Soviet Films - 1950s

1950s

With the start of the Cold War, writers, still considered the primary auteurs, were all the more reluctant to take up script writing, and the early 1950s saw only a handful of feature films completed during any year. The death of Stalin was a merciful relief to many, and all the more so was the official trashing of his public image as a benign and competent leader by Nikita Khrushchev two years later. This latter event gave filmmakers the margin of comfort they needed to move away from the narrow formula stories of socialist realism, expand its boundaries, and begin work on a wider range of entertaining and artistic Soviet films.

Notable films include:

• The Cranes Are Flying, directed at Mosfilm by the Georgian-born director Mikhail Kalatozov in 1957. It won the Palme d'Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival.