What Is Soviet Parallel Cinema? Deep Dive Into The Film Movement

Soviet Parallel Cinema was an underground film movement in Moscow and Leningrad in the mid-1980s, made outside the state studios.

Directors shot on 8mm, 16mm, and video, and showed the work in apartments and at their own screenings.

We’ll look at how that parallel circuit was organized, who made the films, and which titles belong to it.

Stay with us as we set this movement beside the studio films it is often confused with.

Soviet Parallel Cinema

What Is Soviet Parallel Cinema?

Soviet Parallel Cinema was an underground film movement in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s.

It ran parallel to Goskino, the state film system. The people who used the name were Igor and Gleb Aleinikov in Moscow, the necrorealist Evgeny Yufit in Leningrad, Boris Yukhananov, Evgeny Kondratyev, and Pyotr Pospelov.

They were not one school. The Aleinikovs worked in a conceptualist, sots-art vein: collage, newsreel, titles, and Soviet songs. Yufit’s circle staged black-comic scenes of death and the absurd. Yukhananov experimented with video.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, The Mirror, and Stalker, Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates, Kira Muratova’s features, and Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance are a different history. Those were studio productions. Some were banned, recut, or delayed. They were still made inside the official industry.

Soviet parallel cinema at a glance

Origins Of Soviet Parallel Cinema

The filmmakers coined the name themselves. In 1984 Igor Aleinikov shot Metastases, Yufit founded the independent studio Mzhalalafilm and began his early necrorealist shorts, and Evgeny Kondratyev shot a short called Assa — a different film from Sergei Solovyov’s 1987 feature of that name. Boris Yukhananov and Pyotr Pospelov joined the circle the next year.

They were young artists, critics, and technicians with 8mm, 16mm, or video cameras. This was not a 1960s class of VGIK students rewriting Socialist Realism from inside the studios.

In January 1986 Igor Aleinikov issued the first number of Cine Fantom, a handmade journal of about thirty copies. Later issues carried theory, a chronicle of parallel cinema, and notes on directors including Fassbinder, Godard, and Straub-Huillet. The journal ran to eleven issues, the last in 1990.

In November 1987 the Aleinikov brothers held the first Cine Fantom Fest in Moscow, at the Kurchatov Palace of Culture and the Cinema Center, with films by the brothers, Kondratyev, Yufit, and Yukhananov. Sergei Dobrotvorsky organized a later festival in Leningrad.

In a 1989 interview, Dobrotvorsky called parallel cinema a place in the system rather than a style: film made outside centralized production and distribution, for political, ideological, or ethical reasons.

Early screenings were in private flats. After glasnost, print culture could take up subjects that had been closed, and the circle was no longer only an underground. Each filmmaker kept a separate practice.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Soviet Parallel Cinema film movement, check out our in-depth profile and explore our comprehensive timeline of film movements to see where it fits in cinema history.

Outside The State Film System

These films were made where Mosfilm and Lenfilm were not the producer.

The practical conditions were narrow-gauge stock and, in Yukhananov’s case, VHS; projection in apartments until the 1987 festival; and a samizdat magazine instead of the state press.

Tarkovsky and Parajanov used allegory, historical costume, and sparse dialogue inside the official pipeline. The Mirror went through that studio path. It is a different story from parallel cinema.

A few of the same people later crossed into the studios. In May 1988 Aleksandr Sokurov opened a short-lived workshop on the facilities of Lenfilm and the Leningrad Documentary Studio for parallel filmmakers, including Yufit. A two-hour anthology to be called Dreams (Sny) was planned and was not shot. The workshop closed before production. Sokurov hosted that workshop. Mother and Son and Russian Ark are later films of his.

The Aleinikovs’ first official-studio credit was Someone Has Been Here (Zdes kto-to byl, 1989), made at Mosfilm’s Experimental Youth Creative Unit. Yufit later worked at Lenfilm, including Knights of the Sublunary, written with Vladimir Maslov.

Themes And Styles In Soviet Parallel Cinema

The shared fact is that the work was produced off the state plan. The styles diverge.

In Leningrad, necrorealism — Yufit’s name for his circle — played death, suicide, and grotesque violence as black slapstick. He refused a fixed manifesto, on the grounds that a canon would have killed the spontaneity. Early films already carried death and psychopathology, pushed into social grotesque so the violence read as absurd. Werewolf Orderlies (1984), Woodcutter, Spring, Courage, and Boars of Suicide come from his studio, Mzhalalafilm.

