Life Stories of Soviet Women by Melanie Ilic

Author:Melanie Ilic [Ilic, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781135094782
Google: F2WMAgAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-08-15T00:46:57+00:00

eventually. I can’t agree with the market system; it can’t work. Culture can’t be marketed. And students have to pay for their education now. Yura lectured in VGIK for 30 years. People come to VGIK from all over the country. Vasilii Shukshin came from the Altai. Earlier, everyone had a chance to study. When we were in America, nobody believed us when we told them this. We went everywhere. We went to Princeton, to Harvard, to other universities, and nobody believed that education was free in our country.

When we worked on our student project at VGIK we went to the Black Sea. We had a ship and everything was for free for us. All of the Americans were shocked and didn’t believe us. So we were lucky. We had the opportunity to work under very good conditions, but now all these traditions are broken. This is very dangerous for our country. Such traditions are being broken everywhere, not only in our cinematography, in our academies. But I’m sure that all these traditions will be restored in a while. I believe it. Currently we record films on DVDs, and we have a very good studio in Yelets. That’s where we make our films.

Earlier when we were making films, there was censorship, of course, and every film project had to be considered by special commissions. But, in general, we personally were able to work on the films we wanted to make and we chose the themes. Of course, there were disagreements and discussions, but in general everything went well. There was a very interesting situation with our film Mal’chiki. This is from Dostoevsky, chapter 10 from the novel The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky initially planned to write a novel about children, but he didn’t manage to do this so he put it into The Brothers Karamozov. When people read the novel they usually aren’t very attentive to this chapter because it’s a bit outside the general plot flow. We wrote the screenplay and in 1971 we presented it for consideration and approval. We were very happy with the screenplay, but they wanted us to cut out the words from the Bible about Christ’s resurrection. And we said, ‘But this is the main point of the film. How is it possible to cut this out?’

We went to other film studios with our screenplay. We went to Belorussia and then we went to Svedlovsk and then we went to Mosfilm. At that time the director of Mosfilm was Nikolai Trofimovich Sizov – a great person, by the way. He fought during the Second World War as a partisan and after that he was appointed the director of Mosfilm. He was a writer. He read our screenplay and said, ‘We could make this film, but not for another 15 or 20 years.’ And, indeed, we did have to wait, for 21 years! As the saying goes, ‘Good things come to those who wait.’ If we’d agreed to make changes to our screenplay in 1971 it would have been a different film altogether, but we waited for 21 years.

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