00:10 — 02:06 Postsoviet mass culture

To ring in the New Year 1996, ORT broadcast “Old Songs about What Matters”. Today we all know it. We’ve seen umpteen variations on it since: today’s pop stars sing Soviet classics, with dresses and décor like old Soviet films. But in the mid ’90s it was something totally new. It seemed like we had left the Soviet past, yet here it was.

The success of “Old Songs” created a totally new trend. Now, turning to a past where all was good and just, became perhaps pop culture’s main draw. It hooked an audience and made them forget about the world around them.

It’s the main draw, but not the only one. What is pop culture? Why are we talking about it now?

Generally, it’s productions, genres aiming for the widest popularity: to sound from every corner; to hit all screens nationwide; to interest a big cross-section of the public. High culture sees these as low genres, aimed at the most pedestrian tastes, with little to be said of them. In fact, reaching popularity takes talent, intuition, luck. Most importantly, what reaches the masses reveals society’s attitudes: people’s dreams, fears, what’s in their heads.

02:06 — 04:37 The democratization of pop culture

Late-Soviet pop culture followed some strange rules. One, popularity was not linked to accessibility. To get access to screens, to big public spaces, creators had to first comply aesthetically. They had to get state approval. The “struggling creators” were not just serious writers, directors, but also Pugacheva, Obodzinsky, Govorukhin, Motyl, whoever. Unauthorized popularity looked suspicious in this system. “Unhealthy popularity” was a journalistic cliche.

Perestroika saw several new pop culture developments. Firstly, it was democratized. You could gain access to audiences without belonging to official unions, you didn’t need an imprimatur. If you owned a synthesizer, you could record your own album, a week later it’s in shops, in a month you’re touring stadiums. If you had money to shoot a film, you could now do that outside of Mosfilm. You didn’t have to wait for official approval, things got much simpler.

Secondly, pop culture became commercial, like it is worldwide. If success came, you got a large audience or your films hit cinemas, you no longer got a fixed state honorarium. Instead, you made money: the more success, the more profit. Success and money directly correlate.

Thirdly, previously taboo themes came into pop culture. There was no sex or violence in the USSR, but now it’s possible. Yet by inertia creators don’t want to make pure entertainment, so any thriller or erotic film of that time touches on social themes: prostitution, delinquency, etc.

04:37 — 07:34 Fairytales as pop culture’s main genre

By the early ’90s, people reacted strongly to the new frankness: people clearly didn’t want to watch, read, hear the harsh truth. Moreover, the reality outside was crueler, changed faster, than art could depict it.

As a result, fairytales became the main genre for pop cinema and TV. The fairytales existed in all kinds of forms, but oblique, transformed.

Firstly soap operas, a new genre for Russian TV: endless stories lasting months, years – eventually the characters seem more real than real life. These were usually Latin American and cut from the same cloth: a Cinderella story where a girl’s unfairly held down, and only a mustachioed hunk’s love gains her long-deserved status.

Fairytales entered into domestic films, too. Box offices collapsed, few go to the movies, yet what can be called early ’90s popular cinema, e.g. Dmitry Astrakhan, are fantastical tales of good over evil, justice triumphant. Cinderella meets her prince, wedding bells, yet it’s all set in the early ’90s.

TV game shows were also a new genre, where an ordinary guy could become rich and happy by spinning the wheel. Now he wins the big prize, a car, and all is immediately well.

There are the commercials that hypnotize audiences, because any product advertised promises euphoria. Ads for pyramid schemes verge on manipulation, but they preach a fairytale: you can do nothing, but wealth will magically roll in: just deposit money into the fund and wait for the interest.

07:34— 10:01 Escape from reality

It may seem like early ’90s pop culture is escapism, avoiding reality. The fairytale is just one such means.

Humor too provides an escape. Comedy shows air from morning to night. It doesn’t matter how silly Petrosian’s jokes are; if you dive into the laughter, life feels easier.

There is escape through glamour: many new mags and TV shows present the fine life, where happiness is a certain set of consumer goods. You can buy it, or at least dream of it.

