tailieunhanh - THE DEATH OF RUSSIAN CINEMA, OR SOCHI: RUSSIA’S LAST RESORT

I was sixteen. I didn't have the words to explain why I'd downloaded and kept downloading. Why making the film that was in my head was such an all-consuming obsession. I'd read stories of the great directors -- Hitchcock, Lucas, Smith -- and how they worked their arses off, ruined their health, ruined their family lives, just to get that film out of their head and onto the screen. In my mind, I was one of them, someone who had to get this sodding film out of my skull, like, I was filled with holy fire and it would burn me up if I didn't. | THE DEATH OF RUSSIAN CINEMA OR SOCHI RUSSIA S LAST RESORT Nancy Condee 1. Malokartine is a made-up word the Russian equivalent of cine-anemia a devastating blood disorder in the body of the Russian cinema industry. The figures speak for themselves in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed the Russian Republic produced 213 full-length feature films. Since then the industry has suffered an annual decrease of 25-30 . In 1992 Russia produced 172 films in 1993 152 films by 1994 68 films in 1995 46 films in 1996 only 20 films putting Russia behind Sweden and Poland in the second tier of European film production. At this rate the blood count by the end of 1997 should be around thirteen feature films. This dramatic decline is in part the inevitable end to the cultural boom of 19861990 when perestroika s filmmakers produced up to 300 feature films a year moralizing exposés erotic melodramas and incomprehensible auteur films. Once the boom ended however the industry could not recover to the stable norm of 150-180 films of the 1970s and early 1980s. Instead Mosfilm Moscow s leading film studio which regularly had had 45-50 film projects in production at any given time now has at best five to seven films in process. At Lenfilm St. Petersburg s lead studio the situation is bleaker only a handful of films are in production and its studio space like many movie theaters around town doubles as a car wash. Of course cynics might see a tender irony in this transformation in the early post-revolutionary years Soviet commissars had converted Russia s Orthodox churches into makeshift movie theaters screening in Lenin s words the most important of all the 2 arts. Now the new Russians are transforming Soviet cinema space into their own places of worship furniture stores auto showcases and merchandise warehouses. With the few functioning movie theaters operating only at 2-8 capacity information on movie-theater attendance is no cheerier. If in 1986 the average Soviet citizen not including .