The Making of the "Red Hollywood" Film Series

An International Tale of How Lost Soviet Musicals Came to America

Oct 13, 2009 Susan Z. Swan

Behind the "Red Hollywood" series of Soviet musicals of the 1930s sits a tale that links 3 film festivals, a Romanian graduate student, and a New York film programmer.

One of the more important film retrospectives of 2009 is “Red Hollywood: The Musicals of Grigori Alexandrov and Lyubov Orlova.” This series of joyous song-and-dance movies challenges the prevailing notion that all Soviet movies were gloomy and depressing – and invites filmgoers to rethink the role of musicals everywhere as both popular entertainments and political tools.

The story of how these films were “discovered” is an international tale leading from Berlin to Sundance to Venice and finally to New York. And it took a graduate student working on her thesis to start it all.

Ranga, Horn’s “East Side Story” Documents Musicals in Soviet Cinema

It’s the Berlin Film Festival in the mid-90s. A handful of East German musicals are showing and Dana Ranga attends with a friend, Andrew Horn (an NYU-grad in Berlin for an artist’s exchange program). Ranga is intrigued and Horn encourages her to pursue her interest in East German cinema for her master’s thesis. Finding source materials turns out to be difficult, but as she works, she keeps stumbling over people’s recollections of other musicals (Sherman, Boston Herald, 11 Aug 1997). Eventually she and Horn discover 40 musicals, all virtually unknown outside the USSR.

Their discoveries took documentary form and, in 1997, East Side Story premiered to considerable fanfare at the Sundance Film Festival. This revelation of a popular — and entertaining — mass cinema in Russia and the Soviet Union, with excerpts from 23 musicals, was a sensation.

Dubbed “Swing Time for Stalin” by Entertainment Weekly’s David Everitt, Ranga’s brief history covered 20 years of musicals from Stalinist Russia and a decade of youth-oriented musicals from post-1960 Eastern Europe. Filmgoers described what they saw as “jaw-droppingly fascinating,” “beguiling and edifying,” and “mind-melting.” Time magazine named it one of the Top 10 Films of 1997. (East Side Story was released by Kino in 2000, but sadly is no longer in print.)

Andy Klein of the New Times-LA left a screening of East Side Story “wishing…that some enterprising art-film distributor would book a package featuring the best of them” (28 August 1997). Gary Arnold, of the Washington Times (5 December 1997), suggested that “a repertory series with full-length examples might be a logical next step.” But no one seemed to be listening.

Venice Film Festival‘s "Secret History of Russian Cinema"

East Side Story opened in limited release worldwide. Word spread. It took almost a decade, but finally Klein and Arnold got their wish. The programmers of the 2006 Venice Film Festival dedicated a retrospective section to “the Secret History of Russian Cinema,” continuing a series inaugurated in 2004 for restoration and screening of lost films. They presented 18 musicals and featured the work of two directors, Grigorij Aleksandrov and Ivan Pyr’ev, and two "divas," Lyubov Orlova and Marina Ladynina. Aleksandrov and Orlova were represented by 5 films:

Jazz Comedy (aka Jolly Fellows) (Vesiolye rebiata) (1934)
The Circus (Tsirk) (1936)
Volga-Volga (1938)
The Radiant Path (Svetlyj put’) (1940)
Vesna (Spring) (1947)

In program notes, the Venice Festival committee lauded these films as unique efforts toward achieving the often “impossible dream of reconciling Hollywood and Mosfil’m,” stirred to life after Eisenstein and Aleksandrov journeyed to the U.S. in the early 30s, and for providing an important outlet for filmmakers who were “‘non-conforming’ and in love with ‘pure’ and ‘abstract’ film.”

Alla Verlotsky, Seagull Films Champion of Russian Film

So, the films are restored and available, but the leap from Venice to New York is a big one. Enter a young Central Asian film historian who came to New York from Moscow.

Alla Verlotsky grew up with one foot already in the film world. Her uncle, Leonid Verlotsky, was one of the major producers at Uzbekfilm Studio. When it was time for university, she headed to Moscow to study at the VGIK film school, specializing in African Cinema, and then began a career in film history. She eventually rose to Executive Director of the Soviet Union Association of Independent Filmmakers, but, with the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, found herself headed to New York. By 1999, Verlotsky was ready to found Seagull Films, an independent company dedicated to “programming, preservation and distribution” of art cinema from the former Soviet Union and Russia. “Films From Along the Silk Roads” and “Fantastika: Films by Alexander Ptushko” are two notable examples of the showcases she has produced.

The stage is set for the final collaboration needed to make “Red Hollywood"/"Red Diva” a reality, and Vertosky is the liaison who brings together two critical partners: Moscow’s Mosfil'm Studio and New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center. With Vertosky serving as producer, Karen Shakhnazarov, president of Mosfil'm Studio (the foremost film studio in Russia since 1920 and the studio which produced Alexandrov’s films), agreed to loan the films to Seagull while Richard Peña, program director of the Lincoln Center Film Society, agreed to curate the retrospective.

Red Hollywood, Red Diva Shine in Art-House Circuit

Thus the Alexandrov-Orlova films first introduced outside of the USSR in Ranga and Horn’s East Side Story (1997), and then featured in Venice (2006), found in Vertosky the “enterprising art-film distributor” that Klein had hoped for. The resulting film series, billed as “Red Hollywood: The Musicals of Grigori Alexandrov and Lyubov Orlova” or “Red Diva: Lyubov Orlova, First Lady of Soviet Cinema,” depending on the programming needs of the organization screening them, has already begun stimulating new insights into both Soviet cinema and American musicals.

The "Red Hollywood"/"Red Diva" musicals found their first U.S. audiences in 2009. Facets Cinematheque in Chicago screened them in February and the Lincoln Center in New York showed them in May. October finds the films shuttling busily between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cinematheque and the Philadelphia Film Society. Filmgoers in other cities should hope fervently that “Red Hollywood” will make an appearance in their local cinematheque too. It’s just too good to miss.

To learn more, see these related articles:

Russian Film The Circus Showcases Red Hollywood
The Musicals of Red Hollywood—A Retrospective

The copyright of the article The Making of the "Red Hollywood" Film Series in Foreign Films is owned by Susan Z. Swan. Permission to republish The Making of the "Red Hollywood" Film Series in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

East Side Story, DVD cover, documentary, Ranga	Still, The Circus (1936), trapeze act, Orlova	Still, Jolly Fellows (1934), Madcap Soviet Musical
Still, The Shining Path(1940), a Cinderella story