In Moscow, the Aleinikovs were quieter and more conceptual. Handmade collage, newsreel, discarded official paper, on-screen text, and Soviet songs sit in front of a 16mm camera. Tractors (1987) and the later feature Tractor Drivers 2 (1992) take their titles from the 1939 film Tractor Drivers, and from the brothers’ echo of the Stalin-era actor Pyotr Aleinikov.

Yukhananov’s contribution was video. The Mad Prince, begun in 1986, was shot on VHS. He described that camera as the only one then known in Moscow and Leningrad, and he called the method fatal editing: on that equipment, a new shot replaced the old one for good.

The later trace is specific. It runs through Russian experimental film, the afterlife of necrorealism, and the Cine Fantom club Gleb Aleinikov later ran. The Mirror and Stalker belong to Tarkovsky’s studio career. Parallel cinema did not set the curriculum of film schools worldwide.

Influential Filmmakers Of Soviet Parallel Cinema

Igor and Gleb Aleinikov founded the Moscow side of the movement and the journal Cine Fantom. Their 1987 shorts include I’m Cold, So What?, The Severe Illness of Men, Tractors, and Revolutionary Sketch. Post-Political Cinema followed in 1988, Someone Has Been Here in 1989, and Waiting for de Bill in 1990, which took the International Jury Prize at Oberhausen. Igor Aleinikov died in a plane crash in 1994. Gleb published his brother’s diaries and moved toward the Cine Fantom club and television.

Evgeny Yufit (1961–2016) led Leningrad necrorealism and founded Mzhalalafilm in 1984. Werewolf Orderlies, Woodcutter, Spring (1987), Courage (1988), and Boars of Suicide (1988) are the core of that strain. The Wooden Room (1995), with a screenplay by Vladimir Maslov, is a later feature.

Boris Yukhananov joined in the mid-1980s, edited Cine Fantom, and made The Mad Prince as an open-ended video-novel. In 1988 he founded the Workshop of Individual Directing (MIR). He is also the link between this film circle and theatre.

Evgeny Kondratyev, known in that circle as Debil, and Pyotr Pospelov belong in the same group. Kondratyev made diary-like and cameraless films and collaborated with the Aleinikovs. Pospelov, a critic and composer, played the central figure in The Severe Illness of Men and prepared an early parallel-cinema almanac.

Aleksandr Sokurov, Kira Muratova, and Tengiz Abuladze are major Soviet directors, and authors of other films. Repentance, The Long Farewell, and Among Grey Stones were studio pictures.

Legacy And Impact Of Soviet Parallel Cinema

The circle loosened as the Soviet Union ended. Studio doors that had briefly opened then shut, and by the mid-1990s the collective phase was over. Gleb Aleinikov’s Cine Fantom club continued as a home for independent work. Yufit remained the filmmaker most identified with necrorealism. Much of the later experimental line passed through people around MIR.

What traveled was a way of making films with no studio and no Goskino approval: newsreel used against itself, amateur bodies, video that cannot be recut in the usual way. Writing on the movement, including a 2020 issue of East European Film Bulletin, treats irony, self-citation, and parody as part of the practice, including the grey zone between official and underground late-Soviet film.

The practical inheritance stayed local. A handmade journal of about thirty copies, apartment projection, and a festival the filmmakers organized themselves were how this work was seen. When a few titles later reached Mosfilm or Lenfilm, they still carried those devices: stock defects, collage, and, in Yufit’s case, the necrorealist body. Sokurov’s 1988 workshop and Yukhananov’s MIR are the teaching links that can actually be named. The films support that history.

What Is Soviet Parallel Cinema – Wrap Up

Soviet Parallel Cinema is the late Soviet underground of the Aleinikovs, Yufit, Yukhananov, and their circle, from roughly 1984 to the early 1990s.

Tarkovsky, Parajanov, Muratova, Sokurov, and Abuladze posed different problems, inside the studios. Shelved studio films and parallel cinema are separate histories.

The films that carry this name were mostly shorts on narrow-gauge film or video, seen first in flats and at Cine Fantom, and only later, in a few cases, on Mosfilm or Lenfilm.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Soviet Parallel Cinema?

Soviet Parallel Cinema was a late-1980s underground movement. Filmmakers in Moscow and Leningrad made work outside Goskino, on amateur film and video, and showed it through private screenings and the journal Cine Fantom.

Who Were The Key Figures In Soviet Parallel Cinema?

Igor and Gleb Aleinikov, Evgeny Yufit, Boris Yukhananov, Evgeny Kondratyev, and Pyotr Pospelov. Sokurov, Muratova, and Abuladze were studio directors outside this circle.

