Red Blues by Kristian Lin
If it's playing in your area, you won't do any better for goofy, surreal fun than "East Side Story," a documentary about musical films made in Eastern Europe between 1934 and 1973. Filled with hilarity both intentional and unintentional, this wacky movie is "That's Entertainment!' for the Warsaw Pact set.
Directed by Dana Ranga and co-written by Ranga and Andrew Horn, "East Side Story" intersperses clips of these movie rarities with interviews of film historians, filmmakers, actors and audience members familiar with them. The interviews illustrate the film's thesis, which is that moviemakers who tried to make musicals in the Communist system were in an impossible bind. Audiences loved these movies for the simple pleasures of song, dance, and comedy. The apparatchiks knew that the masses had to be entertained, but musicals were threatening - they were too frivolous, and their visual opulence glorified materialism. The bureaucrats vastly preferred that people see serious films about history and social issues (one viewer describes attending these as "like a national duty").
It was hard to obtain official sanction to make a musical, and the studios never saw the profits from the hits, so why bother? This dilemma even inspired one of the genre's biggest successes, a 1962 East German entry called "Midnight Revue." In it, a movie producer is so frustrated in his attempts to film a musical that he kidnaps the country's leading film director, scriptwriter, and composer, and holds them until they come up with an idea for one. The three men insist that it can't be done and, naturally, burst into song and dance about the impossibility of making musicals.
With Hollywood musicals largely verboten in the Eastern bloc, directors and performers had to learn the genre's ins and outs as they went along. Yet the film clips we see reveal a high level of singing and dancing talent, and the visual elements have a real deftness and style that wouldn't have embarrassed any Hollywood director.
Nevertheless, you'll find it hard to believe much of what you see (and hear, if you know German, Russian, or Czech). That's because the musical's generic conventions clashed with the dictates of socialist aesthetics. As the dryly funny narration explains, "Godard once said that the history of film was the history of boys photographing girls. But Stalin had a different fantasy: boys photographing tractors."
Thus, song lyrics like "Racka dacka, racka dacka, that's the song of the coal press!" Beaming, rosy-cheeked Russian field workers sing, "Harvest, harvest, keep loading! The quota has been attained!" A couple of Czech beauty parlor attendants harmonize, "No woman at a construction site is thinking of her skin," while young women lying on massage tables do choreographed routines and the masseuses pat them down in time to the music.
Of course, there's a dark subtext to this Communist musical delirium. Joseph Stalin's favorite movie was a musical called "Volga, Volga." Looking at that rollicking farce about singing boatmen, you'd never guess that it was made during the worst period of Stalin's genocidal campaign to remove potential enemies. Perhaps, "East Side Story" suggests, finding something to sing and dance about in those dark times was a sort of heroism.
But the movie doesn't sell this too hard. Instead, it uses musicals to point up the socialists' failure to see how providing consumers with entertainment (like the damned capitalist countries did) could have served their own best interests. One hysterical insight comes from an East German sociology professor who sent his assistants to scour Lenin's 38 volumes of collected writings to find what he wrote about entertainment. The answer: absolutely nothing. As the narrator says, "Who knows how things might have turned out if socialism had just been more fun?"
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