International recognition The Soviet filmmaking industry extended far beyond Mosfilm. There were many large film studios across the country, such as Lenfilm, Gorky Film Studio, Odessa Film Studio, and many others. However, in the Soviet period, only movies produced by Mosfilm won major international awards, such as the Cannes Palme d’Or and three Academy Awards.
Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel ‘War and Peace’ earned Soviet Russia its first ever Academy Award. It took Bondarchuk six years to make the film– he worked on it from 1961 to 1967. The movie is divided into four parts, with the first one consisting of two episodes. Its total duration is over six and a half hours. In fact, today the movie would be called a mini-series. But, in 1969, it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Nowadays, this would be practically impossible, since, as a series, it would only be nominated for a Golden Globe. But, in those years, the film made a huge impression on members of the Academy.
The second Oscar was given to the joint Soviet-Japanese film ‘Dersu Uzala’ made by the legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa in 1975. At the time, Kurosawa was already considered a living legend and released masterpieces such as ‘Rashomon’, ‘Seven Samurai’, ‘Yojimbo’, ‘The Idiot’, ‘The Lower Depths’, and ‘Dodes’ka-den’.
The film is based on a novel by renowned traveler and Far East researcher Vladimir Arsenyev, who recounts a trip to the Ussuri region and his friendship with the taiga hunter Dersu Uzala. Incidentally, Kurosawa was first offered to make a joint film in 1971. Russian film director Sergey Gerasimov proposed the idea to Kurosawa during a trip to Japan, which he quickly agreed to. Initially, he wanted to make a screen adaptation of Gogol’s ‘Taras Bulba’ or of Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from a Dead House’, but these attempts were unsuccessful. Finally, he selected this theme. The film earned both Mosfilm and Kurosawa – who had previously received an Academy Award for his masterpiece ‘Rashomon’ – their second Oscar.
The third Academy Award was awarded to the extremely popular romantic drama ‘Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears’, directed by Vladimir Menshov. The story of Katerina Tikhomirova – her career journey from a simple factory worker to director, her challenges of raising a child on her own after a bitter breakup, and her love for a tool-and-die maker at a research institute – was a great success. The movie resonated with audiences all over the world, regardless of the country’s political and economic system. ‘Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears’ was released in February 1980, and in 1981 it won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Mosfilm’s legacy For three decades – from the 1960s up until the first half of the 1980s – Mosfilm was at its peak. During these years, the Soviet cinema industry thrived. Dozens of films were made each year and new genres appeared, such as animation films, TV shows, and documentaries.
Nevertheless, Russian cinema has become almost synonymous with Mosfilm, its intro showing the ‘Worker and Kolkhoz woman’ statue by sculptor Vera Mukhina, and the national and international film awards won by the studio. In addition to making award-winning films, the studio also shot movies that earned the love of millions of Russian people – for example, Leonid Gaidai’s comedies (‘Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures’, ‘The Diamond Arm’, ‘The Elusive Avengers’, and its sequels), masterpieces by Eldar Ryazanov (‘Beware of the Car’, ‘The Irony of Fate’, ‘Garage’, ‘Office Romance’), Nikita Mikhalkov’s movies (‘At Home Among Strangers’, ‘A Slave of Love’, ‘Family Relations’) and countless other films that came to represent the ‘mysterious’ Russian soul, its culture and rich heritage.
Mosfilm today The collapse of the USSR strongly affected Mosfilm. In the ‘90s, the studio no longer made 40 films per year, as it had done just a few years earlier. The country faced difficult times, and so did Mosfilm. However, its caretakers were able to preserve its legacy and prevent the film studio from going into private hands.
In 1989, the studio became part of the State Creative Production Association Mosfilm. Vladimir Dostal, who served as the director of Mosfilm from 1987 to 1998, was able to preserve the studio’s production base and its intellectual property. He was aided by film veterans Sergei Bondarchuk, Vladimir Naumov, Georgy Danelia, as well as some younger but already renowned film directors, such as Sergei Solovyov, Vladimir Menshov, and Valentin Chernykh. During the most difficult years, Mosfilm proved to be the most economically stable film company in Russia, and it still holds the rights to its great collection of films.
In 1998, Karen Shakhnazarov became the new director of Mosfilm, and he heads the studio to this day. In the 2000s, the studio underwent large-scale modernization. Today, Mosfilm is equipped with the latest technology and is able to shoot films that fully comply with modern technical standards.
By Dmitry Kuzmin , a Russian movie critic and contributor to one of the country’s top streaming services
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