What Themes Did Soviet Parallel Cinema Explore?

The films do not share one subject. Leningrad necrorealism dwelt on death, suicide, and black slapstick. The Moscow films parodied Soviet myth with collage and newsreel. Sexuality, absurdity, and anti-utopian irony run through both.

How Did Soviet Parallel Cinema Impact Modern Filmmaking?

It established a Russian experimental and amateur-avant-garde lineage, kept alive by Cine Fantom and by workshops such as MIR. Tarkovsky’s films come from another practice.

Did Soviet Parallel Cinema Face Censorship?

The early films bypassed the state production system, so the usual script-approval path often did not apply. They circulated privately until the 1987 festival. Some shooting was illegal on its own, including filming in the metro without a permit.

How Has Soviet Parallel Cinema Influenced Film Education?

Sokurov’s 1988 Lenfilm workshop, which closed before the planned anthology Dreams was shot, and Yukhananov’s MIR workshop are the concrete teaching links. The movement is studied as late Soviet underground film.

Essential Films Of Soviet Parallel Cinema

The titles below are films from that underground circle. Dates follow the filmmakers’ filmographies. A few English titles in circulation are awkward translations; the Russian title is given where it identifies the film.

Most of these are shorts, shot on 8mm, 16mm, or video and first seen in apartments, in Cine Fantom, or at the November 1987 festival. Someone Has Been Here, Waiting for de Bill, and The Wooden Room come at the edge of that handmade period or after it. The 1988 anthology Dreams (Sny), planned at Sokurov’s Lenfilm workshop, was never shot, so it is not in this list.

The Mad Prince (1986–)

Boris Yukhananov’s video-novel, begun in 1986 and shot on VHS. Five films of about an hour were edited from material he had imagined as sixteen chapters. The first, The Mansion, records his independent theatre group Theater Theater during an apartment performance. The listing above is that first chapter.

He described that VHS camera as the only one then known in Moscow and Leningrad. On that equipment a new shot replaced the old one for good, which he called fatal editing. The open form matches the rest of his place in the circle: he edited Cine Fantom and, in 1988, founded the Workshop of Individual Directing (MIR).

Woodcutter (Lesorub, 1985)

Evgeny Yufit’s necrorealist short for Mzhalalafilm, also dated 1984 in some accounts. English sources sometimes call it Sawyer, a mistranslation of lesorub, woodcutter. It belongs with the early shorts built from street actions, mannequins, and black-comic death imagery.

Werewolf Orderlies is the other 1984 short from the same studio. Spring, Courage, and Boars of Suicide continue that line a few years later. Yufit refused a fixed manifesto for these films, on the grounds that a canon would have killed the spontaneity.

Metastases (1984)

Igor Aleinikov’s 16-minute short, often taken as the start of the Moscow underground. Found footage and found sound: solarized training films, documentary fragments, speeches by party leaders, and rock and roll, assembled as a picture of media pressure.

The same year, Yufit founded Mzhalalafilm and Kondratyev shot a short called Assa, a different film from Sergei Solovyov’s 1987 feature of that name. Metastases is the Moscow half of that 1984 start: conceptual collage, newsreel, and found sound, rather than the Leningrad street actions.

Revolutionary Sketch (1987)

An 8-minute short by Igor and Gleb Aleinikov, made with Georgy Ostretsov and Evgeny Kondratyev in the 70th year of the October Revolution. Official speeches about raising a new person run under footage of the circle in costume. Chronicle of model workers is turned upside down and backwards, and Soviet icons are crudely animated. The film keeps its political line unresolved.

I’m Cold, So What? (1987)

Also circulated in English as I’m Frigid, but It Doesn’t Matter. A 15-minute narrow-gauge short by Igor and Gleb Aleinikov, without a conventional plot.

It belongs to their 1987 cluster, with Tractors, The Severe Illness of Men, and Revolutionary Sketch. Like those shorts, it was made for the parallel circuit — the journal, the flats, and that November’s Cine Fantom Fest.

The Severe Illness of Men (1987)

Igor and Gleb Aleinikov, 16mm. The Russian title is Жестокая болезнь мужчин, also translated The Cruel Illness of Men. Newsreel from the Stalin era — Chapayev, pioneers, factories, planes, Cossacks — is cut against industrial Moscow of the late 1980s. Pyotr Pospelov plays a silent figure who is raped in an empty metro car. Filming in the metro without permission was punishable.

