no mention of audience differentiation, as he did in early 1978. Instead, he emphasized an "orientation toward rhe general spectator," something that was never unusual in Soviet cinematic discourse but was previously qualified with the language of differentiation.7' Now, when sociologists employed differentiation, it was to emphasize the population's most "active" and "passive" sections.
Rachuk, furthermore, emphasized "stabilizing" the audience during a conference on "problems of film sociology" in April 1978. " Lifshits, who attacked the typological approach earlier that year, also affirmed that, despite the widening field of production in "serious" and "light" genres, attendance had continued to decrease. Although he did not explicitly argue for limiting production, he advocated greater attention to the "type" of film attracting the
73 E. Kokarev, "Problémy tipologii kinoauditorii," in Kino i zritel': Problémy sotsiologii kino, 82-121.
74 G. M. Lifshits, "Edinstvo i differenrsiatsiia kinoauditorii," in ibid., 122.
75 Ibid., 138.
6 F. T. ErmasK, "Povysiť rol' kino v kommunisticheskom vospitanii trudiashchikhsia,' IK, no. 10 (1981): 108.
I. A. Rachuk, in Problémy sotsiologii kino: Materiály zasedanúa Sověta po koordinatsii nauchno-issledovatelskikh rabot v oblasti kinovedeniia (Moscow: Goskino, 1978), 18.
1
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greatest number of spectators; and indeed his "Lifshits formula," developed with A. L. Bogdanov and Lev Furikov in the mid-1970s, was employed to predict box-office appeal.78 During the conference, the critic Mark Zak came out as the most vociferous critic of film sociology, attacking the discipline for pompously reducing spectators to mere numbers and "formulating the repertoire based on statistical averages." Zak essentially placed on sociologists the same critique of film criticism that had been popular a decade earlier.
An article by Maia Turovskaia published in the previous year, ostensibly about the "bourgeois science of marketing," could not have avoided evoking the specter of the Soviet consumer as the sociology of cinema had construcred him and her. She wrote that audience research (in the West?) was interested only in "average statistical results."7' Zak had only to make the connection between "bourgeois mass culture" and the Soviet culture industry explicit. In conclusion, he proclaimed that there were "other ways of captivating the audience" than simply "to serve" [ohsluzhivat') its needs, echoing Karaganov's warning from a decade earlier.80 Thus, by the end of the 1970s, critics were by and large on the defensive, whereas they were earlier supportive of sociology as a "new science" for understanding the media consumer. The success of the 1979-80 repertoire, especially Durov and Govorukhins Pirates of the 20th Century, demonstrated above all where sociology had taken the Soviet film industry.
Pirates of the 20th Century: A Film "Doomed for Success"
Although Vladimir Vysotskii already suffered from heart problems and was thus unable to participate in the second Govorukhin/Durovxollaboratiofl in 1979, the actor/musician's recent interest in karate provided the authors with their basic idea for the film. According to Tadeusz Kas'ianov, who trained many of the actors in martial arts for Pirates, Vysotskii wished to write a "karate hymn" about the valor of the up-and-coming sport, much as he had done over ten years prior for mountain-climbing ("Farewell to the Mountains").81 Vysotskii and Kas'ianov (both of whom starred in Govorukhins TV serial Město vstrechi izmeniť nel'zia (The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed [1979]) convinced Govorukhin to work on a karate-themed screenplay, based on contemporary piracy in the South Seas. Although karate and seafaring adventures seemed to contain incongruous narrative elements, Kas'ianov
78 Val Golovskoy, Behind the Soviet Screen, ed. John Rimberg, trans. Steven Hill (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1986), 50.
" Maia Turovskaia, "Kinematograf kak předmět massovogo potrebleniia," Kino i vremia, no. 1 (1977): 201.
80 Mark Zak, in Problémy sotsiologii kino, 176.
" Tadeusz Kas'ianov, interview on Piráty XX veka DVD (Ruscico, 2000). The term "doomed for success" comes from Aleksandr Troshin, "Prikliuchencheskii film: Vchera, segodnia, zavtra," SE, no. 23 (1978): 16.
