Why it took so long to show "Star Wars" in the USSR, and What was painted on the first posters

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The legendary film arrived in the USSR with a huge delay. Almost fifteen years after the release of the first series, in 1990, George Lucas's trilogy appeared on Soviet cinema screens. Before the screening, as it should be, we prepared and hung up movie posters. The images on them may today cause confusion among fans of "Star Wars", but the artists are not to blame - after all, before the show they had not even seen the film and had to rely only on their instincts and a slightly vague definition of the genre - "galactic western".

Episode IV (New Hope) premiered around the world back in 1977. However, the Soviet censorship, in its best traditions, recognized Lucas's creation as anti-Soviet. Critics were sophisticated in negative epithets for this next "bourgeois" cinema. Most likely, in the image of the Empire, with which the rebels are courageously fighting, they saw a hint of the USSR, because the Cold War was in full swing. Literaturnaya Gazeta called the film “cosmic movie horrors” and a manifestation of a new wave of “cinema psychosis”. True, there is doubt that the authors of these publications actually saw the film, and not just pictures from it, because otherwise they would hardly have called lightsabers "toy laser rapiers" and Obi Wan Kenobi "knight of the Round Table". At the end of the devastating note, the author concluded that "horrors of a truly cosmic scale" in cinemas are needed by the United States so that the viewer, after leaving the hall, can "feel that it is calmer outside of it."

In general, the reaction of the Soviet press to the film, which probably no one had seen, and could not see for a long time, was sharply negative. The Iskusstvo Kino magazine published arguments about the “cult of power” and “almost fascist views,” the Izvestia newspaper remembered superheroes and considered Star Wars as auto-plagiarism (“Superman again”), and also wrote about the “poverty of the author’s thought ". Today, with such a strict approach, 99% of film production could be rejected, but in those years high ideals were brought up in the Soviet audience, and such "empty shells", according to Soviet critics, spoke only of the "Hollywood crisis."

Of course, the film, banned in the Soviet film distribution, aroused great interest. For ten whole years, it could only be seen in pirated copies, which sometimes surfaced on the black market, so only a select few could enjoy the space epic. However, a decade later, the iron censorship gauntlets seem to have weakened somewhat. In 1988, Episode V "The Empire Strikes Back" was shown in the Moscow cinemas "Horizon" and "Zaryadye" as part of the American Film Festival, and a year later the Leningrad Television channel began broadcasting "Star Wars", but it did it somewhat strangely - cut into pieces for 10 minutes. It is difficult to say how one could perceive a dynamic movie in this form.

Only in 1990, the trilogy, which has already become a classic of world cinema, finally reached Soviet screens. Artistic inconsistencies were associated with the first shows. Posters boggled the imagination: techno-cowboys (on horseback) fired from strange weapons, and unknown monsters resembled medieval images of crocodiles and hippos - after all, ancient artists also acted according to the description, without seeing the mysterious creatures in the eyes. In general, it is noticeable that the graphic designers have conscientiously fulfilled the task, depicting a certain Western, the action of which, as they were explained, takes place in distant space.

Interestingly, in other countries of the Eastern Bloc, "Star Wars" was shown much earlier than in the USSR, but the creations of Hungarian artists also differ from the actual "picture" of the film - Darth Vader's helmet, for example, looks more like the armor of a space samurai. For some reason, the designers from the fraternal countries also approached the work very freely, although, judging by the posters, they were clearly better acquainted with the content than their Soviet colleagues. I must say that today such posters (especially - with the authorship of Yuri Boxer and Alexander Chantsev) can be sold for fabulous money. Individual copies cost thousands of dollars, because they perfectly illustrate the Cold War era and Soviet reality.

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