The only thing I’ve been watching lately are Soviet films on youtube. Mosfilms and Gorky films have their full catalogs on there. Sergei Bondarchuk’s films are deeply moving. Seventeen Moments from Spring is incredible as well- the Soviet answer to James Bond. For some reason it feels deeply refreshing to watch these films instead of what the US has been producing.
There are even callbacks to Seventeen Moments of Spring in children's cartoons like Treasure Island.
When art offers one of the only limited pressure valves for totalitarianism out gets embued with deeper meaning I suppose?
All art in the Soviet Union was state-manipulated propaganda. At least all of it that was in public venues such as theatre and television.
That is true to an extent, but Soviet films are not all the same. Great artists like Bondarchuk were able to still tell compelling stories despite the political constraints of his time. Even Seventeen Moments of Spring, which was commissioned to influence the Soviet public to have a more positive view of the KGB, managed to tell a meaningful and very human story. Tarkovsky’s Sci-Fi films are also great and can hardly be said to be state propaganda even if they were considered acceptable enough to be made public. Many Soviet films are heavy handed and wooden propaganda movies (like the ones by Ozerov), but not all.
> Great artists like Bondarchuk were able to still tell compelling stories despite the political constraints of his time
This might well be true, and it fits in with the claim that constraints or limits can lead to more creative outcomes (currently on the HN front page[1]), but everything still had to pass the state censor's approval.
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> You do not know what you are talking about.
It breaks the site guidelines to attack others like this, regardless of how wrong they are are you feel they are. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you could please review them and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
> Soviet Union was one of last countries with true art.
There was no art, only pro-government communist propaganda. In Soviet Union there was even popular saying regardless culture, that Stalin took over a Russia of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, and left it with the Union of Soviet Writers.
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