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believed that the recent success in the Soviet Union of the martial arts film Lady Karate (Chang Seng-Yi, 1976; Taiwan) warranted further cinematic exploration.
After completing the script, Govorukhin approached Durov to direct what would become Pirates of the 20th Century. The film's action begins aboard the Soviet ocean liner Nezhin, carrying pharmaceutical opium, which is soon hijacked by modern-day pirates. After they loot and destroy the ship, several crewmembers escape in a lifeboat and eventually wash ashore on an uncharted mountainous island. The group discovers that the same pirates have recently colonized the island, killing the indigenous male inhabitants and using the women as sex slaves. Using their Soviet ingenuity and their own mastery of martial arts, the sailors defeat the pirates, save the native girls, and sail off into the sunset.
In 1980, Pirates fell into the "adventure" (prikliuchencheskiľjgcnre, which sociologists had particularly marked as a mák~anď adolescent form, just as they attributed a predominantly young female clientele to the "melodrama" Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. Furikov explained the appeal of adventure films as a process of boys becoming specrators: "The perception or these films is entirely unique" to the experience of young adolescents, he argued, placing particular importance on identification with the films' heroes.82 "Identification" would not have presented a problem, except that Soviet theorists had traditionally dealt with the issue as peculiar to capitalist "mass culture." Elena Kartseva, for example, wrote: "The transformation of mass-produced heroes facilitates identification, for it makes the screened personages more understandable to the spectators of a given epoch. This form of identification remains the main channel by which bourgeois cinema influences personality formation, especially among youth."81
Kartseva's comments may seem hypocritical, considering the hero's essential space within Soviet cinema and Socialist Realism more broadly. In Pirates, however, the hero (Serezha) never assumes the leadership role. He remains a middling character—in fact, he is the ship's engineer, a familiar profession to both Dutov and Govorukhin—who modestly performs heroic deeds before resuming his role as a crewmembcr. Durov himself stressed the newness of the heroic form in Pirates. He recalled attending his own film one evening in an "ordinary theater in a Moscow suburb," when he heard a "common laborer" sitting next to him shout, "Well, finally our men learned how to hit!" upon viewing Serezha's vengeful kick in the pirate's groin at the film's conclusion. Rather than the movement from spontaneity to consciousness common to Socialist Realism, Pirates presents us with a movement from
": Lev Furikov, "Zritel'skie orsenki kak pokazateľ osobennostei vospriiatiia fil'mov iunoi zritelei," in Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia kinematografa (Moscow: NIKFI, 1973), 66, 90-91.
*' Elena Kartseva, "Kino v sisteme 'massovoi kultúre,'" Mi/ý i reálnosť, no. 4 (1974): 91.
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weakness to strength, without any cerebral component. As Durov states, "It's a pure action film. People simply defend their country, without those refined intellectuals. They're all men [muzhiki] ... all men."84
More to the point, "identification" would have been closely associated with Freudian psychoanalysis and, by the mid-1970s, post-structuralist film criticism (both condemned in the Soviet Union). In Furikov's usage of the term, however, "identification" lost these connotations (at least the citations themselves) and became a justification for marketing the film in a particular manner. Supportive critics and Govorukhin himself established the theme of masculine morality as the principle guiding identification with the hero that was specific to socialist cinema's re-heroization. The screenwriter stated that Pirates was a "romantic adventute, where at the center is a hero, who is someone to be emulated because he's a real man. What is a real man?" he queried further. "It's not some kind of Schwarzenegger with biceps. It's rather a man who can prove his own worth, defend a woman and, in the end, his motherland. Such was our hero."8'' Masculine representation in Pirates is an eroticized display and comparison of bodies, while women appear only briefly, as the recipient of either the pirates' gaze or the good will of the Russian sailors.
