| By Ron Holloway Contrary to the opinion of some historians in film lexicons, Russian cinema can trace its origin to St. Petersburg - not to Moscow. In Tsarist times, the first Russian film studio was opened in St. Petersburg in 1908. Russian silent film directors (Yevgeny Bauer, Pyotr Chardynin, Yakov Protazanov) and actors (Vera Kholodnaya, Ivan Mozhukhin) delighted to film against the backdrop of St. Petersburg and its palatial surroundings. Shortly after the October Revolution, during the city's Petrograd days (1914-24), the Petrograd Cinema Committee (PCC) opened a production studio in 1918 - the forerunner of the Lenfilm Studios. Moscow's Mosfilm, in comparison, was founded in 1923. Petrograd also witnessed one of most daring stage and screen experiments in post-Revolution Russia - FEKS, the Factory of the Eccentric Actor. FEKS, founded in 1921 on unconventional principles derived from the circus and vaudeville, defied both revolution and tradition with eccentric ideas that were also closely related to Dadaism and Futurism. Published as a manifesto by Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg while still in their teens, and said to be thrown at Petrograd passers-by from a moving car, the Factory of the Eccentric Actors attracted a broad range of artists. By the late 1920s, however, when the Communist Party declared social realism as its formal policy of art, the eccentric FEKS productions were deemed anathema. But not before Kozintsev and Trauberg's New Babylon (1929), a tongue-in-cheek account of the Paris Commune set in a department store and scored by Dimitry Shostakovich for orchestral accompaniment at its premiere, was acclaimed a masterpiece. Subsequently banned, the film is as exciting to watch today as in the glorious heyday of silent Soviet cinema. Upon the death of Lenin in 1924, when Petrograd was renamed Leningrad, the Petrograd studios were thereafter known as the Lenfilm Studios. Its rollcall of name directors has championed a school of poetic realism up to the present day. Indeed, festival directors would bend over backward to view - and book - films by Alexander Sokurov, Alexei Gherman, Alexander Rogozhkin, Konstantin Lopushansky, Dinara Asanova, Lydia Bobrova, and Ilya Averbakh, to name just a few. During the stagnant days of the Moscow film festival, the heavy chore of watching an overdose of propaganda entries was fortunately broken by an overnight train trip on the Red Arrow Express to Leningrad to visit the Hermitage. Of course, a reception was always arranged under the auspices of the Lenfim Studio. All the while, Lenfilm filmmakers were waiting in the wings to demand a sweeping release of banned films dating back to the silent era. They didn't have to wait long. Triggered by earthquake decisions made by the charismatic Mikhail Gorbachev, an astonishing chain of political and cultural events inundated the Soviet Union and Socialist Europe like a dam-breaking flood. Elected General Secretary of the CPSU in March of 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev launched his revolutionary four-pillar policy - glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring), demokratizatsiya (democratization), and uskoreniye (economic acceleration) - at the 27th Party Congress in February of 1986. Unexpectedly, but consequently, his policies would have immediate impact. By the end of the 1980s, the Soviet Union had imploded. In 1986, on the revamped film scene, Gorbachev appointed Elem Klimov (1933-2003) to replace Filipp Yermash as head of Soviet cinematography. In turn, Klimov's first move was to establish a Conflict Commission to review and release previously banned films. The chore took two years to complete. At the top of the list were films by two leading Lenfilm directors: Alexander Sokurov's Lonely Voice of a Man (1978/87) and Mournful Unconcern (1983/87) and Alexei Gherman's Trial on the Road (1971/86) and My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1982/85). Today, Alexander Sokurov is being hailed as the greatest living director since Alexander Tarkovsky. And in a recent survey of Russian critics, Alexei Gherman's My Friend Ivan Lapshin was voted among the Top Ten Russian Films of All Time. In the meanwhile, Elem Klimov, exercising his office at the Union of Soviet Filmmakers to the fullest, became a roving film minister to spread the word. In 1985, he served as a jury member at Venice. In 1987, at Cannes. Overnight, film festivals in the Soviet Union