Cultural Studies The Prompt

A Sample Post:

Little Vera

COLLAPSE

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Vera

Plot:

This was the first Soviet film that I could identify with.  It was released in 1988.  I was a freshly-minted college graduate with the unkind knowledge that a BA in Soviet Studies was not going to get me too far.  I enjoyed watching how young people lived in the Soviet Union at that time.  I had recently returned from 3 months living in Leningrad/Moscow and felt that the drama and dreary/depressed background well represented what I had just experienced while living in the Soviet Union.  Little Vera in Russian means of "little faith".  Certainly that title was not mistakenly chosen.  Vera graduates from high school at the pinnacle of the Soviet realization that their way of life must change....but they did not have the resources/gumption to do this.  A man named Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the CPSU and leader of the Soviet Union, was causing some ripples in the political fabric of the Soviet Union with his programs of "Perestroika, Glasnost, and Demokratizatisia".  These programs were a start, but they only scratched the surface of what the SU really needed to join the modern world.  For a young person, the choice of living like their parents during this era probably seemed exceptionally bleak.  Little Vera rebels.  She runs wild in the streets, is disrespectful to her parents, has no ambitions with the exception of snaring a man while she was still young.  There is a lot of violence, alcohol abuse, trauma, drama, and family disfunction in this film.  This is one of the first Soviet films that the rest of the world could tolerate with the added bonus of seeing the true Soviet lifestyle in the 1980's.

This film garnered a total of 6 international awards. Nataly Negoda, the lead character, received "Best Actress" at the Nika Awards in 1989. Vasili Pichul, the director, won the Special Jury Prize at the 1988 Montreal World Film Festival.

Culture

Well, you see exactly how the majority of Soviets lived at that time.  The apartments were tiny, crowded, and shabby.  The adults were apathetic and unhappy.  The relationships between the parents and children were volatile.  As all teens, Vera just wanted to escape the world that she knew to somewhere else that she could call her own.  The movie showed a lot of the broken-down machinery, factories, and buildings that are common in Soviet cities.  People did not have a lot of personal things and relationships were the most important to them.  It is a true picture of how life was in the Soviet Union at that time.

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