This doesn't answer your question (other people have better insight than me), but here's an interesting aside with George Lucas talking about making films in the Soviet Union compared to America:
[In America] you cannot lose money. So, the point is, that you're forced to make a particular kind of movie. And I used to say this all the time when Russia was the Union. They'd say, "But oh aren't you so glad you're in America." And I'd say, "Well I know a lot of Russian filmmakers and they have a lot more freedom than I have." All they have to be careful of is how much they criticize the government. Otherwise they can do anything they want. [In America] you have to adhere to a very narrow line of commercialism.
It's a fun quote but I've never been confident of its accuracy tbh. Tarkovsky for example bumped up against Party censors on Andrei Rublev and the reasoning was pretty ridiculous
I think what it's saying is that the US censors content based on whatever will bring in as big of a profit as possible, where in USSR you could make a movie that loses money as long as the message was good.
That's how I interpreted it anyway. George is just saying he thinks the profit algorithm that determines what movies get made is more restrictive than USSR content moderation.
Yeah, I have no clue how accurate it is. It's an interesting way to contextualize how "freedom" doesn't really mean "freedom" in a capitalist market, though. It succinctly makes an important point about how much power capital can have independently of government.
Most likely. There was pretty heavy film censorship and refusals of release during :stalin-pipe:'s years, primarily to promote socialist realism, most notably during the younger years of the USSR and around WW2. But it wasn't an all encompassing system and many Russian directors spoke of being able to navigate it fairly easily, in a similar way directors in the West would hit particular themes hard in their pitch in order to smuggle in more sublte criticisms and themes. Hollywood was also tight within the grip of the Hays Code, goverment interference, and red scare shit of course. The USSR's censorship of film decreased further under :corn-man-khrush: partly due to his liberalisation policies on such things but also due to the material conditions of the time (cold war rather than hot, fewer threats at home etc), while a similar thing was also happening to some degree in the US, particularly during the late 60s and 70s.
My understanding is things chilled out dramatically during... perestroika? I can never remember if glastnost or perestroyka was the social one. Plus, apparently a lot of weird experimental stuff got made because you can do that when you don't have to make a huge profit to justify the script.
It was Glasnost. Also yeah a lot of the gorbachev era films were real good from what I’ve heard
Is it censorship? No! It's just seven corporations that control every printing press in the country!
Gymkata was once banned in Finland for being too anti-Soviet :michael-laugh:
"Subject to censorship" yes, but I find it interesting that the current largest Communist state with proactive government censors (China) hasn't yet weighed in on the movie. Presumably that's because the studio hasn't submitted it for review, although it did release in Taiwan.
yeah. my understanding is that most movies were censored to an extent, though for many that just looked like what gets called 'feedback from the producer' in hollywood
I don't think that it would get made. Socialist realism was the theory and method for all art in the Soviet Union, including cinema. This method was in use from 1932 to the mid 1980’s. "Everything, Everywhere All At Once" does not fit this mold and would not get funding.
