Revolution in the Revolution: Soviet Cinema in the 1960s
Sat-Sun at the Grand Illusion. Through March 11.

IT HAS FINALLY happened. I'm writing a review for films I haven't seen. This is not my fault, but the result of a major editorial and ideological change that occurred this summer in our film department. Let me explain. When the film section was edited by Andy Spletzer, I and other critics were encouraged to attend as many screenings as possible. There were two reasons for this: one, the sheer accumulation of film knowledge (styles, directors, actors, cinematographers, and so on). Two, to inspire discussion among critics about new films. Under this system, the Spletzer system, I watched more films than I reviewed. Under Jamie Hook's regime, however, I have watched fewer and fewer films, but written more and more reviews. Jamie Hook doesn't encourage us to watch everything, but instead, to write everything. The consequence of this bizarre policy has lead to this inevitable conclusion: writing a review sans seeing the film(s).

But there's no need to panic. Jamie Hook, the incontrovertible idealist, and a hero of our times, has taught me well; I'm confident that something decent can come out of this seemingly ridiculous predicament. Yes, if God made the universe from scratch (as the late Carl Sagan once put it), then I can write a film review from nothing. All I have to do is shift the emphasis: Instead of being the one who brings you the future, the one who increases your desires by demonstrating my satisfaction or negating your desires by displaying my dissatisfaction, I will instead be like you: the one who is waiting for the future, whose appetite is aroused by the press releases, advertisements, talk on the streets. Put simply, I will write a review that desires.

The unseen films in question are Russian: the country of my desires. They were produced in the '60s, during the late stages of a period known as "the thaw." This "brief episode of heady freedom" (Clarence Brown) saw the release of political prisoners from Siberia and the reemergence of long obscured but brilliant writers like Yuri Olesha and Mikhail Bakhtin. Due to its brevity, this mini-renaissance was forgotten eclipsed, as it were, by the dazzling outburst of post-revolutionary creativity eventually smashed by the iron hand of Stalin. The film series' press kit addresses this desire (the desire for something missed, something overlooked) in this way: "In the late 1950s, filmmakers from [Russia] and the outlying Soviet republics began experimenting with new styles and themes under a 'thaw' of Soviet authoritarianism. The influence of non-Soviet filmmakers also crept into the screenplays and directorial styles, lending a more international feel to many of the films.... Since that time, there has been ample attention to the 1960s explosions in American, Asian, and Western and Eastern Cinema, but little to their groundbreaking Soviet contemporaries."

Now that the light of a neglected era has been brought to our attention, we move to the next level of desire: What are the names and number of these missed films? We discover, again from the press kit, that a virtual cornucopia of rare films exists. Films whose pleasures remain untapped, still fresh, ready, and ripe. I will mention but four of the 10 that are to be screened over the first two months of the new year: The Letter Never Sent ("[a] drama about a geological expedition to Siberia that meets every imaginable obstacle"), Nine Days of One Year ("two nuclear physicists stand on the verge of a great--and alarming-- discovery"), Heat ("an idealistic high school graduate... goes to work on a state farm, only to clash with its authoritarian, tractor-driving leader"), and July Rain ("a romantic New Wave affair in which a love story is flanked by documentary street sequences").

Next, to stimulate our already humongous appetite, are the stills. Viewing these amazing images trapped in time, I want nothing more than to see them liberated by the motion of cinema. One has a beautiful young woman caught in the shadows (Cranes); another shows a girl standing in a denuded, winter tree (The Letter Never Sent); yet another captures a jaded woman and her jaded hairdresser looking back at something that jades them even more (Brief Encounters). And then there is a still of three jet-set Russians from a film set in the "sterile surfaces of labs, airports, and classy restaurants" (Nine Days of One Year). Could we ask for much more than this?

Yet there is still one more desire to address, that being the presence of an expert from the University of Washington Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the Sunday screening of these films. One of the speakers is Galya Diment, the author of the best nonfiction book of 1997, Pniniad; she and the others will only intensify the pleasure of experiencing these rare Russian films. So, this is the way the future looks: Promising! And I, like you, dear reader, am rushing recklessly toward it.