French Films in the USSR and France Film Distribution (1945–1991)

During the second half of the 1940s and into the 1950s, attendance at French films at the French box office was at its peak.The genre spectrum of the leaders of the "golden ten" of the French film distribution was diverse, but in general it was based on films of entertainment genres, which starred the favorites of the French public.Beginning in the mid-1960s, attendance at French films began to gradually decline (largely due to competition from television and Hollywood productions).An even greater decline in cinema attendance in France began to be felt in the 1980s.This was affected not only by strong competition from Hollywood products and television, but mainly by the massive distribution of household video equipment, which riveted millions of French people to their home screens, who previously preferred to watch films in cinemas.In the second half of the 1940s, there were very few French films in Soviet film distribution.This was largely due to the fact that it was during this period that so-called trophy films (mainly American and German) were shown on USSR screens.Due to the fact that by the mid-1950s the screening of so-called trophy films (mainly American and German) in the USSR was completed, in the second half of the 1950s more new European films, including French ones, began to be released in Soviet cinemas.The "thaw" that came to the USSR brought significant changes to procurement policy.For example, of the top ten leaders in French film distribution in 1958, exactly half were shown on USSR cinema screens.The work of the Soviet film purchasing commission in the 1960s was quite liberal, which (especially after the start of the "Prague Spring" of 1968) could not escape the conservative wing of the "ideological front": a number of articles were published in the Soviet press with sharp criticism of the distribution policy regarding Western film products, "promoting the bourgeois way of life."Among the reasons why French films were not included in Soviet film distribution are the following:-Taboos on erotica, accentuated religious and Jewish themes; -The fear that Soviet viewers might somehow misunderstand shocking plot twists from the point of view of official Soviet morality, which were often found even in artistically significant films;-Exclusion from candidates for the purchase of films with an interpretation of Russian and Soviet themes (and accordingly, Russian and Soviet characters) that is unacceptable for Soviet ideology;-The struggle of Soviet censorship with incorrectly (from its point of view) ideological accents on military topics; -Undesirability for Soviet censorship of films "promoting the bourgeois way of life";