The Perils of Perestroika: Animation from the Soviet Union (1985-1992)
Following a special talk and screening by Riitta Hakkarainen and Jude Cowan Montague to the London Animation Club on 1 March 2021, the artists give a short history of the main exponents and themes of Soviet animation during the Perestroika period
Delusion (Ekran Studios, 1989) directed by Olga Rozovskaya (with kind permission of Olga Rozovskaya)
Perestroika was a restructuring programme initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid 1980s continued until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. When choosing animations we decided to extend our dates slightly to include one film, Sweath (Alexandr Fedulov, 1992) made during this period and released afterwards.
We felt that the animations reflected an anxiety that was heightened at this period as the Soviet Union embarked on a period of change, often described as increased 'openness'. UK media generally presented this period as open in which the harsh policies in the Soviet Union were softened. It was cast in televisions and newspapers as a period of positive development led by the charismatic figure of Gorbachev and his glamorous wife Raisa. The Thatcher-Gorbachev relationship was portrayed as warm and friendly. These stories of states people were poor indicators of the feelings of people in the Soviet Union.
The animations we chose reflect a sense of unease among the makers of film. Animation may be a very expressive art form with its multimedia potential, its ability to dramatise human stories and to represent emotion through colour, line, music and over time. We chose films made by the state-funded animation studio 'Soyzmultfilm' and also by independent studios, in particular ‘Ekran' and 'Pilot', all of which which studios have their own very interesting histories. We chose films we felt were outstanding for their aesthetic and cinematic achievements and ones with appealing energy, humour, drama, visual look or characterisation. We noticed our selection seemed to reflect an anxiety in the process of Perestroika as experienced by the artist community. Did these artist-makers feel that the Soviet Union was in its latter days? It's tempting to leap to this interpretation although it's clearly a retrospective reading.
The best known of the films screened was His Wife Is a Chicken (Igor Kovalyov, Pilot Studio, 1991). Kovalyov founded Pilot animation studio with fellow animator Alexander Tatarsky. After 1991 Kovalyov went to America to work with Klasky Csupo producing the era-defining Rugrats and is now working once more in Moscow with Soyzmultfilm. The plot is simple if surreal. Set in a domestic apartment, claustrophobic, it is a paranoid delusion of marriage, secrets and servility. The woman serves the man's every need but when a stranger visits and reveals that the wife is a chicken, the relationship is over. It's a metaphor you can read in many ways, and there are Freudian deconstructions a-plenty on the internet but what stands out is the bubbling fleshy lines and movements, the grotesque style and the deeply disturbing grimy atmosphere.
The Incident (Aleksei Turkus, Soyzmultfilm, 1990) is based on a Daniil Kharms poem. A man repeatedly falls on the icy street and returns to the pharmacy while finding himself swamped and pulverised by the manically inhuman patriotism. Accidents, fallings, violence, sudden death are a feature of Kharms's writings in the 1920s and 1930s. The animation might be reminiscent to followers of Monty Python and Terry Gilliam, with its topping city theatre-sets and dramatic chorus of patriot songs. Aleksei Turkus was a from a family of architects and he himself studied it too before turning to animation, that shows in the grand rendering of the Stalinist architecture in the film. Subtitling this work was a a difficult task because of all the songs and political speeches which are layered in to the poetry of Kharms, but we felt that it all needed to be done for the unlocking some of the complexity of the work. As well you can feel in the film the search of identity by Turkus in finding out of being from a jewish family which was never talked about at home.
This is not the only film that we chose in which an animator used the absurd poetry of the early Soviet period as source material. Sweath (Alexander Fedulov, Ekran Studio 1992) is based on a poem by Alexander Vvedensky. The piece is structured like a theatre play with three acts. The mood is frighteningly gloomy, and the series of rooms in the house through which the action moves creates a disturbing grid which constrains and intensifies the jaundiced horror. 'Sweath' denotes the beads of moisture that collect on a dead person's brow – an extremely chilling and visceral phenomenon. In the 1980-90’s the poets of 1920’s like Daniil Kharms and Aleksander Vvedensky had a new popularity. Works which had circulated in the underground scene were now published for everyone to read. Poetry and other arts from the decades of the 1920s and 1930s resonated during Perestroika. A generation of artists arrested during Stalin’s purges whose work banned or disappeared spoke to what we might call a new counter-cultural movement. Kharms died of starvation in during the Leningrad Siege in the psychiatric ward of Kresty prison and Vvedensky died of pleurisy on the way to Kazan as a prisoner.
Delusion (Olga Rozovskaya, Ekran Studios, 1989) is the only stop motion piece. It is full of dramatic weather and rural scenes, with wet soil and drenching skies depicted beautifully in slapped-on render. You feel the wind and the rain, the lack of bright sunlight, the peasant world in which the poor have to be clever to outwit the landlord and the power structures that keep them down. By working together they succeed in this although the story does portray a gullible, talkative woman. This kind of characterisation of women can be a difficulty encountered when using traditional folk material as source and this was based on an old Ukrainian country tale. The director, Olga Rozovskaya left Russia like Igor Kovalyov to work in Klasky Csupo in the USA and her skills are evident in this superb looking drama which writhes and seethes in a nest of muddy plasticine.
Finally, Fru-89: From Left to Right (Ivan Maximov, 1989) is an exercise in morphing and movement. Depicting broken dreams and frustrations and released during the moment of imminent break up of the Soviet Union it was initially banned. Maximov himself is an enigmatic and fascinating figure in the world of animation, currently running an animation school in St.Petersburg. From a family of physicists, and working himself in space research from 1982 to 1986, his scientific background inform the piece which is a playful study of hybrid animals with glooping, radioactive transforming bodies that shift across the frame from left to right, recalling creatures and scenes from real life laboratories and their imaginative depictions in literature.
We thank Marina Hakkarainen, Martin Pickles and Tom Lowe who assisted with new subtitling for the works and the film director Olga Rozovskaya was present for the screening, commenting that it took her back to a period that seems to have vanished with innovation, change, experiment which had parallels to the first two decades of the Soviet Union in terms of artistic novelty as well as paranoia. This echo was felt by those animators who chose the poetry of Kharms and Vvedensky as source material. Our own title, 'The Perils of Perestroika' (a pun on the American series 'The Perils of Pauline') was chosen because we wanted to echo the energy of young cinema, and draw out the dangerous lure of the medium for artists who wish to make an impact and change conventions.
Artists in the UK currently living with the uncertainty created by Brexit and enhanced by Covid-19 can find much to relate to in the outstanding works of this last period of Soviet Union animation. Neurosis, worry, political absurdity, domestic claustrophobia, the artists of Perestroika found ways to channel those anxieties into cinematic forms. As many of their works were screened on television, many children were spooked or terrified by their unnerving creations and those viewers might wish to revisit those memories as adults. We recommend beginning by researching these five films and a start can be made on the London Animation Club Youtube channel which published the evening's talk (below).