Olf’s Supporters (1987)

Сторонники Ольфа, a short of about ten minutes directed by Evgeny Kondratyev, Inal Savchenkov, Aleksandr Ovchinnikov, and Konstantin Mitenev.

Kondratyev, known in the circle as Debil, made diary-like and cameraless films and worked with the Aleinikovs. This short is the 1987 credit that carries his name with those three collaborators, in the same festival year as the Aleinikov cluster and Yufit’s Spring.

Spring (1987)

Evgeny Yufit’s Весна, a necrorealist short from Mzhalalafilm, in the same run as Woodcutter and Werewolf Orderlies.

Death, suicide, and grotesque violence are played as black slapstick, the manner of the Leningrad films. The Moscow films of the same year cut newsreel and Soviet song. Spring belongs with the first of those two practices. The Russian title is the name of the short.

Boris and Gleb (1988)

Igor and Gleb Aleinikov. Gleb Aleinikov and Boris Yukhananov play the first Russian saints, Boris and Gleb, after Boris, Gleb, and Igor had started working together. The short stages that brotherhood.

The saints’ names double as the filmmakers’ names. That self-citation — a private fact used as the subject — is the kind of irony the Moscow side of the circle kept returning to, including in the handmade collage shorts of the year before.

Courage (1988)

Evgeny Yufit’s Мужество, a 1988 Mzhalalafilm necrorealist short.

It sits with Boars of Suicide in the last year of those handmade Leningrad shorts. The same year, in May, Aleksandr Sokurov opened a short-lived workshop on the facilities of Lenfilm and the Leningrad Documentary Studio for parallel filmmakers, Yufit among them. A two-hour anthology to be called Dreams (Sny) was planned there and was not shot. Courage is one of the shorts that were made, under the Mzhalalafilm arrangement.

Boars of Suicide (1988)

Evgeny Yufit’s Вепри суицида. “Boar Suicide” is a clipped English title for the same short. It sits with his 1988 necrorealist work, beside Courage and after Spring and Woodcutter.

The title points at the subject those Leningrad films kept staging: suicide and grotesque violence played so the act reads as black slapstick. Yufit had already refused a manifesto that would freeze that practice into a canon. The short stays inside Mzhalalafilm.

Post-Political Cinema (1988)

Постполитическое кино, a 16mm short by Igor and Gleb Aleinikov.

It follows their 1987 cluster — I’m Cold, So What?, The Severe Illness of Men, Tractors, and Revolutionary Sketch — and precedes Someone Has Been Here, their first film inside Mosfilm. Official speech and Soviet song were already the material of those shorts. The 1988 title names the point they had reached: a political line left unresolved on purpose.

Someone Has Been Here (1989)

Здесь кто-то был, the Aleinikovs’ medium-length film at Mosfilm’s Experimental Youth Creative Unit, and their first film inside official production. They carried over devices from the handmade shorts, including the use of film-stock defects.

The move into Mosfilm did not make the earlier apartment films into studio pictures after the fact. Tractors, Revolutionary Sketch, and Post-Political Cinema remained narrow-gauge work shown through Cine Fantom. Someone Has Been Here is the point where that practice briefly had an official-studio credit.

Waiting for de Bill (1990)

Also listed as Awaiting de Bil. Igor and Gleb Aleinikov won the International Jury Prize at the Oberhausen short-film festival with it in 1990, while the Soviet Union still existed.

By then the collective phase was loosening. Cine Fantom’s last issue appeared the same year. The prize is a festival credit for a short from the circle, and it sits after the 1989 Mosfilm film, still under the brothers’ names.

The Wooden Room (1995)

Деревянная комната, directed by Evgeny Yufit, 65 minutes, screenplay by Vladimir Maslov. A documentary director lives with his wife in an isolated forest hut and films marginal events until he is drawn into them. Almost no dialogue. It is a later Yufit feature, made after the underground years.

Maslov also wrote Knights of the Sublunary with Yufit, one of the Lenfilm projects that followed the amateur shorts. The Wooden Room keeps the necrorealist interest in death and the absurd, now at feature length, after Mzhalalafilm’s 1980s shorts and after the collective phase had ended.

Discs And Stills Filed With The Wrong Films

The items below were attached to this article under Soviet titles. They are other films.

Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me (1986) is an American coming-of-age film.

Discover England: Spring and Summer is a Dartmoor travel disc.

Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) is Francis Ford Coppola’s film about the carmaker. The 1988 anthology Sny, planned at Sokurov’s workshop, was never shot.

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