The reviewer Aleksei Erokhin commented on the utter simplicity of the plot, arguing that for the first time in Soviet cinema, there was absolutely no character development. Indeed, rather than a centralized narrative, Durov and Govorukhin's film employed popular culture representations that were essentially external and irrelevant to the plot. The film offered "its audience" scopophilic pleasures in a simulated tourists' view of exotic locations, demonstrations of a popular sports movement, and a seemingly unmediated inspection of male bodies.86 One sociologist noted that the makers of Pirates threw in all the right ingredients, and it mattered little in what order they came.87
In 1980 alone, 87.6 million people in the Soviet Union—one-third of the population—saw Pirates of the 20th Century. The same year Vladimir Men'shov's Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears attracted 84.4 million at home and won an Academy Award for "Best Foreign Film," while other adventure" films Ekipazh (The Crew, Mitta), Petrovka 38 (Grigor'ev), and Syshchik (The Detective, Fokin) also set records for domestic film distribution. In March 1981, Adminisrration of Film Infrastructure and Distribution Chairman Fedor Belov wrote that the ptevious year's success occurred in no small part due to "the technical improvement of the film circuit and the rising standards of service in the theaters." He listed wide-format screens, flowers in
84 Boris Durov, interview on Piraty XX vcka DVD. ^ Govorukhin, interview on ibid.
86 Govorukhin said, "It was a hit for those for whom it was meant" (ibid.).
87 V. Lcikin, "Ne poteriano li chuvsrvo mery?" SK, 12 August 1980: 5.
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the lobby, stereo sound, comfortable seats, and advertisements as included in the "formula for success." He also mentioned that audience research results had informed a strategic distribution of films.88 In the 1980 konkurs, Nikolai Eremenko won "Best Actor" for his role as Serezha. Rachuk commented on the konkurs, stating, "Although your sympathy was split [among the previous year's blockbusters], we suppose that in the present case, all the specta-tots are correct."8' Correctness, in this case, pointed toward the very acr of attendance, rather than the sense for an artistically elevated work of art or a feeling of political sophistication.
Conclusion
In their fear of a polarized audience, where the banality of mass culture uneasily coexisred wirh the art films of Andrei Tarkovskii, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrzej Wajda, Soviet critics frequently harkened back to a time when there was a middle ground, when an alternative existed to both Hollywood's commodified culture and a "de-dramatized" West European art cinema, both of which they claimed alienated most spectators. They longed for a new Soviet Chaplin who would achieve a high level of artistry and confront important social issues, while remaining popular with spectators and profitable for the state.
In his 1970 political film Le vent d'est (Wind from the East), Jean-Luc Godard commented on the Soviet Union's place in wotld cinema by referring to mainstream film more broadly as "Hollywood-Mosfilm.'"'0 While Godard's language skimmed over the differences between the industries in the 1960s, the fact that an ostensibly Marxist filmmaker had formed such associations embarrassed Soviet critics. Godard aimed to erode socialist cinema's international prestige as the product of communist luminaries like Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin. Soviet criticism had developed a pervasive historical narrative for otechestvennoe kino, which celebrared its aforementioned heroes from the avant-garde, Chapaev, and the Stalinist kitsch of Grigorii Aleksandrov and Ivan Pyr'ev, in addition to the internationally renowned Thaw-era filmmakers—Mikhail Kalatozov, Grigorii Chukhrai, and Andrei Tarkovskii.
In 1967, the year that the four-volume History of Soviet Cinema ends, film sociology gained enough approval from the Communist Party to warrant the publication of two major volumes on the topic." For many critics supportive of audience tesearch and the "typological approach" that sociologists
88 "Na puti k zriteliu," SE, no. 5 (1981), 7.
89 "Konkurs-80," SE, no. 10 (1981): 8-9.
'I0 See Peter Wollen, "Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d'Est" Afterimage 4 (Autumn 1972): 6-17.