multiplied like split atoms. In 1986, the "Molodist" (Youth) Film Festival in Kiev (Kyiv in Ukrainian) opened its doors wide for international entries by young filmmakers. For some visitors, the news that the festival had been running as a semi-underground event since 1970 came as a teasing surprise. Also, in 1986, the "Arsenals" film festival in Riga, Latvia - honoring Alexander Dovzhenko's 1929 avant-garde classic - launched a biannual forum for experimental cinema of all genres. As innovative as these festivals were, nothing could compare with what happened in 1989 - the year the Berlin Wall fell and the "velvet revolution" in Czechoslovakia signaled the end of the Cold War. Hardly by coincidence, the year 1989 also saw the launch of the first Sochi "Open Russian" Film Festival on the Black Sea coast. Organized by Moscow entrepreneur Mark Rudinstein, Sochi - known for its summer palaces, luxurious dachas and palm trees - was hailed not only as a highly attractive competitive festival for Russian-language films, but also as a counterpart to Cannes and Venice. Also, in December of 1989, film professionals at Lenfilm reclaimed their birthright by organizing an independent documentary film festival. Titled "Message to Man" and headed by a Mikhail Litviakov, an energetic documentary filmmaker, the popular international event took off like a rocket. And why not! First of all, "Message to Man" was integrated into the newly inaugurated "White Nights" arts-and-music festival, which alone attracted scores of international guests anxious to spend a week at the Hermitage and the palatial gardens. By 1991, the die was cast to rechristen Leningrad back to St. Petersburg. Secondly, city officials hungered for a film festival on the lines of MIFF in Moscow. So, in 1992, critic-historian Alexander Mamontov programmed the first St. Petersburg "Festival of Festivals" with two aims in mind: to showcase international feature films and to promote the Lenfilm School of Poetic Realism. Two years later, in 1994, the "Message to Man" festival broadened its base to include animation, shorts and student films. Boosted, too, by a phalanx of talented filmmakers who were winning awards abroad at international festivals, St. Petersburg was now hailed as a vibrant film capital. So how did the Moscow International Film Festival respond? In 1995, recognizing the programming threat from St. Petersburg, as well as from the reorganized annual Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, MIFF received permission from FIAPF officials to schedule its June event as a yearly "A" competition festival. As ambitious as the reshuffled MIFF was, with a budget to invite a couple of Hollywood stars to fatten out its portfolio under acting director Nikita Mikhalkov (1994 Best Foreign Film Oscar for Burnt By the Sun), it still was plagued by a rather weak international competition and the nagging possibility that quality Russian art films might surface first at Sochi or St. Petersburg. Moreover, in 2003, a world of art lovers was waiting anxiously for the grand opening of Peterhof on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg by Peter the Great in 1703. That was the year that I crossed Moscow off my festival list, to attend the Festival of Festivals in St. Petersburg instead. Apparently, the home audience shift from Moscow to St. Petersburg was felt in MIFF headquarters as well. For, in 2004, Moscow slapped its festival dates (June 21-30) smack on top of those of St. Petersburg (June 23-29). The burgeoning festival war didn't perturb Alexander Mamontov in the least. Particularly as 2004 marked the 60th anniversary of the raising of the Leningrad blockade in 1944, a 900-day siege that saw upwards of 800,000 dead of cold and starvation. That memorable June of 2004, cineastes and festivaliers gathered at the "Festival of Festivals" and the "White Nights" Arts Festival to commemorate the valor and heroism of citizens who had refused to surrender while continuing to work in a crippled industry. At the same time, and as befitted the occasion, archival footage was made available for the first time to documentarist Sergei Loznitsa to make an heart-rending documentary titled Blockade (2005). From his four decades on the festival circuit, Dr. Ronald Holloway shares a uniquely historical perspective of esteemed films, filmmakers and festivals. The three-part Festival Wars series also includes:
Karlovy Vary versus Pula
Goskino versus Union of Soviet Filmmakers | 
