Once - it was at a time when the scandal with Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo was still burning with full force - my friend, a US-Portuguese filmmaker, and I sat at his house and discussed the news. I said then that Weinstein and other Hollywood professionals who had fallen under the rink of struggle with harassment should be given Russian citizenship and invited to bring up Russian cinema at Lenfilm and Mosfilm.
“Dmitry, - then my friend said, - why do you need these old men? You Russians are already much cooler. It’s just that you don’t believe it yourself. ”
I admit, these words have sunk into my soul. I am a patriot and to things made in Russia initially I feel warmer than everything else. I watch with delight the success of our designers, our programmers, our defense industry. But cinema is an area where my patriotism usually slips. Russia was the cinematic country of the first echelon at the beginning of the 20th century, when the names of Eisenstein, Vertov and Kuleshov were written with a comma with the names of the great Germans and Americans.
Under Stalin, the famous Americanophilus, the course was set to imitate Hollywood. Then we were defined our place - eternal imitators, copyists, inserting their values and ideological messages into American fabric. The best samples of our cinema were like the 21st Volga - a good car for those who have never seen a Buick; in ordinary cases, the Lada turned out to be a bad copy of a cheap one and by the time it was launched into a series of hopelessly outdated Italian cars.
And now the Russian Export Center announces the visit to us of representatives of the largest Hollywood studios (Sony Screen Gems, AFCI, Sony Crackle) and production companies (Sony Innovation Studios, Warner Brothers, Amblin Partners and Skylark Entertainment). We came to establish relations, to agree on joint work. We looked and were impressed by the power of Mosfilm. Well, or said they were impressed. They called for more active cooperation, for their involvement in our projects.
No, I'm not going to arrange a victory dance about the fact that "important Hollywood uncles noticed us."
The quality of both our and their movies is completely independent of this. This is simply one of the symptoms of what is already happening in world cinema, with or without uncles.
The Americans gave the world a conveyor belt, they are the nation that was the first to realize and force the great force of mass production to work for themselves. Hollywood has always been the same pipeline: with a rigid mode of operation, with clearly defined tasks of each participant in the process, with prescribed procedures, norms and tolerances. They themselves didn’t come up with anything new, but took a little from everywhere: the antique three-action structure, biblical archetypes, Chekhov’s dialogues - all this is strictly limited to the framework, once and for all defined place.
I learned screenwriting skills from American authors, from Hollywood and Broadway writers, so I know what I'm talking about. “Your script can be as good as you like,” one of them told me, “but if I open the tenth page and don’t see the initiating event there, I will not read it further.”
What is most interesting, this pipeline has worked for many decades. We went to the cinema and each time received our own dose of impressions, our catharsis from films endlessly chewing the same scheme. The hero appears in the frame, we get to know him and his "problem". On the tenth page, something happens that can turn his life around (10-12 minutes of screen time, check), after the first half hour he knows that he has nowhere to go and must answer a challenge. Exactly in the middle - an unexpected turn, ten minutes before the end of the hero is rejected and hated by everyone, after which he overcomes himself (and his problem), performs the Act - and wins if not the enemy, then himself.
However, the more often I try to look at something from what has been shot in Hollywood in the past few years, the more truly I am convinced: the scheme has stopped working. And the matter is not only that due to efforts of fighters for tolerance, political correctness and other #MeToo, overregulation of the industry has reached the point of absurdity. Passed over the edge, where the space for bold moves (and bold moves - this is what is usually called creativity) did not remain at all.
You can, in the end, make a good, sincere film about a black lesbian with a disability, a good transgender and an evil white man. But when you do it within the framework of the once and for all approved pattern, with the same moves that once told you about Rhett Battler and Scarlett O'Hara’s love, the viewer will invariably have the feeling that he is being deceived.
All the interesting, all the more or less non-standard went into the series, the movie with the excessively inflated budgets and the same unreasonable ambitions of star actors and the impracticable demands of the gender obkom stalled, from which there is no way out.
It is unlikely that the big guys from California came to us then to look for this way out. We all understand: they need markets, they need influence and more money.
But it is also true that our cinema is no longer “Zhiguli”. We have learned to shoot with high quality, we have a huge country that is ready to watch these films, and the attention of the Old and New Worlds is now more than ever focused on us. We, Russians, decorate the editorials of all the media, we intervene in elections, our GRU agents keep residents of world capitals in fear. We are what the filmmakers call the game changer. And most importantly, we have always been masters of non-standard moves, asymmetric responses. We are the ones who break the pattern.
This is what my director friend meant when he said that we are cooler than Hollywood, but still do not believe in it. We lack one final step: send everyone to hell, do not look back at anyone and finally start making our own. Overthrow the old gods of cinema and become new gods themselves. And why the envoys of the rolling-up film empire are coming to us: whether to delay our sunset, to swear oath to those who come after, we'll figure it out. Yes, and not so important.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.