Grant Lee grantlee at iinet.net.au
The 1962 Soviet sci-fi movie _Planeta Bur_ (Planet of Storms) was on TV here last night. It is dated --- especially the notion of a landing on Venus(!) --- but still interesting, particularly the stylistic similarities with _Lost in Space_, including a terse robot, although I guess that's hardly surprising, given the period.
--- The film is based on an early book by the Strugatsky brothers. At present, I am reading Viktor Pelevin's great novel "Generation P" (the "P" stands for "Pepsi-Cola"), involving an ad copywriter in the post-Soviet era who gets involved in mysticism -- at one amusing point who asks the ghost of Che Guevara an advertising tips. When I finish, I am going to start on a big collection of sci-fi from the 20s-40s I picked up recently in Yaroslavl.
The reason why the various great Soviet movies, cartoons, etc. are unknown in the West has in my opinion to do with the demands of the Cold War propaganda model, in which absolutely everything in the USSR had to be BAD. If something was good, it was immediately labelled "dissident," so Vysotsky became a "dissident singer," even though he was on the state label and acted in Soviet movies. It's hard to present a children's cartoon as "dissident."
Personally I find Soviet/Russian pop culture to be fascinating. All this stuff of course reappears in contemporary Russian popular culture, as when as I mentioned earlier rock groups rework Soviet music. In fact, Leningrad's song www, which was a monster hit last year, reworks the 70s song "My Address Is the Soviet Union," which I am sure Wojtek remembers, and contains the lines "I have no house and street/my address is the Soviet Union." In Leningrad's hands, it becomes, "I don't remember when I moved/maybe I was fucked up/I have no house and no street/today my address is www.leningradspb.ru!". spb being the Internet appreviation for St. Petersburg, which is where they are from.
The USSR also had pretty good rock music, which, contrary to the Western idea, was not banned, though most was not officially sponsored either. Mashina Vremeni is an exception -- they were official. Nobody ever tried to "ban" Akvarium or Krematorii. Grazhdanskaya Oborana did have some trouble with the authorities, but then they were sort of a Soviet Dead Kennedys, with the song "I Hate the Color Red." Their lead singer was one of the founders of the National Bolshevik Party, incidentally.
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