Soviet and American World War II Cinema in a Comparative Perspective

Presented at the Western/Rocky Mountain Slavic Studies Association Conference

Comparison of Soviet Russian World War Two films with their American counterparts reveals a similar pattern of historical development. In both countries the wartime and immediate post-war cinema glorified the war. However, from the mid-1950s to mid1960s the “patriotic” cinema was subtly countered by anti-war movies. In the United States, such films as Robert Aldrich’s “Attack!” (1956), or Arthur Hiller’s “Americanization of Emily” (1964) symbolized the trend. In the Soviet Union the postStalinist “thaw” was accompanied by such productions as Mikhail Katalazov’s “The Cranes are Flying” (1957), Grigorii Chukhrai’s “The Ballad of a Soldier” (1959), and, most famously, Andrei Tarkovskii’s “Ivan’s Childhood” (1961). These “dissident” films subverted by subtle means the official Soviet mythology of the “Great Patriotic War.” However, while the dualism of “patriotic” versus “dissident” narratives of World War II can be thus seen in both Soviet and American cinematography, the weakness of the Soviet “dissident” genre has to be recognized. Generally, since Elen Klimov’s “Come and See” (1985) no significant Russian film about World War II was created, which can be juxtaposed to the flourishing of American war cinema in the mid-and late 1990s.