Gosudarstvennyi institut istorii iskussrv, Istoriia sovetskogo kino, 1917—1967, 4 vols. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1969-78).
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developed, the discipline was not a marketing tool that would eventually erode Soviet cinema's artistry and social relevance by turning films inro commodities and spectators into consumers. On the contrary, the "new science" promised new possibilities for film art through a deeper understanding of spectators and their relationship to the cinematic text. Karaganov, among others, argued that film sociology distinguished Soviet spectators from the undifferentiated mass that Hollywood cultivated. As funding for audience research became more closely tied to the ability to provide solutions to practical problems in the 1970s, spectator subjectivity was less associated with the multiplicities of perception and became inextricably linked to "attendance frequency" variables. While television was only one component of this decline in attendance, it provided a distinct model of media consumption in which spectators had the power quickly ro determine when to tunc in and how much attention to give. Zhabskii remarked that this had the effect of "deteriorating the film repertoire." The use of the word iznos for "deterioration" is instructive for its evocation of the ephemeral quality of objects of mass culture.92 The typological language of sociology, which not only differentiated the audience into socio-demographic categorics~T>ut also differentiated cinema into genres, however,.produced a new fjMm.c£ knawjgclge_
"about culture that WOuld influence g.r>vipr..ri.npra:A agjahow-prmf iplps and
"its transformation into a market industry in rhe early 1990s.
Dept. of History
Universiry of Michigan
1029 Tisch Hall
435 S. State St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
jfirst@umich.edu
" M- M- Zhabskii, G. I. Kopalina, and L. D. Rondeli, "Vliianie televideniia na chastotu poseshchaemosti kino," in Sotstologicheskie isslednvaniia kinematografa, ed Rachuk and Rybak, 76.
History and'Historians
"The Greatest Russian Tragedy of the 20th Century"
An Interview with Viktor Danilov (1925-2004) Robert E. Johnson
Viktor Petrovich Danilov, who died suddenly and tragically in 2004, was a prolific and innovative historian who devoted his entire career to the study of the Soviet peasantry.' In June 2001, I interviewed him in connection with a radio documentary that I was then preparing on the declassification of Soviet-era archives. I anticipated a conversation of 30 to 40 minutes, concentrating on rhe mulrivolume documenrary publication Tragediia snvetskm derevni (The Tragedy of the Soviet Counrryside), of which Viktor Petrovich was the senior editor.2 It soon became apparent, however, that he wanted to tell me more about his long career and the broader context in which he worked, first during the Khrushchev-era "Thaw," then in the ideologically restrictive Brezhnev era, and finally in the years of archival openness that began during perestroika.
Having met with him on a number of occasions over the previous decade, I was familiar with much of the story that he related. I encouraged him to go into as much detail as he could. I knew that he had had similar conversations with other colleagues, at least one of which has been published, but to the best of my knowledge no other publication has given as much attention to the subjects we discussed.3
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the assistance of Oleksandr Melnyk, Raissa Rozina, and Tcodnr Shanin in preparation of rhe Translation.
1 Leopold Haimson and Lynne Viola, "Viktor Petrovich Danilov (1925-2004)," Kritika 5, 3 (2004): 633-39. Krest' ianovedenie, no. 5 (2006), is dedicated ro Danilov's work and includes a bibliography of his publications.
7 V. P. Danilov, Roberta Manning, and Lynne Viola, cds., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni: Kullcktivizatsiia i raskulaehivante. Dokurneniy i materiaty, 1927—1939, 5 vols. (Moscow: Rosspen, 1999-2005); cf. Lynne Viola et al., cds., The War against the Peasantry, 1927-1930 (New Haven: Yale Universiry Press, 2005), the first volume of a projected four-volume English translarion.
' See, for example, Terence Emmons, "Recenr Development on the 1 lisrorical Front: Excerprs from an Interview with Viktor Petrovich Danilov," Slavic Review 50, 1 (1991): 150-56.
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9,2 (Spring 2008): 345-71.