Of course, nostalgia’s an escape. “Old Songs about What Matters” is blamed for sparking Soviet nostalgia among the masses. In fact, it invented nothing new, it just opened the floodgates, and a stream of emotions issued lasting to this day. Popular films, TV started to deal with the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s. It is that era where art seeks its themes and heroes. It could be heroic war films, some major historical figure, or bold KGB men who catch criminals, spies, saboteurs. By the mid-2000s, these productions make up a new patriotic canon, where all good was in the past, and the past was all good. Russia’s golden age was the Soviet era. Various failures or even Stalinism don’t change the overall picture.

Pop culture is bent on avoiding the present reality. Reality, as if in revenge, does not yield to pop culture. 2000s pop cinema and books is critiqued for being far from the truth, from the real world we live in, down to the details, to the level of a single picture. Filmmakers fail to grasp the features they’re supposed to show viewers today, that they’re seeing today’s Russia.

10:01 — 14:12 Reality comes back

Already in the early 2000s we see a reaction building against escapism. For the moment this happens in experimental art circles, where all kinds of people in all genres seek a new language to talk about reality, to depict it in its rawest form.

In theatre this was Teatr.doc and the verbatim technique, where scripts are derived from people’s own words after the playwright interviews them for hours. Teatr.doc presented a whole new kind of hero: black students, immigrant workers, mother of soldiers who died in Chechnya, those tried for Bolotnaya Square — generally those absent from the stage, cinema, or popular books.

In cinema this process was seen with young documentary makers, often linked with director Marina Razbezhkina’s classes. Her films were shown at the KINOTEATR.DOC festival. These figures created a new documentary aesthetic, they set new goals: how to film the lives of the most boring sorts, how to show real-life collisions through film; how to keep subjects from acting in front of the camera, to show them as they really are; how to get through to the authentic reality.

Directors Pavel Kostomarov and Alexander Rastorguyev gave cameras to ordinary Rostovians, so they could film themselves, their homes, their ordinary lives. The men then wove together “I Love You” and “I Don’t Love You” from the footage. Valeria Gai Germanika shot an interview with her own sister, then edited together a film. Interestingly, at literally the same time, raw, harsh reality comes to fascinate major cinema and TV. Gradually, in various ways, they try to show it on their screens, sometimes using writers and people from the new documentaries.

Already in the early 2000s a new genre arose, imported from Europe: reality shows. Here, it’s like glimpsing ordinary lives, what people do when no one’s looking. This effect of spied reality makes a huge impression on the public. The first reality shows like “Behind the Glass” are a ratings smash, the people on them become huge stars, though they are soon forgotten.

Germanika soon makes the leap to major art cinema and shoots the feature “Everybody Dies but Me”. She then makes the series “School” for Channel One, camcorder-like shots of ordinary teenagers in a suburban school. The wave is now unstoppable. Among box office hits of recent years was “Gorko!” and “Gorko! 2”, also using the new documentary vibe, shot as if on a camcorder and tracking a South Russia wedding.

TNT, which airs the longest-running, most realistic reality show “House-2”, gradually boosts the documentary character of its shows: the new season of “The Stone Jungle’s Law” is made by leaders of the new documentary trend Kostomarov and Rostorguyev.

14:12 — 16:47 Hope for a new mainstream

Russian pop culture swings from escapism to naturalism, from avoiding reality to depicting it in raw form. But no new mainstream arose from this pendulum, no mass, accessible art that would explain contemporary life to people. Superimposed is the state’s attempt to establish a new Soviet aesthetic, i.e. to support ideologically correct, aesthetically conservative art and hinder “incorrect” art. Yet it seems like the attempt is doomed to fail. Base commerce might be decisive here: no channel or studio will make something that no one will watch, just because the authorities approve.

We see on commercial TV that new territories are arising, where a new mainstream can arise. We see cops-and-criminals shows becoming passé. There’s a new type of humor that’s sharp, clever, socially engaged. Finally, we find the genre that worldwide speaks to viewers about their world, their lives today, is the TV serial. If big movies are ever more CGI for teenagers, maybe on smaller, cable channels will allow authors to work with new characters, new relationships, to try to speak to viewers about life today in today’s language.

Probably, all hope for a new mainstream is connected with these territories, where art can be popular, accessible yet still talk to people on an equal footing, without making them flee reality or drift off into nostalgia, and it can explain current events to viewers, make their lives clearer, easier, i.e. do the work that true pop culture needs to do.