By Lauren Sheffer
About 75 students and faculty members buzzed around Room 444 of the Curry Student Center Wednesday to listen to professor Harlow Robinson promote his book, “Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians: Biography of an Image.”
The event, which ran from noon to 1:30 p.m., was part of the Meet the Author series and was co-sponsored by the Northeastern Bookstore, Snell Library and the History and Cinema Studies departments.
Robinson, who teaches classes on Russian history, literature and film at Northeastern, had his book published by the university in November 2007. In the book, Robinson details the evolution of Hollywood’s portrayal of Russians, but also analyzes how the stereotype crafted by American directors influenced the views of everyday Americans during the Cold War and beyond.
“Often we believe that films are reality, and that what they show us is really true,” Robinson said about the movie “Doctor Zhivago,” which he said he saw when he was 15 years old in 1965. He said that was when he became interested in Russian culture.
“The world [of Russia] displayed on the screen … just seemed so much more real than my New England town,” he said.
Robinson said he has traveled to Russia 25 times since 1975 to study the Russian language at the University of Leningrad as a high school student and later at times to work as a tour guide.
After his opening lecture, Robinson showed a clip from “Doctor Zhivago,” a film which he said really humanized Russia for him. The scene he played shows the main character, Zhivago. Zhivago is as a medical student witnessing protesters being trampled to death as they run from law enforcement on the eve of the Russian Revolution.
Close-ups of Zhivago’s tearful face are interspersed with shots of blood splashed across the snow. Once the clip finished, Robinson told the audience how the author of the book, Boris Pasternak, couldn’t travel to Stockholm in 1959 to receive his Pulitzer prize, lest he be banished from the Soviet Union altogether.
Nor could the American director David Lean take his cast and crew to film the adaptation in Russia, because the year it was made, 1965, was at the height of the Cold War, Robinson said. Instead they used sets in Spain and Hollywood, he said.
Several attendees said they appreciated the inclusion of positive film clips. Kristin Richardson, a middler graphic design major, said she liked how Robinson used contrasting imagery.
“The prevailing image in Hollywood was very negative,” she said, “but he used a clip from ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ which didn’t fall back on caricatures.”
Robinson pointed out that the 1965 film showed the US that Russians were “not so different from Americans – they too wanted to make love, not war.” It also used American-built sets and was not reality but something sprung from Americans’ imaginations, he said.
On the other end of the spectrum was the clip from “Silk Stockings,” a 1957 film adaptation of the 1955 Broadway play “Ninotchka.”
The film, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, is the story of a Russian commissar, Ninotchka, who travels to Paris to bring back a comrade who has gone astray. But instead Ninotchka falls in love with a playboy (Astaire), and thus renounces her earlier Communist values.
Beside the heroine’s eventual embrace of capitalism, the film makes frequent use of comedic stereotypes to poke fun at the USSR. For instance, Ninotchka initially speaks in a robotic or “brainwashed” tone, a newly instated commissar of the State Art building receives an angry phone call from his superior after mere minutes on the job, and the ballerinas continue to dance nonchalantly as Russian policemen barge into the building to arrest the old commissar.
The pro-capitalist bent is no surprise, Robinson said, seeing as how “Hollywood directors are the most successful capitalists the system has ever produced.”
The last film clip came from “The Saint,” a 1997 film starring Val Kilmer.
The most notable moment of the clip occurred when Kilmer’s character, who is a mercenary thief working for hire, infiltrates the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which Robinson referred to as “the most secret place in all of Russia.”
Robinson said this moment shows America’s dwindling fear and respect for Russia as a rival superpower following the fall of communism in Russia.
“Since we are entering a new period of tension with Russia,” Robinson said, “I expect the [negative portrayal] will continue or even intensify.”
Robinson ended the event with a Q’A session, during which he discussed topics ranging from the House of Un-American Activities Committee to how the Great Depression temporarily attracted Americans to Communism.
Student response to Robinson’s presentation seemed enthusiastic.
“I hadn’t even really thought [before] about how Russians were portrayed in films,” said Matt Gelsinger, a freshman business major. “It gives you a new perspective on how different people … and cultures are portrayed by Americans.”
Snell librarians Emily Sabo and Maria Carpenter, who are also co-chairs of the library’s Programming and Communications Committee, said that when the Head of the Research and Instruction Services James Dendy heard that Harlow had published this book, he recommended it.
“So then I spoke with Harlow,” Sabo said. “The people in the committee were enthusiastic about the study.”
As the managers of the Meet the Author series, she said she and Carpenter “try to reach a combination of some of the more popular authors and faculty authors.”
But Carpenter said the most important thing the series can bring to campus is variety.
“It’s important to bring up topics and ideas which can be explored by the community, and encourage dialogue,” she said.
