ASSA, motion picture

The last seven minutes of Sergei Solov’ev’s 1987 film Assa, during which Viktor Tsoi and his band Kino perform their rock anthem “Changes!” (“Peremen!”) became the defining mass-cultural event that legitimized Soviet rock music as a product of the official mainstream. The scene serves the function of a narrative epilogue for Assa’s deceased protagonist, avant-garde musician Bananan (played in the film by Leningrad artist Sergei “Afrika” Bugaev), whom Tsoi is set to replace as the resident performer at a seaside restaurant. After enduring what can be described as verbal assault of bureaucratese from a restaurant official tasked with onboarding the band, Tsoi silently walks off to an empty banquet hall where proceeds to perform his anthem, whose refrain repeats the words “Our hearts demand changes! / Our eyes demand changes!” At one point during the performance, the camera pans away from the stage to reveal a stadium-sized crowd of fans cheering and holding up lighters in an act of defiance and support, concluding with the film’s rolling credits. The film became one of the first Soviet blockbusters in terms of popularity and box office sales and ushered in a new semi-privatized model of film production and promotion pioneered by Solov’ev’s production company Tvorcheskoe Ob’edinenie “Krug.” Moreover, Assa’s cult status has endured the test of time and continues to serve as a popular intertext in post-Soviet film and popular media.