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VLAD THE PRODUCER: PUTIN SCORNS SOFT POWER; USES RUSSIAN FILM INDUSTRY FOR DOMESTIC PROPAGANDA
JAN 30, 2009 - 11:38AM PDT
Posted by Neal Rosendorf
All posts by this author

Vladimir Putin is obsessed with cinema’s potential to sway hearts and minds. Over the past several years, Russia’s paramount leader has been tightening the screws on his country’s film industry. What is most remarkable about Putin’s move is not his power grab per se, Radio Free Europe’s anxiety-laden reportage in late December notwithstanding. As an instinctive autocrat in a country with a notorious history of state control of cinema, the logic of his strategy is straightforward. Rather, what is noteworthy and disquieting is the goal of his strategy. Putin’s program evinces little evident interest in burnishing Russia’s overseas reputation. Internal propaganda, rather than international soft power, is Putin’s cinematic preoccupation. The culmination of Premier Putin’s efforts (so far) has been the establishment in mid-December 2008 of the Government Council for the Development of Russian Film Industry. Putin announced that he will “personally supervise” the activities of the Council. The new body is intended to harness the “potential of cinema to be a major educational tool and valuable point of reference for society,” as Putin put it in a speech at the October 2008 conference of Russian film producers which led to the Council’s formation. Putin’s move has discomfited many, both in Russia’s motion picture community and in Hollywood as well. In mid-January 2009, a long-time observer of the Russian film industry sent a memorandum to US movie industry executives analyzing Prime Minister Putin’s decree creating the Council. The memo conveyed the apprehensions of liberal Russian film makers, to whom “these declarations are very difficult to reconcile with the concept of [a] free market economy and civil society which Putin as president and prime-minister has pledged to support.” Still, the analyst noted, “They hope….that most of these declarations will remain on paper at least for the foreseeable future.” The US media industry newspaper Variety, however, quoted a rather more pessimistic Russian film industry figure, who anonymously groaned, “As usual, nothing good will come of it.” The movies that have resulted from Putin’s ever-increasing pressure on filmmakers have ranged from fairly subtle to utterly embarrassing in their messaging. The former is typified by a remake of 12 Angry Men, in which the Henry Fonda character is now an ex-KGB agent (the Russian premier’s old job) who adopts the young suspect he helped clear, who in the Russian retelling is a Chechen. “Call me Uncle Nikolai,” he tells his new ward, a presumably grateful stand-in for the region Putin brutally pacified earlier this decade. As for the latter, one need go no further than This Kiss is Off the Record, a risibly idealized fictionalization of Putin’s courtship of his wife and rise to political power. The film was blasted at home and abroad on its release as hagiographic folderol—as Russian journalist Yuri Zarakhovich inimitably put it in the pages of Time, “a big, sloppy, and cloying smooch” to the then-Russian president. Proving that the Russian public has not completely lost its critical faculties, This Kiss is Off the Record was released straight to…... FULL TEXT
 
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Read Comments:

Dale Hinote on February 6, 2009 @ 4:03 pm:
The quote from Stalin is interesting. Might it lend credibilty to the idea of intentional Soviet infiltration of the American film industry? Did HUAC have a rare outbreak of justified paranoia the late 40s?

Bill starkov on August 24, 2010 @ 8:00 pm:
Go Vlad!!

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