"Sovetskii Ekran" with Tsoi on cover

The popularization of rock music in the USSR occurred in large part with collaboration from the cinema industry. Popular film magazines like Soviet Screen (Sovetskii Ekran), were therefore instrumental in establishing rock musicians as cultural icons. The cover image from volume 13 (1988) depicts Viktor Tsoi of Kino and Petr Mamonov of the Moscow-based rock band Zvuki Mu. Both artists appeared in Rashid Nugmanov 1988 film The Needle (Igla, 1988), which cemented Tsoi’s rock stardom and firmly established Mamonov as a serious actor. The musician went on to star in Pavel Lungin’s drama Taxi Blues (Taksi Bliuz, 1990), which was released to international acclaim and became one of the classic examples of the perestroika-era chernukha aesthetic. Mamonov also went on to have a successful career in the theater, as well as becoming Lungin’s cinematic muse, who has cast him in his two controversial films The Island (Ostrov, 2006) and Tsar (Tsar’, 2009). While Tsoi’s potential cinematic trajectory remains fodder for conjecture, Mamonov’s example shows the extent to which the artistic symbiosis between rock music and the cinema industry in the USSR became a productive conduit for post-Soviet visual culture. This issue of Soviet Screen also demonstrates the extent to which the late-Soviet film industry has embraced and become dependent on underground rock culture as a reliable source of lucrative cinematic content. On page 11, the editors published a poem by the recently deceased Siberian rock musician Aleksandr Bashlachev, below which they added a plea: “Brothers-cinematographers! We ask of you, make a film about him! The footage exists, not much, but it is there. Scenes from his astonishing concerts…Make this film!”