‘Daytime Stars’ by Igor Talankin and Olga Bergholz: Cultural Trauma of Stalinist Repressions and the Siege of Leningrad in Soviet Films of the 1960s

The era of the “Thaw” of the late 1950 – 1960s can be considered as a period when the process of cultural trauma in Soviet film production was especially intense. Soviet filmmakers and culture apparatchiks reflected and tried to rethink and overcome the Stalinist past. In this context, the film “Daytime Stars” (1967/1968, Mosfilm), the first biographical film of the famous Soviet poet Olga Bergholz (1910-1975), directed by well-known Soviet director Igor Talankin (1927-2010), can be considered as an exceptional example and a climax of Soviet cinema’s exploration of the Leningrad Siege and Stalinist repressions in the 1960s. Unfortunately, the film was heavily censored and did not reach its audience in the original version. Based on the methodology of system film analysis, as well as adaptation studies, the neo-Formalist theory of narrative, encoding/decoding theory of communication, and a comprehensive range of primary sources about film production from several Russian archives (TsGALI SPb, RGALI, Gosfilmofond, Archive of “Mosfilm,” “Mosfilm” Museum), this text is aimed to reconstruct the original version of Bergholz’s biopic as well a process of its production, editing, censorship, and reception. Building on such theoretical frameworks as a study of the cultural memory, cultural trauma, and film studies, this research continues historiographical debates devoted to continuation and subversion of Stalinist narratives and tropes in the Thaw culture, as well as the institutional production of cultural trauma in the post-war Soviet Union. How did the original version “Daytime Stars” shape the “historical world” of the Stalinist past? What does censorship of this film reveal about the Soviet microphysics of power in the cultural sphere? Thus, the author argues that while mainstream Thaw films proposed the narratives of “restoration of consensus” between the returned victims of the regime and Soviet state in the early anti-Stalinist films and “the Socialist Realist Historicism” in the depiction of the Siege of Leningrad in 1950-1960s, “Daytime Stars” challenged such a narration radically. This film proposed unconventional film language which dealt not with the optimistic version of the Soviet history but rather with the psycho-katabasis narration of unmanageable trauma, an explicit accusation of a Stalinist repressive state, not Socialist Realist depiction of the Leningrad catastrophe, and a compensatory nostalgic myth of the 1920s with the dual revival of “Lenin’s theme” and Christian religiosity. From the stylistic perspective, “Daytime Stars” was strongly influenced by international art cinema. This cultural transfer vividly demonstrates the permeability of cultural boundaries between Western and Soviet memory films of the 1960s. Nevertheless, while the film was supported by the “Mosfilm” editors, the censors of the State Committee for Cinematography did everything to make this new narrative “unreadable” to the public. Thus, “Daytime Stars” was disfigured, and it lost its original meanings, appropriated by the state-oriented narrative about the war, which made its final version the little-understood enigma that the author tried to reconstruct and explain in this thesis.