The Soviet state managed to erect a somewhat robust domestic film industry but its products were relatively absent in the US market. Part of the problem was that Soviet films were like other non-American films: recorded in a non-English language, starring actors unknown to US audiences, and produced for different audiences. This placed a hard ceiling on their viability in the US market. In this respect, the consumer barriers to Soviet films was much like that of films produced by US allies like Japan or France. But there was a political aspect to the distribution of Soviet cinema that was not present for other filmmakers. Cinema was not immune to the Cold War and the political imperatives of the cultural Cold War often interjected themselves into the complex process of US distribution. This meant that while some Soviet films did manage to reach the US market it was often in very mediated forms.

One of the basic facts of the distribution of Soviet films was that the Soviet state was directly responsible for negotiations on this matter. It was only during Glasnost that Soviet production companies like Mosfilm would deal directly with potential buyers of their product. From 1965 onward, most of these deals went through Goskino, not the film production companies. The Soviet state approached exchanges of film somewhat like any other commodity like steel; ideally the Soviets would agree to the legal distribution of x number of films for y number of films from a non-Soviet production company. This form of bilateral trade was less predicated on the box office but rather a form of cultural diplomacy. This was clear in the Soviet film exchanges with India in which a number of Indian films were shown in USSR theaters and vice-versa. Likewise, Mosfilm's joint production with Toho for Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala started with an approach by the Soviet embassy to the Japanese, not Mosfilm. These deals often left much to be desired in execution. While Soviet audiences saw a number of Indian films, the translation and distribution of Soviet films in India was patchy and initially quite chaotic.

This bilateral import-export approach made penetration of the US market quite problematic. For one thing, Hollywood companies were far larger and carried a great deal more weight than any other partner for Soviet films. This meant that Soviet negotiators could not finesse bilateral deals made on the basis of an equivalent exchange. The Thaw had precipitated an agreement between US and Soviet diplomats over cultural exchanges in the late 1950s. The State Department had negotiated an exchange of ten films and the major US companies drew lots to in 1956 to show a number of Soviet films. The weak link in this was the importance of US production companies to maintain this agreement. While US production companies were interested in the Eastern bloc market, they had far less interest in showing Soviet films in US screens. Longtime MPAA president Jack Valenti noted that most US distributors felt that there was a limited market for Soviet films so this created a disincentive to engage in these type of bilateral trades. The MPAA and other production companies also took issue with the USSR's unlicensed distribution of US films during the Stalin period and feared that giving them access to American products would lead to state-abetted piracy by an avowedly anti-capitalist state. These agreements provided for some US control over censorship, but did not eliminate it completely. There was a sense among American producers that if they handed off their products to the Soviets they would lose control over it. For their part, Goskino and other state agencies were interested in putting only their best films forward for the US market, which limited their hand in negotiations. The problem was that the most Hollywood-like films produced in the USSR like the war epic Liberation often had an ideological spin to justify their budgets.This made US-USSR negotiations for films quite tense, but also pretty futile. Most of the Soviet films came across from the State Department agreement such as The Cranes Are Flying lost money for their US distributors. The major US companies opted out of the bilateral agreement in the 1960s, leaving the distribution of Soviet films to relatively minor players in Hollywood who negotiated with Goskino directly.

There were some major examples of Soviet films that bucked this Sisyphean trend. The most notable one was the 1966/67 Soviet epic War and Peace. Mosfilm's epic was a direct response to Hollywood's tackling of Tolstoy's opus. The joint American-Italian production had come to Soviet screens via the cultural exchange and there was a sense in Mosfilm and Goskino that it was necessary for the Soviets to exceed Hollywood's translation of this classic of Russian culture. The Soviet epic received an American distributor in the form of the Walter Reade Organization who shouldered the costs of dubbing the epic for American audience. The premier of the film at NYC's De Mille theater edited down the film to a more manageable six hours and the film received a fairly warm reaction from audiences. A young Roger Ebert gave the film a glowing review and praised the film's dubbing. But the sheer length of the film precluded an extended run and Walter Reade parlayed the film to ABC, who further reedited the film for a miniseries event in 1972.

Most of the Soviet films though that trickled into the US after the major Hollywood producers opted out of the exchange were relatively minor ones and not epics like War and Peace. Most of the films in question tended to be more niche items that filled in the growing art house category of cinema rather than mainstream Soviet films. Various film festivals that specialized in showing global cinema such as the New York Film Festival showcased a number of Soviet films such as Nachalo. But here too Soviet cinema was at a disadvantage in that it was not producing the type of arthouse fare that was popular at this time. Ironically, the Warsaw Pact states, most notably Poland, were the Eastern bloc films more likely to find an audience among the US arthouse market as these films tended to be more artistically daring than their more conservative Soviet counterparts.

But arthouse films do not pull in the same revenue as a hit film. While Soviet films filled a niche in the arthouse market, there was little interest in bringing Soviet films to US screens. Exceptions to this trend such as War and Peace confirmed the general rule that the Americans conceptualized film exchanges as more of a one-way street rather than a bilateral exchange. The major studios had the moxie to walk away from negotiations. This was different than in smaller film markets such as Western Europe where there were longer traditions of transnational exchanges of film and there was greater importance placed on film festivals like Cannes and prizes like the Venice's Golden Lion. The Moscow International Film Festival was part of the European cycle of film festivals and tended to receive a number of films from Western Europe. Soviet films made some headway in European festivals and theaters, but much like the US arthouse market, they were eclipsed by the more audacious Eastern European filmmakers like Andrzej Wajda. American studios could have shown more Soviet films during the Cold War, but they chose not to do so. Part of the rationale had to do with political rivalry and Cold War tensions, but there was a strong mercenary component to the disinterest on the American side of the equation. Most Soviet films would not have been profitable to screen and the costs of dubbing to make the films palatable to a mass American audience leery of subtitles made things even more difficult. Nor did Soviet films promise the allure of sex that characterized the American advertising for Western European films like I am Curious (Yellow) or Ikiru that promised nudity and other debauched scenes American films could not show. The fact that US studios were negotiating with a powerful state entity like Goskino meant this was a different relationship than negotiations between smaller non-American studios like Toho where the US could make cuts and artistic compromises in the name of profitability. The Soviets for their part had no real incentive to meet the US demands either. In the end, cinematic exchanges were a path not taken during the Cold War and neither side was invested in making these exchanges a success.

Sources

Babiracki, Patryk, Kenyon Zimmer, and Michael David-Fox. Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange Across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s-1960s. Arlington: University of Texas Press, 2014.

Balio, Tino. The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010.

Rajagopalan, Sudha. Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas: The Culture of Movie-Going After Stalin. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2008.

Romijn, Peter, Giles Scott-Smith, and Joes Segal. Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West. Amsterdam University Press, 2012.