| This dissertation concerns the role of rock-n-roll music in the last decade of Soviet cinematic production. It outlines the historical developments in the Soviet film industry, unofficial popular culture and cinematic form that provided the foundation for the Soviet rock film to become a cultural emblem of Perestroika. Prior to Gorbachev, rock music was considered a nefarious form of Western propaganda from the perspective of official Soviet cultural production and was essentially banned, despite the fact that from the mid-1970s it was one of the fastest growing unofficial arts in the USSR. With the onset of Perestroika, unofficial art forms flourished under the new conditions of officially loosened reins. Yet the typological make-up of Perestroika-era art did not develop in the absence of pressure from the state, but instead was a result of a precarious and often contradictory balance involving both censorship and validation. In my dissertation, I suggest that the Soviet rock film took this dynamic one step further. While engaging two incompatible artistic spheres—rock music and the Soviet film industry—it created one sui generis cultural product that was a direct symptom of Perestroika. The importation of unofficial culture into the registers of official cultural legislation created a cinematic Zeitgeist, an artistic testament to social and political change. By disseminating symbols of dissent using old-order infrastructure, the Soviet rock film embodied, on an artistic level, the precise mechanism that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. This study analyzes the mechanisms behind these symbols in terms of form, reception and the film industry itself in order to frame the Soviet rock film as a crucial component of Perestroika art. The rock film of the last Soviet decade unites within itself a struggling unofficial milieu, an established bureaucratic industry clamoring for control in the face of sociopolitical upheaval, and an emerging mass culture—all of which constitute a lens for understanding the cultural mechanisms underlying the collapse of the Soviet Union. |
