UCLA film producer Marina Goldovskaya was once a film student. Unlike the students at UCLA, however, her daily life was shadowed by constant fear. As a documentary filmmaker in Russia during an era when personal freedoms were unthinkable, Goldovskaya managed to immerse herself in the truths that she captured on film while standing up against censorship and oppression. Goldovskaya’s new book, Woman with a Movie Camera, explains the process of documentary filmmaking and intimately reflects upon what it was like to live through Russia’s social and political upheaval.

BookZone: You grew up with the dilemma of having to work with state-enforced bureaucracy, censorship, surveillance and threats, all of which could get in the way of a person’s creativity, while striving to preserve the truth of what you were documenting; things that were going on in society. This period of history was followed by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), both of which brought about subsequent freedoms as well as conflict. Is this freedom reflected in the work of today’s Russian film students and filmmakers? Or is fear still a lingering presence in the collective Russian mind?

Goldovskaya: That’s a great question. The thing is that when I was working, I started after the totalitarian regime, Stalin and Stalin’s ideology, and the fears, were ingrained in the genes. I am not sure that I completely got rid of them because it was so deep. When I was five or six years old, I remember myself drawing on the newspaper, Pravda, which means “truth.” It was the most popular newspaper [as well as that of the] Communist Party. I was drawing a Soviet star and it was on [a photograph of] Stalin. I had put a little piece of it on Stalin. My father took away the newspaper, tore it and said, “Please, never do it,” without explaining why. These kinds of things stay with you. It was as if I was breathing with this air; we didn’t even think about it; we knew it was the rules of the game. Everybody played by their own rules. My rules were to not say something that I didn’t believe in if I could avoid it. So, I tried not to take on stories or subjects, which could or would make me lie. It was very difficult not to be afraid. I think that my young colleagues don’t have this fear.

BookZone: You’ve been living in Los Angeles for over fifteen years now. Do you often go out and see American films?

Goldovskaya: You know, I am a member of the American Academy of Motion Pictures’
Documentary branch. It’s great. I am so happy because I see all the best films. I also try to see many fiction, non-narrative, films.

BookZone: Your film, Solovki Power, (about Gulag prison camps) was an amazing feat. The entire process of making that film unfolded in just the right way, from the characters, to the settings, to the way that historical information was uncovered; most significantly, that the camps were started not by Stalin, in 1924, but by Lenin in 1923. When the film was up for release, it was shelved and then later brought back out for public viewing. The fact that it was screened at all was an indication that society was changing. Could you comment on this?

Goldovskaya: It was clear to me that the film would not be shelved for long. When you live in a country, in a society, you feel what is happening and it’s not only with your nose that you smell it but you feel it. So, I felt it. It was like waves. I was full of anxiety; all of us were full of anxiety. The film was released in three hundred cinemas in one day. They printed three hundred copies and it killed the negative. I had to restore the negative later. I felt the obligation to go wherever the film was screening: in Moscow; in St. Petersburg; in big cities; in little cities. Every screening brought people against each other. There was the feeling that a civil war would start. Later, I read a quotation from the writer, Anna Akhmatova, a very famous Russian poet who never left the country. She wrote: “A time will come when two parts of Russian society will confront each other: those who were sitting in prison and those who were putting people in prison.”

BookZone: Of all the documentaries that you made, is there one that you are especially proud of?

Goldovskaya: The most significant was Solovki Power. Solovki Power is a metaphor for Soviet power. From the film, you can see that life outside the prison camps was not better than life inside the camps. For people who were arrested, life was unbearable, especially if they had been tortured. That was how people were treated during investigations; my father was tortured and had insomnia for the rest of his life. Later, people were sent to prison to be exiled and had to work and live in barracks inside the camps. I think that the prisoners felt more free than those who were not sitting in prison because those who were living in so-called freedom didn’t know what would happen to them next. Very often, a person could leave the house and not return home. They were just grabbed off the streets; they were completely unsure of what could happen.

Professor Goldovskaya’s book was recently read by Grey Gardens (1976) director, Albert Maysles who had this to say:

As I read I kept thinking, “that’s me, too.” Each of us engaged in battle with the system, whether Soviet or American, and determined to make films our own way.